On July 16, candidate Nicolás Maduro warned of a “bloodbath” if the “fascist right” were to win the elections on July 28. The president’s comment has given rise to various interpretations in the media and even caused a “scare” for Brazilian President Luis Ignacio “Lula” Da Silva.
The warning from the candidate of the Great Patriotic Pole was launched after a mass event in La Vega, Caracas. It was not there in the middle of the crowd that the President made the comment. At the end of his speech, Maduro came down from one side of the platform and entered the house where the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) operates in that Caracas parish. The house that Hugo Chávez visited in March 1994, just after being released from the Yare prison. In that house, Maduro met briefly with the local leadership of the party, to whom he made a reflection that was later broadcast in a video.
Below we faithfully transcribe the words that Maduro said at the PSUV-La Vega house.
“I have prevented a civil war here, because if we tell the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, the police forces, the streets, that is, a revolution like the one in the 20th century: popular and armed, it will be another revolution. If the fascist right comes to power, a popular and armed revolution would be inevitable; we could not stop a civil war. And not because Maduro says so, but because it would arise…”
The fear that Lula Da Silva says Maduro’s words caused him came six days after they were pronounced by the Venezuelan Head of State. “I was scared by Maduro’s statement that there would be a bloodbath if he lost. When you lose, you go home,” said the Brazilian president, interpreting Maduro’s words last Monday in an appearance before the media in his country.
That same day, Jorge Rodríguez, head of the Venezuela Nuestra Campaign Command, responded. “How can we not respect the results if we are going to win?” Rodríguez replied precisely in a press conference where he denounced that the Venezuelan extreme right has already set up a situation room in Miami, United States, to “call fraud” next Sunday, July 28.
Before the accusation was aired, even when Maduro and other candidates were already in the pre-campaign, we gathered information according to which María Corina Machado’s group had transmitted a theory to governments in Europe and the United States. That theory indicated that the current Venezuelan president would not win the elections and was therefore staging a fraud to stay in power. “It is impossible for him to win,” said Machado’s experts.
But as the days went by, the candidate Maduro emerged as a sure winner in the elections, Machado and his group emphasized their preaching that the Government had already planned the fraud. And they took advantage of the words spoken by Maduro in that house in La Vega to assure that this was the “conclusive proof” that Maduro was lost and hence resorted to an alleged threat of civil war.
Machado was the one who activated the international spokesmen who agree with this version, according to sources from the opposition sector itself. And Lula was the first to take the step of insinuating a possible failure of Maduro in the presidential elections. Lula’s inference was assumed by spokesmen of the extreme right as a demarcation of the Brazilian president with his Venezuelan counterpart.
But before Lula, some foreign media spoke out, one of them pointed out by Jorge Rodríguez as a workhorse in the dissemination of this theory of the Machado group. Indeed, CNN interpreted Maduro’s words with this headline: “Maduro warns of bloodshed if he doesn’t win.” Carlos Montero, a former anchor of the aforementioned news network, criticized CNN’s journalism and the way it presented Maduro’s comment. “Don’t stay with this alarmist and ill-intentioned headline and listen to what the President of Venezuela really said,” wrote Montero in a kind of warning to viewers.
The interpretations of what Maduro said continued and it was the turn of Alberto Fernández, former president of Argentina, who repeated Lula’s comments. “If Maduro is defeated, what he has to do is accept. As Lula said, whoever wins, wins, and whoever loses, period, it’s over,” Fernández declared on Tuesday, assuming that what Maduro said was a condition that the Chavista candidate was placing to force people to vote for him.
In successive appearances, Maduro has substantiated his statement made in La Vega.
“I know the plans she has, the devil has,” Maduro warned on July 22 at a rally in El Vigía (Mérida). “I say it: extreme fascist project or democratic Bolivarian project,” he said in Barcelona (Anzoátegui).
But at the closing of the campaign in San Carlos (Cojedes), the President explained the meaning of his words alluding to the bloodbath.
“This guy here has prevented a civil war in Venezuela several times. Chavez and the people saved Venezuela from several bloodbaths. I said that if, denied and transmuted, the extremist right, Bolsonarists, followers of Milei and Hitler, came to political power in Venezuela, there would be a bloodbath and I am not saying this making it up, no; it is that we already experienced a bloodbath on February 27 and 28, 5 thousand dead in the country,” said the candidate of the Gran Polo Patriótico at the San Carlos rally.
“They are violence, savage capitalism, death and blood, and we are the embodiment of the Bolivarian project and we are peace, stability and tranquility for the country and for the entire society,” Maduro concluded.
