At the end of last year, Venezuela made headlines for its prisoner swap with the United States. In exchange for the return of a close business ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Colombian national Alex Saab, Caracas released 10 Americans detained in the country and 21 Venezuelan political prisoners, including an organizer of the opposition primaries.
At the end of last year, Venezuela made headlines for its prisoner swap with the United States. In exchange for the return of a close business ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Colombian national Alex Saab, Caracas released 10 Americans detained in the country and 21 Venezuelan political prisoners, including an organizer of the opposition primaries.
The swap was part of ongoing negotiations between the Maduro regime and the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition to ensure free and fair elections in Venezuela. Caracas agreed to electoral guarantees and rights for candidates and political parties, and Washington also temporarily eased sanctions on oil and gas—Venezuela’s two main exports—and gold. If the regime complied with its electoral compromises, Washington said that it would renew sanctions relief before it expired in April this year.
There is little evidence that the Venezuelan government is easing its political crackdown. Washington already reimposed sanctions on gold in January after Caracas confirmed its ban on the leading opposition candidate, center-right former lawmaker María Corina Machado, from running for president this year. But the crackdown is broader than many observers realize. The socialist government, led by the Chavistas who carry on the tradition of the so-called Bolivarian revolution started by then-President Hugo Chávez in 1999, has not just persecuted opposition parties, independent media, and civil society. It has also cracked down on its former allies: other left-wing parties and labor movements.
This year’s election will be the first that Venezuela’s mainstream opposition will participate in since 2013. Although the opposition has been fragmented and weakened in recent years, it remains popular among the electorate. The opposition’s October 2023 primaries, which Machado won, saw unexpectedly high turnout, with more than 2.4 million voters. That month, local pollster Delphos found that a plurality of Venezuelans surveyed self-identified as opposition supporters, and only 20 percent self-identified as supporters of the current government. Forty-three percent of Chavistas surveyed said they would prefer another Chavista candidate over Maduro.
As the mainstream opposition gains ground, and Maduro remains extremely unpopular, his regime is clearly worried about dissent, including from other leftists. Despite their ideological similarities, Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which was founded in 2007, now sees other leftist groups and union movements as “diverse fronts of opposition,” said Guillermo Tell Aveledo, a Venezuelan political scientist.
The main leftist party that the Maduro regime has been targeting lately is the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), the country’s oldest political party. The PCV has not supported or joined any mainstream opposition coalitions since Hugo Chávez became president in 1998; in fact, the PCV eagerly supported Chavista governments as Venezuela slid into autocracy.
But in August 2023, the Chavista-controlled Supreme Tribunal of Justice appointed a loyalist board, made up of officials who will support the Maduro regime, to oversee the PCV—a tactic it has used recently to hijack opposition parties and get them to participate in sham elections. In January, the PCV alleged that the ruling Chavistas were seeking to expel its sole lawmaker from the National Assembly. (The lawmaker is currently still in office.)
Like other far-left parties that once supported Chavismo, the PCV’s relations with the Maduro regime started to cool when Venezuela’s economy crashed in the early 2010s. Amid the collapse, Venezuela’s social programs were gradually dismantled, public services deteriorated, and the government curtailed workers’ incomes and rights. The effects have lingered. In May 2023, according to Caracas-based consulting firm Ecoanalítica, 65 percent of Venezuelans earned less than $100 per month, up from 52.6 percent in 2022.
In 2018, the PCV signed an agreement with Maduro’s PSUV demanding “revolutionary” economic policies to tackle the crisis, including raising salaries and dismantling what they called “private monopolies.” However, Maduro didn’t follow through. After long ignoring the advice of many economists who recommended liberalizing Venezuela’s state-controlled economy, Maduro finally allowed the free circulation of U.S. dollars, lifted all price and currency exchange controls, and eliminated many import tariffs. It wasn’t true market-oriented liberal reform, but as Ecoanalítica director Asdrúbal Oliveros put it, Maduro took a “pragmatic” approach.
The PCV decried these moves as “neoliberal,” and in 2020, it officially fell out with the PSUV when it joined other far-left parties disaffected with Maduro to create a “revolutionary opposition” coalition named the Popular Revolutionary Alternative. The Maduro regime responded by raiding the PCV’s headquarters in the state of Zulia and arresting four PCV supporters in December 2020. Venezuela’s judiciary then appointed loyalist boards for the four parties in the new coalition—excluding the PCV—that received the most votes during Chávez’s time in office. It later appointed loyalist boards for smaller parties in the coalition, including Tuparamo, a Marxist-Leninist party known for its violent paramilitary branch.
The PCV was spared during that first round of interventions, but it has since further angered the regime by helping mobilize civil society activism. Since mid-2022, the party has supported a series of labor protests led by teachers in public schools. The first three months of 2023 saw a nearly 1,000 percent increase in teacher-led labor protests compared with the same period in 2022, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, a non-governmental organization based in Caracas. In July 2023, a PCV unionist was arrested in Caracas for participating in labor protests, and the following month, the country’s high court appointed the loyalist board for the PCV.
All of this may seem like a lot of effort to hamstring a party that doesn’t tend to perform well in the polls. The PCV has received less than 2 percent of the vote in most elections since the late 1960s and has said it won’t support the mainstream opposition. In the 2020 parliamentary and 2021 regional elections, it won only one seat in the National Assembly and no mayoral or governor posts. But the PCV’s dissent has symbolic importance in Venezuelan politics. Neirlay Andrade, a member of the PCV’s political bureau, told Foreign Policy that “the government is attacking us because PSUV wants to show itself as the only left-wing force in the country, and it’s not convenient for them to have a revolutionary force pointing out the falsehood of their discourse.”
Margarita López Maya, a historian who specializes in Venezuela’s left, offered a similar assessment. “Dissidence is unacceptable [to the regime], and the PCV … was strongly criticizing the anti-workers’ policy of the Maduro government,” she said. For Aveledo, the political scientist, the regime’s fears are not related to elections but to having “an opposition similar to themselves, to their insurgent model” of the late 1990s.
Maduro’s government is losing the support of communist parties abroad that have criticized its crackdown on the PCV. For decades, Chavistas have cultivated an international net of parties, organizations, and politicians to voice their support for the movement when it clashes with the opposition or the United States. Last year, 41 international communist parties issued a joint statement supporting the PCV and criticizing the regime.
“Although the Communist Party is not an important electoral force, it has cultural and historical relevance and weight because international communist parties watch it closely,” Aveledo said. “It’s distancing [the PSUV] from other communist parties in the region and the world.”
Even so, the Maduro regime does not appear to be letting up. The PCV is just one of eight organizations whose boards faced judicial interventions in 2023, including the Venezuelan Red Cross. And the National Assembly recently revived the discussion and approval process for a bill that would increase government control over Venezuelan nongovernmental organizations. Instead of organizing competitive elections, the regime may only further suppress what remains of Venezuela’s civil society as this year’s vote nears.
By turning on its ideological allies, the regime may succeed in ensuring that those groups are not able to influence its bases, such as rural communities and industrial workers, even if doing so comes at the expense of alienating its international supporters and further fracturing the Chavista movement.
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