Nicolás Maduro claimed another six years in power after a disputed election, which will result in another wave of migration and Venezuela cementing its position as a regional crime hub.
The head of the National Electoral Council (Consejo Nacional Electoral), Elvis Amoroso, declared that Maduro had won the July 28 election with 51.2% of the ballots counted, in what was “an overwhelming and irreversible tendency.”
The announcement was immediately refuted by María Corina Machado, the opposition leader.
“We won, and the victory has been so overwhelming, so huge, that we won in all the country’s states,” she said in a press conference.
International recognition of the results is unlikely. The criminal implications of a continuation of the Maduro regime are far more certain, and predictable.
Virtual Panel: The day after: elections and the criminal chessboard in Venezuela
We invite you to tune in to the live stream on Tuesday, July 30, where the co-director of InSight Crime and several experts on organized crime, elections, and politics will answer questions about the future of Venezuela’s criminal landscape. The event will be held in Spanish.
In the aftermath of these elections, assuming the security apparatus remains loyal to Maduro and is able to squash any civil resistance, Venezuela’s international isolation will worsen, with more sanctions expected. This isolation is going to deepen Venezuela’s financial crisis and Maduro’s reliance on criminal networks and illegal rents to keep his cash-starved regime afloat.
Maduro already presides over a criminal hybrid state, where he relies on criminal actors in what is a symbiotic relationship. He allows certain criminal groups to operate, unmolested and even supported on Venezuelan territory, in return for these groups sharing criminal proceeds with loyal political and military actors and crushing political opposition in their areas of influence. This criminal hybrid state will now further consolidate itself, and with it, Venezuela’s importance in the regional criminal panorama.
“I believe that organized crime’s control over resources and the appropriation of rents will grow, and governance may be so difficult that [the Maduro regime] will have to resort to domestic and foreign irregular groups to exert political control,” said Roberto Briceño-León, a university professor and director of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory (Observatorio Venezolano de Violencia).
InSight Crime has seven predictions on the consequences of this election on the regional criminal landscape:
1. A new wave of migration
Venezuela has already seen up to 8 million of its citizens flee the country looking for opportunities abroad. Faced with another six years of Maduro rule, economic stagnation, and repression, more Venezuelans will certainly opt to search out greener pastures. This unprecedented exodus from the country has already prompted the evolution of sophisticated human smuggling and trafficking networks, exploiting and recruiting some of the most vulnerable refugees and feeding off Venezuelan diasporas across Latin America and the Caribbean. One of the most notorious criminal structures that has grown off the back of the migration crisis, and established presence in different parts of South America, is Tren de Aragua.
2. More migration to the United States and, with shifting destinations, a new evolution of Venezuelan transnational organized crime
South America has already absorbed millions of Venezuelans, and there are fewer and fewer opportunities there for immigrants. This has fed, especially over the last two years, a wave of migrants heading northwards to the United States, a trend which is certain to continue. Venezuelan gangs like Tren de Aragua are unlikely to establish strong roots in Central America, as they have in South America. This is because Central America already has a crowded criminal landscape, as well as established migrant routes operating since the start of the civil wars that wracked the region from the late 1970s into the 1990s. However, there are indications that Venezuelan criminals are establishing footholds in the United States, embedded in Venezuelan diasporas, especially among migrants whose legal status is uncertain, which makes them very vulnerable to exploitation by organized crime.
3. Deeper reliance on illegal international oil brokers
Venezuela sits on some of the most extensive oil reserves outside the Middle East, and while incompetence and lack of investment has hampered production, once at more than 3 million barrels of oil a day, the country still produces anything up to 800,000 barrels a day. There have long been sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry, but still, the regime has been able to move significant quantities of crude, first using allies like Iran, Russia, and China, and then diverse international criminal networks able to sidestep sanctions.
4. Deeper reliance on gold smuggling networks
Like oil, Venezuela has substantial gold deposits, and the Maduro regime has been reliant on criminal actors to extract the gold, and on international smuggling networks to sell it on international markets, disguising its origin and thus dodging sanctions.
SEE ALSO: Maduro’s El Dorado: Gangs, Guerrillas and Gold in Venezuela
5. Growing involvement in the global cocaine trade
Venezuela will need to find other ways to earn desperately needed foreign currency, and the cocaine trade offers significant revenue. Cocaine trafficking through Venezuela is nothing new. What is new is the evolution of the country not just as a transit nation, but as a producer. Coca plantations are springing up along the border with Colombia, with crops registered in at least three Venezuelan states, and Colombia rebels have set up sophisticated drug trafficking infrastructure in these areas, with the blessing of the Maduro regime. Deeper involvement in the growing global cocaine trade could offer Maduro an economic lifeline, as well as flood a hostile United States with drugs.
SEE ALSO: Venezuela’s Cocaine Revolution
6. The fatal undermining of Colombia’s peace strategy
Colombia’s president and Maduro ally, Gustavo Petro, has made an ambitious plan to bring an end to the six-decade old civil conflict, making it one of his flagship initiatives. Dubbed Total Peace (Paz Total), Petro is negotiating with two groups that have deep roots in Venezuela, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN) and Second Marquetalia (Segunda Marquetalia) a dissident group born from the now demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – FARC). Both groups have a significant part of the membership in Venezuela, along with crucial revenue-raising and logistic infrastructure. With the prospect of another six years of protection from the Maduro regime, these two groups are unlikely to sign any peace agreement with the Colombian government unless very generous (and therefore politically unacceptable) terms are agreed. Thus, we are likely to see not only a continuing presence of these groups on the Colombian criminal panorama, but their strengthening.
7. Greater government regulation of criminal economies and the actors that manage them
The result of the above will be not only the consolidation of the Venezuelan criminal hybrid state, but the greater regulation of criminal groups in what noted journalist and security analyst Javier Mayorca described as a form of “pax criminal.”
“This means that Maduro, in a possible new term of office, would have to continue this line [of pax criminal], rejecting those groups that openly use violence …. and seeking a certain normalization,” he said.
This “normalization” could involve increasingly state embedded organized crime, regulating and directing illegal economies from within the Maduro regime, seeking to maximize criminal earnings to sustain an administration starved of legal options.
Featured image: Nicolás Maduro celebrates winning his third term as president of Venezuela. Credit: NPR