Today, Explained - Christmas in October

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro landed himself on the naughty list for stealing an election. He's hoping an early Christmas will improve his standing. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Miles Bryan, engineered by Rob Byers and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A man takes a selfie in front of giant Christmas decorations in Caracas. Photo by JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mariah Carey posted a video on social media yesterday. In it, she appears to be comfortably reclining on a private jet. This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard, Mariah. We are headed to the North Pole. Not yet. Sorry. The message is clear. Christmas is not yet here. Check your calendars again, because spooky season has only just begun.

I don't know her. What am I supposed to say? We don't know where Mariah's plane was heading, but clearly it was not on its way to Venezuela, because in Venezuela, Christmas has indeed come early. Not even in Santa Claus's town, you know, they start Christmas this early. But we do. How jolly old Saint Nicolas Maduro stole Christmas, coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

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Oh baby, all I want for Christmas is... Today Explained. So how exactly does Christmas in October work? Like, is October 1st Christmas Day? Is October 25th Christmas Day? Is there a Christmas Eve? Is it just about the season? What does it do to Christmas in December? I have many questions. Yeah, and rightfully so, because not a lot of people can understand. season. What does it do to Christmas in December? I have many questions. Yeah, and rightfully so, because, you know, not a lot of people can understand. I mean,

we understand because we've lived there so many times. But it's about the season. It's not about the Christmas morning or Christmas Eve. It's about the season. So our Christmas is going to be on the 25th of December. but the season starts October 1st. Ana Vanessa Herrero is a reporter in Caracas, Venezuela, where she covers the country and the rest of South America for The Washington Post. I asked her if she was surprised when the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, decided to start the Christmas season a few months early. Well, not really. To us here in Venezuela, we're very used to this happening. but Nicolás Maduro decided to start the Christmas season a few months early. Well, not really. To us here in Venezuela, we're very used to this happening. You're used to Christmas in October? Well, I mean, we're used circumstances that the government can't really handle that well, they announce early Christmas.

But, you know, the context now, it's different. We are coming from a very complicated political situation after the presidential elections in July. And then the government comes out and announces an early Christmas in October. That is the shocking part. That is the wow part from our end. But not the fact that they announced it earlier. That's happened before. I'm sure a lot of people out there have heard that there's been some political upheaval in Venezuela. But when a government is trying to appease its people with an early Christmas, what exactly does that look like? Are there trees everywhere? Are there decorations? Are they playing Feliz Navidad in the grocery stores? Feliz Navidad! Feliz Navidad in the grocery stores?

Well, on the radios, you can listen to some of kind of songs that we know and we link immediately Venezuela with Christmas. And yes, some decorations are not all of them because, you know, to decorate a city, that's a lot of work. Basically, the mandate, it's put out the trees. Let's celebrate in peace, according to what Nicolás Maduro said, that he wanted to celebrate. And actually, he said that this was a way of thanking the Venezuelan people after what happened in July. But, you know, it is really complicated to understand that when everything shows that actually Nicolás Maduro might have not won the elections. In July, Venezuela celebrated presidential elections on July 28th.

Nicolás Maduro, who is basically Hugo Chávez's heir, showed for elections for the third time. And the opposition, for the first time, organized themselves so well that they went into the election race with a very, very strong hand, and an upper hand, I must say. Venezuela united, to a single shout, out of the dictatorship! Out of the dictatorship! Before the elections, I have to say, the government tried to shut down as many efforts as possible from the opposition. So they arrested a lot of people linked to the opposition's campaign. They banned the main contestant named Maria Corina Machado from running. And they almost made it impossible for her to campaign around the country. But Machado is not the presidential candidate.

The opposition coalition selected diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia to run in her place when the Maduro government and courts banned her candidacy earlier this year. I had a really hard time finding people that voted for Nicolás Maduro and the government. I actually had to really look for someone who would say, yeah, I like the government, I love it, and you know, they should stay. With that, I understood that things were changing. So after the election day was over, you know, people were confident that the opposition, for the first time since Hugo Chávez in 1999, for the first time, the opposition had won the election. And then the electoral council announced extremely quickly, without showing any kind of numbers, they said that Nicolás Maduro had won the election and that they were going to proclaim him as president the very next day.

I am Nicolás Maduro Moro, president of the Republic of the United States. Immediately after the announcement, you could hear just shouting, yelling, people in their balconies yelling, that's not true, it's a lie. I experienced this. I was in Caracas at the time, at the moment, and people were taking the streets, just, you know, banging pots and pans, which is our very Latin American way of protesting against the government. And at the same time, the opposition came out publicly and said, those are not the results. We have the results. Because we have all the votes. We collected them.

And now we're going to show them to the world and confirm that, you know, in fact, the opposition won with 7 million votes. That's what they said. How do we know for sure that González won? I don't think we can never know for sure because we would definitely need the government's version of what happened. We would need the government's counting the votes. We would need the government's version of what happened. We would need the government's counting the votes, we would need the numbers, we would need the percentages that they have. So I don't think we would, we will never, really, I don't think we know. But the opposition quickly, and they prepared themselves for months to do this, to collect the tallies. So those tallies are like a large receipt that the electoral machine prints after the election is over. So that really large

receipt, what it says is the amount of votes that each candidate got and who won in that electoral center. So what they did was prepare normal citizens for months. Citizens, by the way, were risking everything, everything that they had. Even some of them are in jail now. So what they did was immediately after they printed, they have to print by law, they have to print copies for those witnesses who are there, present at each electoral center around the country. And these witnesses took the tally and ran for their lives, and then after that, they scanned them, and they uploaded them to a website that is now, you know, it's available for everyone, where you can see who won in each table.

How do Venezuelans feel about the lead up to this election, what transpired during the election, and what's happened since? Are they in a state of shock? Well, that is, you know, Venezuela, we've experienced a lot of turmoil and protests and demonstrations and things have gone really bad really quickly for a long time. But this time, it's different because for the first time, people feel, people who didn't support the government, of course, they feel they were being absolutely robbed. This is the first time that after an election, the government or the one in power can't show really to everyone, to the world that they won. And now it's a sentiment of despair almost. It's just to hear you explain how all of this happened

and run through months of political turmoil and upheaval, it's just, it's so insane that he thinks a fake Christmas in October can fix it. Well, but he does. But, you know, somehow that's how the government is used to survive certain crises and they've done this in the past and for them it has worked, so why not now? But the thing is that they have no stable ground. Right now, the instability is important. Over 2,000 people are arrested and 100 of those are underage.

So, you know, the crisis and the situation that millions are suffering right now and the fact that other countries are preparing themselves for another huge migration wave. It's enough contrast with Christmas in October. What is it to celebrate? I mean, Nicolas Maduro didn't really explain what he's celebrating. He's celebrating Christmas, but what does that mean? What does that mean? Ana Vanessa Herrero Guapo, read her at WashingtonPost.com. You know, before Biden shut down the southern border, it was Venezuelans who were putting up the biggest numbers.

We're going to talk about why that was when we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself.

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and terms and conditions do apply. Today Explained. My name is Javier Corrales, and I'm a professor of political science. I use he, him pronouns. Great. Can I call you professor? Yes. Profe? What do they say? What do your students call you?

Oh, right here, Professor Corrales. In Latin America, Profe, Profe, Profe Javier. Profe, Profe, Profe Javier teaches at Amherst College in Massachusetts and is also the author of several books on the demise of Venezuela's democracy. It wasn't always this bad. Yes. Venezuela was known worldwide as an early democrat of civil and political rights in the early 1960s. That process of democratization accomplished many things. It lessened the incidence of violence and revolution.

It created for alternation in office. It created opportunities for welfare to expand. It expanded political freedoms and a number of very important institutions. And this was happening as Venezuela was also developing its oil industry. I drink your beer. decades, one would have been hard-pressed to find a country scoring higher levels of democracy in Latin America and in the Global South, at least until the 1970s. And when things started to go badly, it didn't go back into autocracies. There were times in Latin America where countries would flirt with democracy and have vibrant democracies, but those democracies would collapse, morph into military juntas.

But Venezuela never did that. Venezuela maintained its democratic institutions, especially when the economic situation started to deteriorate in the early 80s and into the 1990s. Venezuela has foreign debts of around 18 billion pounds and its petroleum-dominated economy has been hit by falling oil prices. President Perez has now announced the government suspending all foreign debt repayments. Future payments will depend on the effectiveness of his austerity program. One of the problems of Venezuela's democracy is that while on the one hand it didn't collapse, on the other hand it didn't really reform to keep up with the times. And so the political parties remained in the hands of a group of people who were basically refusing to go away, even though they were not able to deliver solutions to the economic crisis.

So this generated two types of discontent, a discontent against the economic conditions. Venezuela was getting poorer and poorer in the 1990s, but also political discontent. And this is the moment when Hugo Chavez steps in early in the 1990s, first as a coup plotter and then later as a presidential candidate. Our popularity is growing every day. It is because we are in tune with the public. We are in tune with the national spirit. We represent the hope of the nation. That's where our popularity lies.

A large number of Venezuelans were hypnotized by this message in this moment of discontent. What was he able to get away with while Venezuelans were under his hypnosis? So in the very beginning, everything was being done relatively democratically, although he started to bend rules right away. The first thing he wanted to do was to change the constitution.

There were rules to do so. He didn't like those rules. So he managed to get Venezuelans through plebiscites to approve new rules. And once he was able to change the constitution, he then decided to use his popularity and the fact that he had a ruling party that was fully under the spell, a major enabler to then capture every other institution of government. And once you have that alignment,

a ruling party controlling the executive branch and the legislature, all under the spell of a strongman, rather than a system of checks and balances and accountability, you have a system of turbo enabling. Turbo enabling? Turbo enabling. The legislature was there not to check the excesses of the executive branch, but to expedite anything that the executive branch wanted to do. So in a matter of about five years, you know, basically from 1999, when the new constitution was, when it came into being, through 2005, they revamped every important institution of the country. Suddenly the institutions lost their independence, their professionalism,

they became conquered by members of the ruling party. And so by 2005-2006, the game was over. The institutional game was over. Rather than a liberal democracy with checks and balances and independent bureaucracies and an independent judiciary, what you have is a ruling party that dominated every branch of government and started to also intervene in even non-governmental organizations. It happened very quickly and during that period it was very difficult to stop him. Venezuela was fortunate in 2004, as did all oil states, to experience the highest increase in the price of oil, which is Venezuela's main export. This generated a huge profit windfall for the state.

And Chavez spent this money lavishly. Everybody gained, all levels of society, from the very wealthy the middle classes all the way to the very poor while at the same time he began to introduce what i call autocratic legalism a significant number of laws and regulations all designed to make life very difficult to any political actor who was willing to challenge him. So you get this combination, this odd combination of welfare expansion together with more restrictions on the possible life of civil society and political parties. So by the time that Chavez died, the money was gone, but Chavez had this image of being this patron

of the little guy, while the opposition saw him as the deliverer of the most draconian, restrictive laws and regulations that Venezuela had ever had. So when Chavez dies and handpicks, I believe, Nicolas Maduro to be his successor. Correct. Does Nicolas Maduro decide, all right, let's start fresh and do a little democracy? Or does he skip straight to... No. I mean, look, what we observe is that these processes of autocratization can go very far. But one of the things that always survives, one of the things about democracy that never goes away is elections.

And in Venezuela, that is the case. So the first thing that Nicolás Maduro does is, all right, you know, Chávez died. There has to be a presidential election. The problem occurs in terms of his reaction to the fact that the polls revealed that though he still won, the ruling party was losing votes significantly. And what he decided to do is increasingly become more repressive and expand the autocratic legalism that Chavez had experienced with, but he just brought them to higher and higher levels. And that's what leads to this situation in Venezuela where you could have a stolen election. So, right. What occurred in this election is that the government thought that it could try traditional tricks, which in the past

allowed him to prevail, except that this time those tricks didn't work. Do you think early Christmas will fix it? No, no. I mean, I think this is a very wounded animal. We're facing a situation of an autocracy that on the one hand has all institutions under its controls, but at the same time, these institutions are bleeding. The key point is that we know from studying other cases of transitions to democracy is that we still need to be able to see some kind of a crack at the top of some sort. Those cracks have

occurred before. The regime has moved quickly enough to reseal them and survive it. But I'm guessing we're going to see another round of internal little earthquakes. And you never know what's going to happen then. The regime may very well survive them, but I am not 100% confident that this regime is going to survive this little crisis in a strong fashion. So the game is not over. Profe, profe, profe, Javier Corrales. Find him at Amherst College. Amanda Llewellyn produced today's show.

She was edited by Matthew Collette. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Miles Bryan, and mixed by Rob Byers and Andrea Christensdottir. I'm Sean Ramos for M, and this is Today Explained. you