It was mid-morning in Catia – 12 hours after Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in Venezuela’s presidential election – and the residents of this longtime chavista stronghold were up in arms.
At first the sound of spoons clattering against crockery began timidly, puncturing the eerie silence that gripped large chunks of the capital Caracas in the hours after Maduro’s highly controversial move to claim another six-year term.
Soon it grew into a thundering, indignant cacophony as locals appeared at their grated windows with pots, pans and plates to let the Venezuelan strongman know what they thought of his 11-year rule, during which the oil-rich country has nosedived into one of the worst-ever economic collapses outside a war zone.
“People are fed up with the same old shit, with the fraud,” fumed one local, Yesica Otaiza, as the cacerolazo pot-banging protest – a South American tradition intended to express political discontent – spread to a neighbouring tower block and along the street.
“We are longing for change and [Maduro] laughed at us and rubbed it in our faces,” said the 38-year-old street hawker who, like many, was convinced the election had been stolen. “He doesn’t want to accept that he lost.”
A 12-year-old girl called Sofía Sánchez pointed her mother’s mobile phone skywards towards the balconies to capture the startling uproar – once unthinkable in a pro-government bastion like the Catia neighbourhood.
Was just out doing interviews in Caracas’s working class west when this astonishing cacerolazo pot-banging protest broke out around us in a longtime Chavista bastion pic.twitter.com/gbIY77UvKz
— Tom Phillips (@tomphillipsin) July 29, 2024
“They’re doing this because they don’t agree with what the president Nicolás Maduro Moros is doing,” said the girl, explaining how two of her aunts had fled overseas to Chile to escape the economic meltdown. “They don’t want Maduro as president because he hasn’t been a good president.”
Similar sentiments could be heard across Venezuela’s on-edge capital on Monday after Maduro’s disputed claim to have won re-election sparked international condemnation and outrage from opposition voters who believe they were the true winners.
The British foreign office said it was concerned by “allegations of serious irregularities” in the vote and Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, called the result “hard to believe”.
Maduro’s opponent, a low-key former diplomat called Edmundo González Urrutia, and his campaigning partner, the conservative activist María Corina Machado, have both rejected the president’s claim to have won re-election. “We won and everybody knows it,” Machado declared on Sunday after the government-controlled electoral authority announced Maduro had prevailed with 51.21% of the vote compared to González’s 44.2%.
As charcoal-coloured clouds hung low over the mountain flanked city, many streets were strangely deserted and shops were closed as residents braced for potential turmoil and street protests over the coming days.
“So far things are calm but there are rumours about disturbances,” said David Perdomo, a 58-year-old shoemaker, as he sat on a bench on Bulevar de Sabana Grande, a normally teeming shopping district where there was hardly a soul to be seen and most shutters were down.
Perdomo said he had always voted for the government, since Hugo Chávez was democratically elected in 1998, catapulting the oil-rich South American nation into 25 years of uninterrupted chavista rule. But this year he had switched sides. “They made so many promises and they did nothing,” he complained of Maduro’s increasingly repressive administration which has presided over a massive migration crisis that has seen some eight million citizens flee abroad.
One of those economic exiles is Perdomo’s grandson who he has not seen since he moved to neighbouring Colombia seven years ago. Other relatives live in Chile and Ecuador.
Further along the boulevard, Mary Monsalve stood outside a hairdresser and voiced frustration at the opposition’s supposed defeat. “People are sad and disappointed,” said the 42-year-old nurse describing how Maduro’s claim of victory had come as a shock. In the working class neighbourhood where she lives, she had seen few voters turn out to vote in the red shirts traditionally worn by chavistas on election days. “This time … most people came in white,” she noted. What was that colour supposed to symbolize? “La libertad”, Monsalve replied. “Freedom.”
Not all of the Venezuelans on Sabana Grande were upset by Maduro’s claim to have won.
Enrique Pacheco, a jobless builder, celebrated the result as he clutched a government-controlled tabloid that had stamped a photo of Maduro’s grinning face on its front page alongside the percent point of the vote he supposedly won: 51.2.
“It’s good news. He’s not to blame for the situation the country he is facing,” argued Pacheco, 79, blaming Venezuela’s opposition and the United States for causing the country’s economic collapse with its campaign of sanctions.
“They can’t attack us with missiles so they use sanctions,” Pacheco said, hailing Maduro as an everyman president of the poor. “It can’t work out if the people who voted for the opposition are stupid, imbeciles or just ignorant.”
But many more of the voices heard during a three-hour tour of Caracas appeared to have voted against the incumbent and were perplexed and exasperated that their candidate had lost.
“Many people thought Corina would win and they can’t understand what happened,” said Ayari Rauseo, a 48-year-old clothes seller as she sat on a concrete bench in Catia and described how Venezuela’s slow-motion collapse had torn her family apart.
Rauseo’s sister is currently in Mexico, battling to reach the US where she hoped to build a new life. Her brother lives in Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, with her son. Her daughter was also now thinking about leaving. “She wants to go to Spain,” Rauseo said, staring despondently into the middle distance. “I just don’t have any more words.”
Rauseo called herself a longtime supporter of the Bolivarian socialist-inspired movement Chávez entrusted to Maduro before his premature 2013 death. “[I always voted] for the revolution … always, always, always,” she said. No more.
Minutes later, the strange mid-morning silence was broken as the pot-banging protests erupted, here and in other blue-collar areas that were once hotbeds of Chavista support.
On the highway back into town, the sound of clanking kitchenware echoed from the red-brick shanties lining the road. Brightly coloured propaganda billboards and posters jumped out from the urban landscape, their pro-Maduro slogans at odds with the metallic din.
“I choose peace. I choose Nicolás,” read one. Another informed the few passing motorists: “Nicolás is our hope.”