It was early on Wednesday morning when police forced their way into the Caracas home of their former colleague Milciades Avila.
Mr Avila, who for a decade has provided personal security for María Corina Machado, the opposition leader currently taking Venezuela by storm, was charged with “gender violence,” they said, as they whisked him away.
The arbitrary detention – the 71st this year of members of the Unitarian Democratic Platform, the opposition umbrella alliance – is just the latest example of kleptocratic strongman president Nicolás Maduro’s dirty tricks before elections scheduled for Sunday July 28.
After more than two decades of runaway corruption, gross economic mismanagement and widespread human rights abuses, even many of the poorest Venezuelans, traditionally the “Chavista” regime’s strongest supporters, have turned against it. Polls show the authoritarian socialist government losing by a landslide – unless, as many fear, it rigs the vote.
Opposition figures arrested include around a dozen of Ms Machado’s inner circle. Meanwhile, six of her aides, including her press secretary, have been holed up in the Argentine embassy in Caracas for months after seeking asylum there.
Mr Avila was targeted after several female Maduro supporters suddenly barged their way towards Ms Machado on July 13 in the central region of Carabobo. Mr Avila did his job, physically blocking the women’s path.
He was eventually released on bail on Friday. But not before Ms Machado, 56, an industrial engineer who has long been one of the most fiery critics of Mr Maduro and his late mentor Hugo Chávez, claimed the incident was a set-up.
“There are dozens of witnesses and videos that prove this was an act of planned provocation to leave us without protection,” she posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Maduro has made violence and repression his campaign.”
For Mr Maduro, 61, facing a laundry list of potential serious criminal charges, defeat next week is not an option. Barring a deal with the opposition, he would lose not only power, but his freedom.
Separately, he would also need to negotiate immunity with the US, which has placed a $15 million bounty on his head for large-scale drug trafficking.
That explains why the former bus driver and union leader, anointed in 2012 as the next leader of Venezuela as Mr Chávez was dying of cancer, has this week been warning of a “bloodbath” and “fratricidal civil war” should the “fascists” – a term he appears to use for anyone who believes in the rule of law – win.
The florid rhetoric may be more than scare tactics. The regime has heavily armed its civilian supporters ever since a failed coup against Mr Chávez in 2002.
And force may be all that is left to keep a once popular, but now deeply loathed, government in power.
Initially, after Mr Chávez was first elected president in 1998, his colloquial but sweeping oratory, anti-American posturing and petrodollar-fuelled largesse, even distributing televisions to the poor, saw his approval ratings soar.
But since then, his regime has transformed the only country with larger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia into one stalked by hunger where hospital patients die for lack of basic medicines.
The humanitarian crisis has prompted an exodus of seven million Venezuelans, roughly one in four of the population. It is statistically the western hemisphere’s greatest refugee crisis ever.
Meanwhile, Mr Maduro and his inner circle are accused of embezzling billions of dollars and running the state-owned oil company PDVSA, which accounts for more than 90 per cent of exports, into the ground.
But the regime may finally have met its match in Ms Machado. The mother of three grown children, who like so many Venezuelans now live abroad, is frequently mobbed by emotional supporters as she criss-crosses Venezuela on the campaign trail. Expectation of her imminent triumph is at fever pitch.
Some commentators say the fervour is reminiscent of the heyday of “el Comandante” as Mr Chávez, a former lieutenant colonel in the army who first rose to national prominence following his own botched coup attempt in 1992, was once known.
Yet Ms Machado, who counts Margaret Thatcher as one of her political heroes, is not even a candidate in the presidential race.
After winning more than 90 per cent of the votes in the UDP’s primary last year, she was barred from public office by a Chavista-packed court for supposed corruption and supporting US sanctions against the dictatorship.
She promptly threw her support behind a back-up candidate, Edmundo González, 74, a little-known, softly spoken retired diplomat and amateur birdwatcher.
The pair often campaign together now, braving police roadblocks and government harassment as they travel by car because of a ban on Ms Machado flying.
Hotels where the pair have stayed and restaurants where they have eaten have often been shuttered by the regime, prompting the pair to rely on the hospitality of local supporters.
Should the opposition win, Ms Machado is widely expected to be the de facto leader of a government formally led by Mr González.
Polls show him on more than double the level of support for Mr Maduro. The remainder of the vote is shared by around a dozen smaller candidates widely viewed as stooges of the regime.
‘It’s hard to imagine they will hand over the keys’
“I’m sure they [Ms Machado and Mr González] represent change, for a prosperous Venezuela, where there’s no persecution and those of us who see things differently to the government can be adversaries, not enemies,” Milagros Gómez, a retired lawyer who attended a rally held by the pair at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas last Sunday, told The Telegraph.
But for that to happen, Mr Maduro must be prepared to relinquish power, something that strikes Michael Shifter, a Latin America expert at the InterAmerican Dialogue, a Washington DC think tank, as “pretty far-fetched.”
“It’s hard to imagine that without guarantees for Maduro and those in his inner circle, and all the accusations, including of crimes against humanity, that they are just going to hand over the keys and walk away,” he says.
Nevertheless, even with electoral fraud, this month’s vote and the opposition’s new-found unity could signal the start of a long, painful democratic transition, Mr Shifter believes: “There will be significant actors within ‘Chavismo’ who will see the writing on the wall.”
But for that to happen, citizens will need to make their weight felt and vote in significant numbers next Sunday, even if the Maduro government ultimately manages to fake, at least temporarily, an improbable electoral comeback.
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