Cuban Special Forces Reportedly Being Airlifted Into Venezuela as Country Braces for Mass Demonstrations Saturday

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Venezuelans are bracing for dueling mass demonstrations Saturday morning. Both the democratic opposition and the socialist dictatorship are preparing make or break shows of force.

The opposition claims that its candidate easily swept last Sunday’s presidential election. The opposition seeks to return Venezuela to the democracy and prosperity enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s.

For President Maduro, the stakes are equally high — extending a 25-year-old socialist revolution that has beggared what once was South America’s richest country. Mr. Maduro and 14 close supporters are wanted in America on Trump-era charges of “narco-terrorism,” drug trafficking, and corruption.

Analysis of 80 percent of the election results show that Mr. Maduro failed to win any of Venezuela’s 24 states. Economic collapse and migration of millions of people out of the country has seriously eroded the socialists’ power base among the poor. In Caracas’s Petare shantytown, home to about 450,000 people, a video purports to show residents firing on police Wednesday, forcing them to retreat.

This week, planeloads of Cuban “Black Wasps” flew into Venezuela from Havana, opposition sources reported. A video taken through window blinds purports to show a line of these Cuban special forces soldiers patrolling a street at Caracas. By importing foreign soldiers, Venezuela’s Cuba-trained president hopes to insure himself against defections of his own military and paramilitary forces.

“Cuba is sending troops to Venezuela to repress the Venezuelan people,” a Spanish member of the European Parliament, Hermann Tertsch, warned Thursday in an X post. A member of the Vox conservative party, he said: “We shouldn’t let it happen — and it is happening.”

To intimidate potential protesters, Mr. Maduro showed on state TV a video of 75 who were captured. Heads shaved and dressed in prison garb, they dutifully shouted pro-regime slogans and pumped the air with clenched fists. The president said that 1,200 opposition supporters have been arrested and that police are going house to house searching for 1,000 more.

Raids target opposition members who were registered with election authorities as opposition poll watchers. Mr. Maduro said he is converting two abandoned prisons into “re-education centers” for political detainees.

Mr. Maduro is now defining as “treason to the fatherland” a range of actions, from blocking highways to tearing down statues of his political mentor, Hugo Chávez. A former army officer, Chávez was president of Venezuela between 1999 and 2012, when he died of cancer. So far, eight Chávez statues are known to have been torn down since Sunday.

A U.S. non-governmental organization, Human Rights Watch, says that 20 protesters have been killed since Sunday night. Ordeals faced by Venezuela’s captured protesters are dramatized in “Simón,” a film released last year by a Venezuelan filmmaker, Diego Vicentini. The movie is about a young protester, Simón, who is arrested and tortured. He manages to escape to Miami, where he deals with guilt about leaving his country in the grip of tyranny. After becoming Venezuela’s highest-grossing film in a decade, “Simón” migrated last spring to Netflix.

“The alarming scale of violence and human rights violations by the Nicolás Maduro regime,” justifies sending United Nations “blue helmet” peacekeeping soldiers and police to Venezuela, a conservative Colombia senator, María Fernanda Cabal, wrote in a letter today to the UN secretary-general, António Guterres. A veteran politician from Bogotá, Ms. Cabal was close to Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro when they were presidents of America and Brazil, respectively.

On Friday, at 3 a.m. New York time, six unidentified men, armed and masked, overpowered guards at the campaign headquarters of the opposition leader, María Corina Machado. They broke down doors, sprayed black graffiti, and stole paper files and computers, Ms. Machado posted on X. The computers had been used to post on an open source website official returns from 80 percent of the 30,000 voting tables.

Last October, Ms. Machado won 93 percent of 2.4 million votes cast nationwide in an opposition primary. In response, Venezuela’s government-controlled supreme court barred her from public office for 15 years. Eventually, the opposition settled on a standin, Edmundo González Urrutia, a mild-mannered retired ambassador.

As of now, the two opposition leaders are in hiding.

In an opinion article published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Machado said she is “hiding, fearing for my life, my freedom, and that of my fellow countrymen.” Both leaders plan to appear Saturday morning at the mass rally at Caracas. It will be on Mercedes Avenue, a wide boulevard known for shopping centers built during the oil boom years of the 1970s and 1980s.

“You won, we all won, Venezuela won, and now we are going to collect,” Ms. Machado says in a defiant video message posted on X from an unidentified location. Calling on protesters in all towns and cities across a nation twice the size of California, she says: “The world is going to see the strength and the determination of a society that has chosen to live in freedom.”

Mr. González posted: “I remain at the side of the people. I will never leave them alone. And I will always defend their will. Viva Venezuela!” Secretary Blinken said in a statement Thursday night that Mr. González had won the election. This statement stopped short of calling him “president-elect.”

On Friday, Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, called Mr. Blinken’s recognition of Mr. González “an excess” and said Mr. Blinken was “overstepping his boundaries.” The Venezuelan foreign minister, Yvan Gil, said Friday that Washington’s recognition of Mr. González’s victory showed it was “at the forefront of a coup attempt.”

In contrast, Argentina’s libertarian government recognized Mr. González as Venezuela’s “president-elect.”

The region’s main center-left countries — Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico — asked Venezuela’s National Election Council to speed up the release of official, precinct-by-precinct vote tallies. The government blames the delay on a computer hacking attack from North Macedonia.

In reality, the delay may be orchestrated to give time for the national manhunt for opposition poll watchers to produce results. On national TV this week, Mr. Maduro ordered a general: “Find these people. … Even if it takes a month, I want them all in jail.”

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