I was working in Mexico over the summer when the Venezuelan elections were taking place, and back home in Miami, it was all anybody could ever talk about. Could it be the end of the Maduro regime that led many of my classmates at school to leave the country they consider home? The morning of July 28, I woke up to various infographics on people’s Instagram stories and calls to vote. As a Colombian student, I felt hopeful talking to one of my best friends about the promise of change. Could this finally be the end of the autocratic stain on the Latin American region? 

That whole day I followed the news coverage of the elections, listening to Venezuelan migrants all around the world calling on their fellow compatriots to vote if they were able to. However, as soon as the results were announced a little before midnight, the indisputable reality of the puppet democracy in Venezuela came to light. 

After the polls closed, the real battle began. According to the polls, Nicolas Maduro won the election with 51% of the vote while the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzales received 44.2% of the vote. These results have been deemed “impossible” by the opposition as they only had access to 40% of the polling results less than an hour ago. Elvis Amoroso, president of the National Electoral Council, declared Maduro the winner, claiming 80% of the votes were in his favor. However, later polls received by the opposition showed  Gonzalez had received 70% of the votes in the election. Ever since the results were announced, countries in the Latin American region like Chile and Brazil have been calling for the publication of the polling results, a demand that Venezuela has not complied with. International pressure from the United States also manifested with Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for a peaceful transition of power and transparency in the voting process. The will of the people has been undermined, the regime’s repression has escalated following protests over the fraudulent results and Maduro’s regime is set to continue on for the next six years. 

The next morning, after the results were announced, I woke up with a crushing sense of disappointment for democracy. When did we get to a point where democracy became a performance with a corrupt leader conducting an orchestra of lies and deception? As the day continued, I found myself immersed in the coverage by the Colombian broadcasts that led me to pose this question; How will the situation in Venezuela impact the rest of the region? According to Ronald Rodriguez, spokesperson for the Venezuela Observatory at the University of Rosario, there will be massive movement at the border with Colombia. The importance of this election was clear from the beginning, given that a quarter of the population has chosen to leave the country rather than live under the regime. A massive exodus, if Maduro manages to consolidate political power, will harm the entire region, as seen over the past five years, especially its closest neighbor, Colombia. The number of migrants arriving at the border will exceed the capacity of current assimilation programs, creating a humanitarian crisis and leaving thousands of Venezuelans on the streets. When such problems occur, social tensions arise, potentially leading to violence between the local population and migrants. Neighbors will have the moral responsibility to deal with the high number of migrants, but without adequate resources to handle such a volume, social instability will spread throughout the region. According to Estefanía Colmenares, a journalist at El Espectador, the national and local governments have lost the capabilities and knowledge they had developed in Colombia to address, integrate, and regulate Venezuelan migration. The Colombian government closed the border management office, and currently, there is no person in the national government responsible for coordinating the migration problem.

Apart from the migration issue that will impact not just Venezuela’s direct neighbors but the region as a whole, we have the question of a “lost” generation. The lack of opportunities present in the country will continue to see its younger generations leave the country if they haven’t already created a brain drain. In 2024, international funding for Venezuela saw a major drop from its 2023 numbers, going from around 400 million dollars to 123 million where education only makes up 3.5% of those funds. Without the proper investment into education, the poor in Venezuela will remain in these cycles of poverty that a lack of opportunities keep them constrained in. The elections demonstrate a lack of change that does not incentivise international actors to invest in the country, which leads younger generations to migrate. 

Another implication of these election results is the continued isolation of Venezuela from the rest of the region, hindering development. Countries like Nicargua and Cuba, staunch opponents of the United States and the liberal world order, have endorsed the results while leftist governments in Chile, Colombia and Brazil continue to demand the election results to be publicized. With the further isolation of Venezuela by its neighbors, Latin American development will be critically impaired. A lack of collaboration will lead to a lack of transparency and compromise on issues such as climate change, migratory pressures and increasing security threats. For example, the region saw how division negatively impacted them during the pandemic because a lack of collaboration led to opposing strategies to tackle the pandemic. While countries like Chile were making rapid progress vaccinating its population, Venezuela was not even able to provide shots to high risk groups. Anticipated global meltdowns such as the pandemic require sturdy relationships between the region to be able to manage shocks such as these. 

The elections will continue to widen the gap for cooperation due to the contestation of the fairness of the elections. Now that Gonzales has fled the country to Spain due to safety concerns, the likelihood for a change in regime seems unlikely. Perhaps in six years, the winds of change will bring forth a new order to unearth the roots of oppression the Maduro regime has planted in Venezuela. Until then, migration and division will continue to wreak havoc across the region.