Venezuela’s Maduro says he needs to win reelection to avoid possible ‘bloodbath’

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has told his supporters he must win reelection this month if the country is to avoid a possible “bloodbath.”

“If they do not want Venezuela to fall into a bloodbath, into a fratricidal civil war,” the ruling party must win the presidential elections on July 28, Maduro told a campaign event in Caracas on Tuesday.

Only a win for his party would ensure “peace” in the country, Maduro said, adding that he expects “irreversible results” in his favor.

The Venezuelan strongman has been in power in Venezuela for more than a decade, having assumed the presidency following the death of predecessor Hugo Chavez in 2013, during which time his government has often been accused of rigging votes and silencing the opposition.

The 2018 election that returned him to office was described as illegitimate by an alliance of 14 Latin American nations, Canada and the United States, as a “farce” by the Organization of American States, and was largely boycotted by the opposition.

There were hopes that the 2024 election might be different after he promised the United States last year in a historic agreement that he would hold free and fair elections in exchange for sanctions relief.

However, more recently the opposition have accused him of reneging on that promise. Two opposition candidates – Maria Corina Machado and Corina Yoris – have been barred from running while a report this week by a human rights group suggested there had been a spate of “arbitrary detentions” since the beginning of the campaign season on July 4.

Human rights NGO Laboratorio de Paz reported Monday that there had been 71 arbitrary detentions in the first 10 days of campaigning, the majority of them involving people who had provided some type of service to the campaign command of the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, of the Democratic Unitary Platform.

Two days after Laboratorio’s report came out, the barred opposition leader Machado said in a post on X that her security chief had also been arrested.

Machado said her security chief Milciades Ávila was “kidnapped” on Wednesday “by the Maduro regime and accused of gender violence against some women.”

The opposition leader said the women who accuse Ávila of gender violence tried to “attack” her and González Urrutia in a restaurant last Saturday.

“There are dozens of witnesses and videos that demonstrate that this was a planned provocation to leave us without protection 11 days before July 28,” Machado wrote.

The governments of Costa Rica, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Panama called on Venezuelan authorities to guarantee that elections are “free, fair, and transparent,” in a joint statement released on Wednesday by the Alliance for Development in Democracy.

Maduro is one of 10 candidates vying for the presidency, however, several of them have minimal support and are viewed by the main opposition as government allies.