ARTIGO 19 Brazil and South America launches the report “Venezuela: freedom of expression and democratic crisis,” developed in partnership with independent South American researchers and the Human Rights Center of UCAB (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello). The publication is available in Spanish and English.
This report was produced throughout 2025. Although the U.S. military intervention and the subsequent abduction of then-president Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 are events that alter the country’s institutional environment, the structural issues analyzed in the report remain essential to understanding the causes and possible consequences of the current crisis.
The report expresses some of the organization’s main concerns regarding the democratic crisis Venezuela has faced since the last presidential electoral process, with special attention to the rights to freedom of expression, access to information, political and social participation, as well as other rights essential for the full exercise of democracy.
In the first chapter, the report discusses the Venezuelan electoral system and the voting technologies used in the country, analyzing the arguments mobilized to support or contest the result declared by the Electoral Council that named Nicolás Maduro as the winner. We also analyze how the use of technology facilitated vigilantism, information concealment, and control during and after the electoral period. In the second chapter, we address the persecution of journalists, communicators, and media outlets in the country — a phenomenon occurring for nearly two decades — which has become an additional layer obstructing the free circulation of information in Venezuela during the electoral context and beyond it.
In the third chapter, we examine the persecution and restrictions on rights targeting Venezuelan protesters and human rights defenders, apparently aimed at silencing dissenting narratives that highlighted flaws in the electoral process and in Maduro’s actions in previous years. Finally, in the last chapter, we present a regional and political analysis of Venezuela’s crisis, in light of the human rights and humanitarian situation and the framework of international rules.
In summary, the report questions the legitimacy of Maduro’s reelection due to the absence of documentation proving the result and the integrity of the electoral process. This concern is intensified by the lack of guarantees for essential rights that ensure fair and free elections, as well as by the persecutions carried out against voices dissenting from the regime, which have resulted in at least 2,000 people in arbitrary detention.
Furthermore, we conclude that the Venezuelan case is not isolated from a regional and global trend of rising political extremisms, marked by authoritarian practices, excessive use of force, control and restriction of the information ecosystem, and the silencing of dissenting voices.
Thus, the country’s situation aligns, in practice, with other authoritarian tendencies around the globe, such as those represented by Nayib Bukele (El Salvador), Javier Milei (Argentina), Donald Trump (United States), and Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Completed in September 2025, the report does not cover the recent events in Venezuela within the context of a military siege in the Caribbean, progressively built by the U.S. government in recent months. Since then, the United States has carried out at least 32 attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific under the pretext of combating drug trafficking, resulting in the extrajudicial execution of at least 115 people.
Meanwhile, the administration of Donald Trump announced that it would govern the country until a democratic transition takes place and that management of the Venezuelan oil industry would be handed over to a large U.S. corporation — the U.S. government also has interests in critical minerals and rare earth elements.
Vice-president Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in, and uncertainty regarding democratic and political developments in the country persists. Despite the release of political prisoners, new arbitrary detentions have been recorded, including of press workers.
The report “Venezuela: freedom of expression and democratic crisis” does not lose its relevance in light of these concerning events. On the contrary, the problems documented may intensify due to the United States’ belligerent and illegal actions and the new political paths the country may follow as a result of this rupture.
In this new context, we use the publication to reaffirm our support for the Venezuelan civil society’s demands to end the imprisonment of journalists, protesters, and human rights defenders, and to build a peaceful democratic transition that respects the sovereign will of the Venezuelan people, as well as calls for accountability for those responsible for serious human rights violations.
At the same time, we argue that Venezuela’s democratic crisis will not be resolved through interventionist, neocolonial, extractivist policies that undermine the sovereignty of Latin American peoples and international law. On the contrary, such actions — reminiscent of a dark history of authoritarianism, repression, and exploitation in Latin America — only intensify recent democratic crises and deepen the landscape of human rights violations.
We invite you to read the publication, expressing our solidarity with the Venezuelan people for the numerous threats and violations they have faced in recent years, as well as the acts of interventionist violence in recent months. In this context, the report also becomes an invitation to reflect on the political paths of our region and on the role human rights and their protection play in the search for political systems that address people’s main needs and overcome historical traumas and structural inequalities.
Também disponível em: Portuguese (Brazil) Spanish
