'So many similarities'

Caracas, Venezuela, and Medellin, Colombia – It was barely past midnight on July 29 when 86-year-old retiree Judith felt her hopes get “crushed”.

Judith — who asked to withhold her last name for her safety — had stayed up late to hear the outcome of Venezuela’s presidential election, which was widely expected to result in the defeat of President Nicolas Maduro.

Instead, the country’s National Electoral Council (CNE) announced that Maduro had won a third term in office. The opposition immediately refuted the results as fraudulent — but Judith remembers feeling crestfallen.

“There’s nothing left to do here,” she recalled thinking.

After more than eight decades of living in Venezuela, Judith had seen presidents and dictators rise and fall. That night, she saw Venezuela on the precipice of yet more turmoil, as Maduro and the opposition both claimed victory.

But experts and voters say Venezuela’s history may hold clues to how the ongoing electoral crisis will unfold.

For Judith, the present-day crisis reminds her of a tumultuous period she lived through more than 60 years ago.

At the time, she was a 20-year-old college student, and Venezuela’s last military dictator, Marcos Perez Jimenez, was in the final throes of his rule.

"I see so many similarities. A fraudulent election being the first one,” Judith told Al Jazeera.

On December 15, 1957, Perez Jimenez held a referendum to decide whether he should remain in power. Within a few hours of the vote, a result was announced: The widely unpopular Perez Jimenez had somehow won in a landslide.

But the suspect nature of the results triggered a backlash. The vote was widely denounced as fraudulent, and within just 39 days, Perez Jimenez fled to the Dominican Republic.

Tomas Straka, a historian and professor at the Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said many Venezuelans are comparing the current election crisis to that period of military dictatorship, from 1948 to 1958.

“There is an aspect in which they are all very similar. A broad sector of Venezuelan society and the international community have serious doubts about the results announced by the electoral authority,” Straka told Al Jazeera.

But there are also significant differences. According to Straka, Perez Jimenez never had to “confront important protests in Venezuela or distrust from a large part of the international community” as a result of the election fraud.

“It was the middle of the Cold War. Venezuela was the first oil exporter in the world, and Perez Jimenez essentially had the blessing of the West,” he said.

By contrast, Straka points out that Maduro faces much more pressure both domestically and internationally. Protesters in Venezuela and foreign leaders alike have demanded that his government release precinct-level voting tabulations, as it has in the past, to justify the results.

Even Maduro’s regional allies, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, have been reluctant to recognise him as the winner, going as far as to suggest that the elections should be repeated.

Nevertheless, Maduro has clung to power, something Judith highlighted as a big difference between the past and present.

"Perhaps back then, the process felt a lot faster. They were long, uncertain days, but this seems like it will be a lot slower," she said of a possible government transition.

Government crackdowns on the present-day protest movement have also brought back the ghosts of Venezuela's repressive past.

Since Maduro took power more than a decade ago, human rights organisations have accused him of using the Venezuelan government to suppress dissent through intimidation, violence and election rigging.

Even his first election, in 2013, was greeted by protests and accusations of fraud. Those demonstrations spilled over into 2014, as Venezuela struggled with food shortages and a lack of security.

To tamp down the unrest, Maduro’s government deployed paratroopers armed with tear gas, water cannon and guns. Thousands of people were arrested and 43 were killed.

Phil Gunson, a Venezuela analyst at International Crisis Group, a nonprofit, said the legacy of that crackdown lingers over the contemporary protest movement.

“The opposition is no doubt conscious that, since the first major anti-Maduro protest wave in 2014, the government has brutally quashed such demonstrations on numerous occasions,” Gunson wrote on the Crisis Group’s blog.

In 2017, a new wave of unrest erupted after Maduro’s government dissolved the National Assembly, where the opposition had gained a majority of the seats.

Once more, Maduro and his allies turned to hard-knuckle tactics to silence the unrest. One effort was called “Operacion Tun Tun”, which translates to “Operation Knock Knock”.

It involved raids on the residences of opposition members and dissidents, culminating in their arrest.

In August, as the latest spate of election protests unfolded, Maduro again invoked “Operacion Tun Tun”. Standing in the rain at a youth rally, he mimed knocking on an opposition member’s door.

“He who oversteps, tun tun!” Maduro told the cheering crowd.

In the weeks since, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado accused Maduro’s government of kidnapping her lawyer. Other prominent figures have been arrested. And residents in Caracas said pro-Maduro paramilitary groups have been painting black X marks on their houses.

“Operation Tun Tun is an intimidation scheme,” Alfredo Romero, executive director of the Venezuelan human rights group Foro Penal, told Al Jazeera.

He said the scheme is effective because it “frightens an important collective group: not just political leaders but also common people who are exercising their right to peaceful demonstration”.

Already, the toll of the current political unrest has been high. Since the July election, at least 23 people have died in Venezuela’s protests, according to Victim Monitor, a human rights group. Foro Penal, meanwhile, has documented 1,581 arrests.

Some critics have speculated that, if Maduro continues to lose popular support, the Venezuelan military could turn on him.

Even the opposition’s presidential candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, urged the country’s security forces to “fulfil their constitutional duties” and not “repress the people”.

Straka, the historian, pointed out that the Venezuelan military has turned its back on leaders in the past, most notably in the case of the dictator Perez Jimenez.

That the military played a role in his downfall took “everyone by surprise”, Straka explained. “The armed forces — Perez Jimenez’s main support — were divided.”

But that outcome is less likely in Maduro’s case, according to Gunson, the Venezuela expert at the International Crisis Group. He indicated that some military leaders could face prosecution without Maduro’s protection.

“If the military were to desert Maduro, his government would fall,” Gunson told Al Jazeera. “But the high command is unlikely to do that in the near future at least because it would threaten their own personal positions.”

In recent weeks, the military even reaffirmed its support for Maduro amid the election crisis.

On August 25, the Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) pledged their “absolute loyalty and subordination to the commander-in-chief of the FANB, President Nicolas Maduro".

Still, Gunson believes the military might not be as unified as it appears.

“There is no reason to believe that members of the security forces voted any differently from the rest of the population,” Gunson said, pointing to the widespread support for Venezuela’s opposition coalition.

“There are plenty of anecdotes to support the thesis that many members of the National Guard and the police sympathise with demonstrators,” he added. “In recent years, thousands of members of the armed forces have deserted, and many have left the country.”

The strength of the opposition has given Judith — the woman who witnessed the fall of Perez Jimenez over 60 years ago — a measure of hope. She said she wishes to see another authoritarian leader topple in her lifetime.

“I don’t want to leave this world before seeing the start of change [in Venezuela] once again.”