On the most recent meeting of the Christian Democratic Leader’s Roundtable (Brussels, December 3), I was asked to speak on electoral fraud in Latin-America and on illegal migration as a weapon. These are two seemingly separate topics, but, as we shall see, they are conceptually interconnected.
Modern electoral fraud was developed in my country, Venezuela, by Hugo Chavez, with the support of Cuba. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Castro-communism, which directed and supported the armed violence of the guerrillas throughout Latin-America, decided to change its strategy, founding political parties, financing them with drug money, and perpetrating electoral frauds as a new form of coup d’état.
In other words, guerrillas such as the Colombian FARC,and coup perpetrators such as Chavez, abandoned their weapons while maintaining their hatred for democracy, for capitalism, and for the values and principles of Western Christian civilization.
Electoral fraud is an attack against democracy, because it destroys the last resource of a nation to settle its most important matters: to consult the opinion of the people. Suddenly, it is no longer the voters who decide, but those who control the automated voting and totalization system.
The Latin-American Left perpetrates electoral frauds for the sake of a supposed higher goal: the socialist state. The members of the São Paulo Forum consider that the socialist state should not depend on the ups and downs of democracy and when the votes do not favor them, they are willing to pervert the electoral process.
In my book The Electoral Frauds of the São Paulo Forum, now available in five languages, I explain the details of how this new method of fraud works and how it has been exported to the rest of the Latin-American countries.
It is an integral fraud, because it covers all aspects of an election, from the selection of the electoral authorities to the validation of the results; it is an evolving fraud, because it is perfected with the passage of time; it is advanced, because it uses state-of-the-art technological tools; it is undetectable for many, because it requires specialised training to discover it; and, as if that were not enough, it is also exportable to other nations.
The problem with the automated voting and totalization systems is that, first, they can be manipulated, as any other software; second, they are not democratic, because they exclude the common citizen, who is incapable of knowing what happens inside the electronic circuits; and third, sovereignty is taken away from the people, to hand it over to a small group of technicians who handle the intricacies of these systems.
In Venezuela, during the past twenty years, there have been fraud denunciations, but in the last elections of July 28, a scheme to neutralize it through citizen participation was developed. Opposition leader María Corina Machado organized one million Venezuelans to watch over all the voting centers, manually count each vote, compare the results with the tally-sheets, and deploy a verification process alternative to the one made by the electoral authorities.
Through this mobilization, the opposition was able to obtain 83% of the voting tally-sheets, and then scan them and upload them to a robust webpage, so that both Venezuelans and the international community could verify the results that gave the candidate Edmundo Gonzalez as the winner, beyond the false result announced by the electoral authorities, controlled by the dictator Nicolas Maduro.
The great contradiction consists in spending millions of dollars to develop an automated voting and counting system, which can only be validated by manually counting each vote.
Illegal migration
There have always been migratory movements in the history of mankind. For example, in Latin-America, during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, millions of Europeans arrived and integrated perfectly into our societies. The same could be said of other migratory movements in the past.
But nowadays, the European and North American Left want to eliminate the very concept of “people”—based on a unity, with history, tradition, and identity, where minorities live together integrated with the same culture—and replace it with a variety of minorities in permanent confrontation among each other. It is a way of keeping alive the old Marxist class struggle, through the struggle between cultural minorities.
In other words, the neo-Marxists seek to replace the concept of “people” with that of “inhabitants”, that is, people living together in the same territory, although each one has its own culture and identity. This is what is meant by “multiculturalism”.
The Left boasts that it is interested in the welfare of migrants by promoting the policy of open borders, but the real result is that those who enter the United States and Europe illegally run the risk of being exploited, captured by mafias, or begging on the streets. The promise of an ideal world in the north becomes a tragedy both for the destination countries and for the migrants themselves, who often lack the skills to integrate and to live a fulfilling life.
I am very sensitive to this issue, because the Venezuelan Castro-communist model has forced eight million of my compatriots to flee the country. It is a real drama that we live in our own flesh, and we are grateful for the welcome we have received in many countries.
However, what we are seeing in Europe is not what the Dublin treaty sought—to help the politically persecuted and those in need of refuge—but an instrumentalization by the Left as a political weapon to weaken democracy and, in some cases, to establish platforms to support organized crime, especially drug trafficking and terrorism.
A scandalous case is the exportation by the regime of Nicolás Maduro of a criminal organization linked to drug trafficking called “Tren de Aragua,” or TDA. The historical antecedent of this phenomenon can be found in Cuba, in 1980, when Fidel Castro’s regime exported criminal gangs to the United States from the port of Mariel.
To conclude, I would like to invite readers to make two reflections on what can be done to counteract these threats:
First, to strengthen democracy, giving power to the people and taking it away from the electoral software companies, organizing citizen participation movements, so that they collaborate in the surveillance of the vote and in the totalizing process.
And second, to guarantee that the true objectives of the Dublin treaty are fulfilled, avoiding the indiscriminate entry of illegal migrants and at the same time punishing the mafias that transport them.
