(Bloomberg) -- Venezuela’s government is engaging in a full crackdown on any resistance to President Nicolás Maduro’s self-declared victory, announcing 749 arrests and detaining prominent opposition figure Freddy Superlano on Tuesday.
A video shared on social media showed Superlano, who campaigned alongside opposition leader María Corina Machado, being taken out of his car Tuesday and forced into an unmarked SUV by several men in all-black uniforms in a residential neighborhood in Caracas.
The arrests followed Maduro’s livestream, broadcast to X on Monday night, in which he said that protesters would be “severely” prosecuted after thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas decrying what they say is a fraudulent win. He held his phone up to the camera over and over again, showing videos of the demonstrations while emphasizing that he would engage security forces to keep the peace.
“Selective violence and intimidation have usually been enough to end protests,” Teneo Managing Director Nicholas Watson wrote in a note to clients Tuesday morning. “A key question in the days ahead is whether the regime can bear the political costs and strains that would likely arise from a more lethal strategy of repression.”
Foro Penal, a nonprofit network of lawyers who provide legal assistance to political prisoners in the country, counted 132 arrests on Tuesday and 46 on Monday. It’s unclear why there is such a discrepancy with the official count. In total, at least six people have died.
The government’s initial efforts to quash protests seems to be working. The capital city was calm Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, hundreds of people have gathered on a main avenue in eastern Caracas, where opposition leader María Corina Machado and her stand-in candidate, Edmundo González, addressed their supporters.
The two announced that the opposition now had more than 84% of the voting tabulations, which are key to the party’s ability to prove that González is the rightful winner of the election. They said that they were on track to have more than 8 million votes — close to the 8.2 million the late Hugo Chávez received in the 2012 election.
The opposition last night published the data onto a website, for the international community and citizens alike to see, but said it had to make another after an apparent government attack. It wasn’t immediately clear what the next formal steps would be to proving fraud, but they said the timeline wasn’t clear and that peaceful demonstrations would continue.
Machado said that it was crucial that any demonstrations were peaceful, and that no one should agitate other citizens, the police or military. She and González, however, never made mention of Superlano or his arrest.
“What we are combating is fraud,” Machado said. “The truth is the truth and we will defend it until the end.” The crowd yelled, “We’re not afraid!”
The note from Teneo said that, “the situation is volatile and the outlook uncertain as an opposition emboldened by its performance and charismatic leadership faces off against a president whose legitimacy has been severely weakened.”
The fact that many of the protests have taken place in lower-income neighborhoods — historically strongholds of Chavismo, Venezuela’s brand of socialism — could also be alarming Maduro’s regime.
As tension boils within Venezuela, international pressure has continued to mount, with the US saying it would consider travel bans and other new sanctions should Maduro not comply. Maduro has said he would meet international demands to release full records from Sunday’s vote.
No other credible third-party vote counts have been released. The Carter Center, the sole election observer of international repute that monitored the election and planned to publicly report its findings, has not yet released its preliminary report as was planned Tuesday.
The White House took a slightly stronger stand in a statement Tuesday afternoon, saying that the release of the voting data “is especially critical given that there are clear signs that the election results announced by Venezuela’s National Electoral Council do not reflect the will of the Venezuelan people as it was expressed at the ballot box on July 28.”
Meanwhile, Maduro’s government added a new angle to the claim that a cyberattack is preventing the release of voting data, saying North Macedonia was involved. Authorities there denied the allegation, with Digital Transformation Minister Stefan Andonovski telling reporters Tuesday that the government is monitoring the situation and has asked Venezuela for proof that any Macedonian citizens or institutions were involved.
Earlier, Public Prosecutor Tarek William Saab accused opposition leader Machado of conspiring with Leopoldo López and another member of his party in an alleged plot to prevent voting records from reaching the electoral council’s headquarters.
Superlano, a 48-year-old former lawmaker, is a popular opposition figure who participated in last year’s primaries before throwing his support behind Machado. He accompanied her and her stand-in candidate González during most of the campaign. On Monday he was among the group that backed Machado’s claim that there is proof to show González won the election.
Superlano had been on the receiving end of veiled government threats for months, including from top Maduro allies Diosdado Cabello and Jorge Rodríguez.
He led the gubernatorial race for Barinas, a Chavista stronghold, in 2021 before the government halted the process, claiming he was ineligible to run due to a previous ban.
His party Popular Will has been the subject of intense persecution by the Maduro government in the past decade, with most of its members — including López — currently in exile.
--With assistance from Slav Okov.
(Updates throughout, including latest arrest count and comments from analysts and North Macedonia authorities. Updates in paragraphs 6 to 10 and 14 to 15 with new comments from the opposition.)
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