After more than a decade of authoritarian rule under President Nicholás Maduro, the Venezuelan elections on July 28, 2024, were domestically and internationally regarded as a potential turning point in the country’s history. Within Venezuela’s borders, hyperinflation has gripped the economy due to poor governance, rampant corruption, and Venezuela’s excessive dependence on oil exports — descending the country into political and economic chaos. Since 2014, more than 7 million people have fled the country in a mass emigration crisis. Experts estimate that an additional 18-25% of the population is considering fleeing if Maduro remains president, putting neighboring Latin American countries and the United States at risk of destabilization as border pressures increase.

Héctor Fuentes, a member of the 2024 class of Fisher Family Summer Fellows at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), is a lawyer, human rights advocate, and agent of social change in Venezuela, dedicated to bottom-up national transformation. He serves as the executive director of EstadoLab, a think-and-do tank focused on state fragility and the reconstruction of democratic governance. In a conversation earlier this week with Michael McFaul, Director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Fuentes explained, “People are not leaving because the situation is bad, they’re leaving because they don’t see a future for their children.”

Although opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was banned from the presidential ballot, her endorsed substitute, Edmundo González, ran and received popular support from the public. Fuentes posits that the Maduro administration needed to give its base the illusion of legitimacy through the most recent elections, although this did not preclude widespread electoral irregularities. From delaying voting in centers where the opposition was grouped to forcefully recollecting boxes containing paper voting records, evidence has emerged of falsified results. After counting 80% of the ballots, the National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner with 51.2% of the votes compared to González’s 44.2%. However, independent research polls conducted in Venezuela containing over 7,000 responses from 100 centers certify that González won by a landslide majority.