A week after declaring victory — so far without evidence — in Venezuela’s hotly disputed election, socialist strongman Nicolas Maduro isn’t backing down.
Investigators opened criminal probes against opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and opposition candidate Edmundo González on Monday, following their recent appeal to the country’s military and police to abandon Maduro and “take the side of the people.”
Venezuelan authorities, which announced Maduro as the winner with 53% of the vote, haven’t published voting records to support this claim, and have cracked down on protests. The opposition, meanwhile, collected vote tallies from more than two-thirds of precincts, which pointed to a landslide win for González, who ran in Machado’s place after she was banned.
For now, the criminal probe is likely more bark than bite, says Risa Grais-Targow, a Venezuela expert at Eurasia Group. “It’s meant to deter other opposition figures,” she says, but locking up the two most prominent faces of an unusually unified Venezuelan opposition “would lead to a harsher international response and potentially blow up the streets.”
In other words, Maduro, so far weathering the blowback of what looks like a stolen election, wants to intimidate the opposition without provoking a situation that could quickly spin out of control. So far, it’s working.