Six stories - 29 May 2025

Venezuela doesn't know how to steal elections; Petro can't organize a pro-government protest, and BYD can't make profitable cars without slave labor.

Happy Thursday. I focus on US-LatAm relations on Mondays and then use the Thursday newsletter to highlight stories that aren’t directly about the US.

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In today’s newsletter:

1. Venezuela’s lazy election stealing

2. Mexico’s judicial elections

3. Colombia protests and Ecopetrol scandal

4. Brazil BYD lawsuit

5. Brazil money transfers to China

6. Haiti’s warfare testing ground

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Last July, the Venezuelan government was embarrassed when it blatantly stole the presidential election and got caught because the opposition collected the voting receipts from each location to prove they had won. To prevent that from happening again, Maduro’s cronies removed various regulations about the voting receipts to make stealing elections easier. They knew ahead of time they were going to have to make up numbers steal last weekend’s regional and legislative elections.

I don’t advise the stealing of elections. But if I were the sort of unethical consultant advising the Maduro regime, given months of advanced notice that an election would be stolen, I would:

1. Make up the numbers ahead of time, not wait until the night after the vote took place.

2. Ensure those numbers were logically consistent with the voting sites and the realistic turnout that I wanted to demonstrate. There shouldn’t be locations with 99% or 104% turnout to make up for bad numbers elsewhere.

3. Accurately calculate state level and national voter turnout percentages based on my own imaginary numbers.

4. Correctly apply the formula to apportion the legislative seats using the fake numbers.

5. Organize the seat lists so the candidates that must win for the government’s internal stability hit the victory threshold.

6. Properly randomize the numbers so the patterns don’t appear human-generated.

Ok, that last point is overkill and demonstrates a level of obsessiveness, but the first five points should be obvious. This isn’t advanced math. It’s a day or two of spreadsheet work, and AI can probably do much of it faster.

The fact that Maduro’s people didn’t do any of that is a sign of internal dysfunction. They waited until the last minute, panicked, printed and reported inaccurate numbers to steal the election and then miscalculated their own seat formulas. There is at least one position where the government wanted to win, faked the vote count, and still lost, meaning they had to manipulate their own fake counting system even after fabricating the voting numbers.

There are a few people within opposition circles who think the Chavistas make these mistakes intentionally to demonstrate and gloat about the level of control and manipulation that they have over the entire country. No they don’t. Cuba, Nicaragua and Russia all manipulate their own election results with far fewer of these basic errors. The fact Venezuela can’t steal an election without screwing it up shows just how amateurish their dictatorship can be. It’s a frustrating level of incompetence. It’s a weakness the opposition has been too distracted and divided to exploit.

Morena is mobilizing its political machine to elect friendly judges in this weekend’s election. For anyone who understands Mexico’s history with the PRI or politics in general anywhere, this feels like a statement of the obvious. But it’s still illegal.