Episode 6: What happened in Venezuela’s elections?

Jay Ulfelder:

You are listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast. I’m your host, Jay Ulfelder, he/him. Together with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth and other members of the Nonviolent Action Lab Team, each episode we bring you the latest research, insights and ideas on how nonviolent action can or sometimes fails to transform injustice.

Today’s Thursday, August 8th, 2024, and I’m speaking with my colleague Freddy Guevara Cortez about the recent elections in Venezuela. Freddy co-founded the Venezuelan progressive party Voluntad Popular in 2010. He was the top voted congressman there in 2015, was vice president of Venezuela’s Parliament in 2016, and was leader of the nonviolent civil uprising against the Maduro government in 2017. As a result of his political activism, Freddy became a target of political persecution resulting in the loss of his freedom for three years. During this time, he was a refugee in the Chilean embassy in Caracas, a political prisoner, and has now been an exile since August 2021. He was appointed to the opposition unitary platform in negotiations with Maduro’s regime and in 2023 as president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Venezuelan Parliament in exile. He’s also currently a democracy visiting fellow with the Nonviolent Action Lab here at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. So Freddy, welcome to the podcast and again, thanks so much for making time to talk to me today.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Thanks to you, Jay, and thanks to everyone who’s listening to this.

Jay Ulfelder:

Now, I’m going to assume that a lot of listeners aren’t deeply knowledgeable about Venezuelan politics in general, or even the recent elections in particular. So let’s start with some basics, who was running in the July elections and what happened?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Well, it seems like a simple question but it’s not simple at all because of course, we don’t have a democracy in Venezuela and it’s not just me, in my opinion, it’s several NGOs and human rights organizations qualify Venezuela as a non-democratic or authoritarian regime. And I say this because we as the opposition, don’t have the full right to choose our candidates. What I mean with this is, for example, I have a ban to run for 15 years. Many of the leaders in the opposition, we actually did organize a primary. The candidate that won was María Corina Machado and she won with 90% of the votes in almost like 2 million votes which is a lot for a primary in Venezuela in the conditions that we held. And still, the Maduro regime didn’t allow her to run.

So then, even if that happened and that was unfair, we still believe in nonviolence and of course, how to take advantage of elections as a moment to organize and mobilize people. And we proposed a second candidate, a university professor called Corina Yoris, also a woman and she’s part of the History Academy in Venezuela, very well respected woman. Never had a public… She’s not a public servant and she was also banned. Banned from participating in the elections. So then we chose a third candidate that was Edmundo González, that he was a former ambassador. He’s never been also in leadership position and they allowed him to run because A, some international countries like United States, Brazil, Colombia from the left and from the right pressured Maduro to say, “Hey, you cannot ban a third candidate and still think that we’re going to recognize this election.” But also B, because they thought that this person that was basically a person that nobody knew in Venezuela before was going to be easily defeated.

And so he, Edmundo González, ended up being not only the candidate of the opposition, but he won and we just been saying with our numbers, because we have the tallies of the result, the official tallies, the proof and the Carter Center also said, that was the international team that came, invited by the Electoral Council of Venezuela that answers to Maduro but they still invited them. And even then, an old international, main international observers stands that Edmundo Gonzalez won the election by a landslide. And now we’re seeing the crisis that is happening there because the Maduro regime is not recognizing that.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. I was going to ask you to say a little more about the evidence of fraud and you mentioned the tally sheets. Do you want to say any more about that?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Yeah. I mean the electoral system in Venezuela, it’s very particular and it’s made by machines. So it’s a machine that has a lot of, let’s say, mechanisms to prove that the transparency occurs if you do the right thing.

Jay Ulfelder:

Right.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

And the thing is that the Chavez regime did this because, A, at the beginning, many parts of the opposition called that he made frauds even though he, and I believe I was in for the position but I recognize that he has the majority of support in one moment.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

That doesn’t mean that the elections were fair and they weren’t free necessarily, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t have the support. So he built the system in a way that could prevent us to call for fraud, to say that we had a fraud and without any proof. So he built it in this way because they were confident that they had the majority of the vote, but of course, that change like everything. And they start changing, not the electoral system itself but they start to making, I would say gerrymandering, that it’s a very common thing in the United States. They did things like moving people from one center to the other and start to playing with these things and suppressing vote in a very massive way and suppressing candidates. So the manipulation of the elections that they did through the years weren’t a direct manipulation of the electoral results, but more related to the context itself of the elections.

For example, I don’t know, taking all of the media, banning candidates, stealing the opposition parties. For example, my political party, the one that I founded with other people, they decided by the Supreme Court, the Madura controls, that we are not the ones that will sit anymore and they gave it to a guy that is supporting Madura. So imagine that the American Supreme Court today will say, “No, the Republicans, now they are not ruling this” and they will give the Republican Party to some ally of Joe Biden or something, that’s what happened there. So I’m explaining all of this because the thing is that because the system itself, the voting process itself was so secure that they needed to change the environment around it and the context of the election to make it uneven, unfair, and of course, to try to manipulate it. But that works when you have, I don’t know, between a 5% or 10% difference between one party on the other, then you can manage those things. You can make the fraud within those numbers.

The thing that happened is that we won by more than 30%. So that’s a thing that never happened and not only that never happened, it’s also that we got the proof because the system itself, when you vote at the end of the process, the machine throws a tally, that is a receipt, which includes all the results of that electoral center, where the place people voted. And it’s a machine that throws basically three or more tallies. One, that one for each party and one that the electoral board gets and the military gets. So we have, they tried, they gave an order and that was the plan that we discovered after, they gave the order to the militaries to not allow all witnesses to take and to have the tallies in their hands.

Jay Ulfelder:

Right.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Because if they impede that the people from our coalition got the tallies, then they could change the results with the machines and that’s it.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

But the fact is that there was a major operation, brave people, and also people from the military didn’t obey the order, and we got 83% of the tallies. So the difference is so big that even if they have all the rest of the tallies and they have 100% of the votes to Maduro, and we don’t have none, even if that happens, there’s no way mathematically, I not even speaking statistically, mathematically, they will not reach the difference. So that’s why today the Carter Center, that it was an international electoral observation board that was invited by the Maduro regime, they say today and say like, “Hey, the people from the opposition won, Edmundo Gonzalez won.” So we have inner hands, 83% of the ballots… No, sorry, of the tallies that are not opposition, tallies are tallies that comes from the electoral board officially from the machine and that has the signatures of all witnesses, the Maduro party witnesses, and of course the electoral board too.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. And I’ve seen a number of major media outlets here in the US essentially conducting their own audits of those tallies and reaching the same conclusions.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Yeah. AP did it.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

I think also, yeah-

Jay Ulfelder:

Washington Post.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

New York Times, Washington Post.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Wall Street Journal too.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Because we got it. We made a big operation, digitalized and uploading it, putting in a webpage.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

And make the data available for everyone because we don’t have anything to hide.

Jay Ulfelder:

Right.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

We’re sure we won.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. Well, so let’s take a step back and maybe get some more context. How did Venezuela get to this moment? What’s the historical trajectory that brought about the Chavez and then Maduro government and this movement, your movement and opposition to it?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

I think this is a very important question because of course, nothing happens without the context. And I think it’s important, especially for American audiences and democracies to understand that no one is absolutely safe or have a bulletproof democracy.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Because Venezuela, we were the biggest and stronger democracy in all Latin America. When all the region, you had Pinochet in Chile, you had Vida Videla and the other dictators in Argentina, when you had a dictatorship in Brazil, when you have a dictatorship, basically in most countries, Venezuela was the beacon of democracy. We were the ones that were helping others and not only that, we had a GDP that was even bigger than Italy and Spain. And actually people, Americans, if Americans hear this, the Americans live in Florida, from Florida, they will have this remembrance of Venezuelans being wealthy and going to Miami just to buy groceries or clothes or things like that.

So Venezuela was a Saudi country but with a democracy, a very vibrant democracy. That of course had an issues but it was a democracy. So of course, I’m not going to say that we were living in the paradise but for example, my family, my family didn’t came from rich origin or nothing at all. Both my parents come from humble origins. They come from poor sectors and they live in a country which had the opportunities with public schools, with public universities and with enough support. And so, they made it and they became middle class and they made the possibility for me to become a generation that also went to university and have a decent life without trying to worry about food. Well, of course, and that’s what happened at the late eighties, I would say. We are a country that depends mostly on oil. So of course, there’s a lot of other variables. I don’t want to simplify this, but if I will have to choose just one variable that make the country to get into a bad trend was basically the crisis of oil.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

So 80% of our incomes were oil. So when the oil price went down our model got into a crisis and that affected a lot of inequality, poverty, and because of that, also weak institutions. And that created corruption and a turmoil in the country. So that turmoil at the end made a lot of people to choose Chavez. Chavez was a military that tried to make coup d’etat in 1992, he failed. Then he went in prison and when he got outside, he basically called for, to a revolution against all the status quo saying that all the parties within the opposition, all the government at the moment were part of the same thing. And he had this populist discourse that in the case of Venezuela, was from the left. I think it’s important to know that populism is not only about right wing. You have left wing populism, right wing populism, left authoritarianism, right authoritarianism. In the case of Venezuela was discourse from the extreme left authoritarianism and populism, and he basically got elected. That’s the truth. Chavez came to power with democracy.

Jay Ulfelder:

Right.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

That’s a thing that we cannot contest because he got the support. And then after he got elected, the country started in a very dangerous path between, basically divided the country in two and a lot of turmoil happened. So I mean, I don’t want to extend too much on this but basically from 2000 to 2013, Chavez made an agenda in which for example, he started to control most of the media. He closed the main TV stations, he bought other TV stations, he put some people in jail. He started getting control of the judiciary, of the Supreme Court, of the electoral board and he started to create this, that I will use Steven Levi’s definition. He created this electoral authoritarianism.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

In which he made this system as a way in which he could win elections but in an uneven field.

Jay Ulfelder:

Mm-hmm.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

But after he died, he left Maduro in power. And the first election that happened was a very contestable election that was contested because they won, they say that they won, but just 1%. From that moment on, all the system that Chavez built was used not just to retain power, but also to suppress the opposition. From 2013 to now, Nicolas Maduro, that is the Chavez heir, basically started to dismantle all the small, I would say, islands of democracy that still remain in the country despite Hugo Chavez effort. And I’m not going to say that Chavez was better than Maduro, I mean, we’ll never say that. I’m not here to judge personalities, I don’t know that. But one objective fact is that Chavez didn’t needed to rely as much as in repression as Maduro needs to because he had popular support. He has good money, income because the oil process were good. He had international support in that moment. Chavez was a hero from the left. So it was a situation that he could handle because he didn’t need to rely as much repression.

Maduro doesn’t have any of that. A, Maduro is not a popular guy. B, Maduro is in a context in which all the region basically reject him. C, the prices of the oil went down but D, and this is very important, Nicolas Maduro also inherit economic system so disastrous, that Hugo Chavez made that made Venezuela to basically be dollarized. If you go now to Venezuela, you will not be able to find our currency, even if they claim that they are an anti-imperialist, anti-American country and revolution, everyone needs to use a dollar. And we don’t have even legal dollar accounts. So everyone has to do cash or something like that because the economy was destroyed with this amount of crazy expropriations and a statistic point of view in which they basically, they try to take control of all the means of production. And by doing that, they destroyed the economy. So you don’t have good income now because oil went down. You didn’t have now enough national production of food or anything and you rely only on to import food.

And that created more crisis and Maduro, instead of doing what everyone will do, have a negotiation, I don’t know, open the space, have a dialogue. What he did was respond with repression. And that started from the 2013, God is speak in 2017 and now we have Nicolas Maduro accused of crimes against humanity, this is a very big word. Crimes against humanity by international criminal court, also by the United Nations Commission of Human Rights that led Michell Bachelet that no one can say that Michell Bachelet, that is a left president from Chile, that then went to lead the United Nations Human Rights Commission. And the fact finding mission also proved that Maduro did systematically committed torture, oppression, and repression against most dissidents in Venezuela. And especially now against more poor people, especially young ones.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. I wanted to ask you a little more about the opposition movement you’re part of and how the government’s responded to it. I think you just answered that last part but can you tell me a little more about who is in this movement, who makes this movement up and what are your goals and what strategies and tactics have you been trying?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Well, the opposition movement is very big in a way that is not only one party. The opposition movement, I would say that, A, you have to first differentiate the political parties and the democratic society because what’s happening in Venezuela is not a fight between left or right or political parties, it’s a thing between autocracy and democracy. So if I would say the opposition or the democratic sector includes universities, student movements, unions, and churches and a lot of sectors. Within the democratic sector of the country, there’s the political parties that of course are the ones that mainly lead this, that we have a coalition that includes basically parties from all the ideological spectrum. We have, for example, a party that is from the far left that’s called Red Flag, Bandera Roja. They’re mainly communist and they’re against Maduro. And we have from the right, I will not say far right, but we have a very right wing economic liberal party that is the one of Maria Corina Machado. They’re very liberal, not in the way of America, but liberal in the European way.

Jay Ulfelder:

Right.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

And very less is fair, very open economies and things like that. So this is a coalition they have parties from all over the place and all over the regions of the country and that all of the ideologies. So that’s the main coalition and it’s led by Maria Corina. So far, we have been using a lot of different tactic and strategies. And actually two years ago when the first year that I was there in the Kennedy School, I did a study group about the lessons learned from the Venezuela struggle. And my work was mainly trying to analyze and dissect the different theories of change that we produce. So of course, I will not name all of them since I mean 2000, 2024, is too many. But if I can categorize the main strategies that we have used, I would say that we can divide it in mainly two. One have been strategies that uses the system that the regime created. For example, strategies in which we participate in elections that they call…

We participate or we use a recall referendum. That is an article for constitutions to allow us to do that, and things that exist within the system of the regime. That’s a lot of things. Participating in regional elections, in national elections, in presidential elections, in parliamentary elections. So that’s one stream of the studies that we use. Some of them work, some of them didn’t. And then you have other type of strategies that were more, I would say, out of the system strategy. That doesn’t necessarily went through the institutions of the regime and they were more based on alternative institutions of people’s power. For example, the student movement of 2007, but also the protest of 2014, the ones that I led in 2017, they were basically… The fundamental of those strategies were the mobilization of massive… Massive mobilization of young people in different sectors demanding freedom and using civil disobedience in that way.

And I would say that I can include in that big category of non, I would say not institutional or institutionalize the strategies within the system of the regime. They entered in government strategy that was the one before in 2019 in which we basically based the strategy in a claim that our constitution has, that when there’s no elected president because there’s a fraud, the head of the national parliament becomes the president of the country, that’s what constitution said. And then at that moment, because we participated in the previous election and we won, and the 2015, we got an interim government that was recognized by many of the democracies. So that I would say, that those has been mainly the two type of strategies that we have used.

This time, we came back again to the strategy of playing within the system of the regime. And this one worked very well too as in 2015, the last time we did it was in 2015. We won two thirds of parliament. After that, they didn’t allow us to make another election. And then I think because of a lot of pressure, the international sanctions, negotiations, the crisis, everything, they needed to legitimize themselves again and they called for this election in 2024 expecting that we weren’t going to participate or that we were going to lose, but whatever. So we did it this time again, we came and participated and the results are now obvious. We won and this worked very well but first, we still need to do the hardest part that is how do we claim this victory and make it in a democratic and peaceful transition.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. I wanted to ask you related to that, do you think it helps or hurts you all when the US government publicly sides or concurs with your conclusions about the audit you described of the election results? And more broadly, the US is longstanding economic sanctions against Venezuela. Are these things that you think have helped the opposition? What would you like to see the US and other foreign governments do to support the opposition movement?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Well, I mean, I would say that we have to understand that Venezuela is not a country that exists separated within the geopolitical complex. So the Maduro regime supported by China, by Russia, by Iran, and it’s not a claim that I doing, it’s very obvious.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

They do it, they say it, so thinking that a people can topple down a dictatorship just by themselves. You can say, “Okay. Yeah, maybe that’s possible.” And history has proved that people can make it. And people’s power have proved that with nonviolence and with a lot of pressure and structure, you can do it but I think that times have changed. And what you don’t have to fight now just your dictator, but at the same time, you have to fight Putin and the China Communist Party and the Iran and Cuba. Well, that’s a different story. So I think the Belarusian example is also important with this happened in Hong Kong. And it’s very hard to think that even if there’s some people that will say that, “No, we don’t want the United States to get involved.” Listen, there’s no way. There’s no way that you can achieve democracy in this country without the help of democratic superpowers.

We need not only the United States, we need the United States, France, UK, Germany, we need democracies. Brazil, Colombia, Chile, we need the Democratic world supporting this because now we also have transnational repression. Part of what I’m doing with Erica is trying to understand and develop some hypothesis of what it’s happening that makes some so hard now for civil system movements to succeed. And one of the hypothesis that we found, that we have now is the international repression or transnational repression. What I’m doing in helping my country now, I’m also still doing my research, and I found testimonies of people from Cuba and people from Nicaragua that both had told me that one of them were part of a special forces in Nicaragua, and they were trained by Cubans. And one of them is a Cuban and told me that they were part of the people that send Cubans to repress Venezuelans. So what I mean with this is that this is a reality. It’s also Zelenskyy he denounces this in Twitter.

He has said it, the Wagner group has also been involved in Venezuela now. So of course I understand, and it can create a lot of debate about what are the tactics and what works and what doesn’t, we can discuss all of that. But the main premise that I want to say is that saying that United States or other democratic countries cannot get involved in the fight for freedom in Venezuela or other countries that are facing dictatorships, is condemning people to live in slavery from these dictators that just want to take advantage of the resources and the will of the people.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. I was going to ask you, there are some of the governments you mentioned, leftist organizations here in the US and elsewhere that have asserted that the recent elections were fair, that the oppositions just an instrument of the US and meddling. I think you’ve effectively addressed this but I just make sure you get a chance to address it directly if you’d like. How do you respond to those allegations that this is a US meddling, an attempt to pull off what amounts to a coup in Venezuela?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

I mean, I have many people from many friends from the left United States, and luckily I would say that most of them, I think that the case of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua was very clear from the left United States. You see that main leaders and you see from Bernie Sanders, Alexander Kahill and the leaders in political arena, they all agreed that Venezuela is a dictatorship and that there was a problem.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

But of course, you may find also other type of organizations that… I mean, I have to say this, some of them, I know them and they are financed by the Maduro regime somehow. And it’s not… So I would not say that everyone that says that Maduro won or whatever, or paid by debt. No, probably there’s people that has their reasons. I will call it ignorance and other things that I will say now but some of them have this. But I also think and I understand that… But I think this is a problem that many Americans have, if I may say. With all due respect, but I think that some people try to see or only understand the world with their own lenses. So many people believe that the fight that is happening in other countries is the same struggle that happens in United States. And United States has its own history, and you have a thing, and that it’s not…

Everything is not about the issues that are in United States. So in United States, usually you see more left versus right thing. People don’t like Trump. So if Trump is a friend of somebody else, then they automatically go to the other side. And I think that that logic of the friend of my friend is my friend or the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that doesn’t work in the world today.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Because for example, let me say this. So Iran, Iran is not a communist regime, at all, they are a theocratic regime. Actually, a communist regime will be against theocracy because communist regimes in general are anti-clatical and anti-religious. They had an interview with a revolutionary guard and they were asked why they support communist regime in Venezuela. I wouldn’t not say that it’s a communist regime but it’s a very far left regime. And they were very clear with this and they say like, “Hey, this is not about our ideology, this is about our interest and we need now Maduro to be a pain…” I would say the word or the phrase, “to be a pain against United States.”

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

So you see the Chinese Communist Party persecuting and trying to eradicate Muslims aligned with Iran, that is basically a theocracy. So the enemies of democracy doesn’t have that and I think that the people that really believe in democracy should see the world not only through the lenses. I’m going to put the quite opposite example and I will use my people, Venezuela. So you may find some Venezuelans that they would support Trump just because Trump was very hard against Maduro. So I think that that’s also simplistic point of view but if an American supports Maduro just because they don’t like the international policy of the United States and they believe that United States is anything, you can put any name on it, you are not helping the people in the ground. You are just using all conflict to support your point of view and that’s not helping everyone. Because what I believe that even from the left and from the right where we all should agree, there’s a thing called human rights that should be respected.

And when you have the president of Chile, Gabrielle Boric, for example, who will say that Gabrielle Boric from Chile is in the right, he’s in the last, I would say 30 years more because even Pinochet, he’s the most left wing president in the history of Chile. When you have people from the left, from the right, from the center, on all over the world. People from the United Nations, people from international criminal court, the same international criminal court that accused, what’s the name of him? Bibi, Netanyahu of crimes against humanity is the same international criminal court that is saying that Nicolas Maduro is a criminal for committing crimes against humanity. So I would say that my pledge will be, please don’t analyze Venezuela is as if you were analyzing the United States situation. The realities are more complex, are different and this is not about left or right. This is about basic rights, human rights, democracy, and the right to choose your own destiny.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. Well, finally, I’d like to ask you, we can zoom back out here and given we’re the Nonviolent Action Lab and this is what we think about, I wanted to ask you, are there any lessons, positive or negative, that pro-democracy movements in other parts of the world can draw from the movement in Venezuela? And are there movements elsewhere to which you all have been looking for inspiration strategy?

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, recently I am part of the team that is advising many of democratic civil society groups. Helping them or guiding them, let’s say more than advice because I’m far away now but trying to help them with these things. And we have done a lot of interviews and met with people from Bolivia, people from Guatemala, people from also Belarus, and try to understand different Ethan areas, recent experiences. So we’ve learned about that and we also were very inspired by the Otpor movement in Serbia. We read the Ukrainian Orange Revolution and many of the things but also we have learned from bad experiences. So what happened in Cuba in the last ones, what happened in Hong Kong, what happened in South Sudan, what happened in Syria because we don’t want those to move from a nonviolent movement to a massive civil war And we’ve been doing.

But also I think that we have many lessons that can help other societies of course. We still need to win the whole thing but I think that we’ve come so far now that we can say that there are some lessons that could help other movements. I think the first one, of course, is the importance of unity. The key and that’s a key factor that is not only… We’re not creating the wheel, no, or inventing the fire. Most studies in nonviolence remarks the importance of having a unitary platform, unitary strategy, and a common view on how to abroad this issue. So this is a very important thing that I think it’s important. Another thing that I will remark a lot is the involvement of young people. Students, and universities and colleges and high school. Young people are the source of freedom because…

I mean, most of the people that today are in jail, Maduro in this from… Yeah, it started in July 29 till now, we have 2,200 new political prisoners. 80% of them are below 21 years old. And these are people that never knew what a democracy was. They born and they live, and they were raised in this system. But even though the lack of freedom and the natural and human instinct for happiness, for progress, for freedom from engaging in a different way, to not live in a life design and bounded by a person that you didn’t choose, that spirit gets expressed more in young persons. So I think that’s another thing that we’ve been working a lot since long use. I came from there. I started in politics and the civil system movement because it was from the student movement. And well, I could say other things but probably that will be another whole episodes of lessons learned. Yeah.

Jay Ulfelder:

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate this. This has been great. I’ve learned a lot and I know you’ve probably been ridiculously busy.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

Yeah.

Jay Ulfelder:

For the last couple of weeks and will continue to be hopefully in the ways you’ve been describing. But again, thanks Freddy so much for making time.

Freddy Guevara Cortez:

No. Thank you very much, really. I think that all of this is very important. There are, hopefully we’ll have good lessons that we can try to spread through the world that can help us also in the Ash Center to understand how we can create or understand more knowledge that can help people to free themselves and then help also the international community to do right actions to help people. Because at the end, even though I say that we can’t win without the support of international community, it’s support. International community will never substitute the role of the people. And that’s what we need to do and I think that’s one of the things that an Nonviolent action lab is doing very great. Creating knowledge that can help human progress in the struggle for freedom against autocratic regimes.

Jay Ulfelder:

Thank you for listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast, hosted by me, Jay Ulfelder, and produced at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Please rate and review us wherever you listen. You can find more information about the Nonviolent Action Lab and links to our work in the show notes below. See you next time.