Observations On Perception

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After nearly ten months abroad, María Corina Machado is again on Venezuelan soil, received in a church in Lara by people who had waited for her through seven failed attempts at return. Edmundo González, whom the electorate chose in July 2024 and who has never exercised the office it gave him, remains in Madrid and says he will follow. Their presence, or its announcement, does not alter the condition into which they come back. That condition is not the absence of a president. It is an absence that has been kept from every term that might bring it to an end.

The question her return makes visible began before the third of January. In July 2024 the tally sheets gathered at the polling tables, and the counts made from them, showed that González had won by a wide margin. The electoral authority proclaimed Maduro without publishing the tallies that would have supported the proclamation. Two attributions of the same office stood against each other: one by the votes as recorded, the other by the organ empowered to declare them. In September a court specialized in terrorism ordered González’s arrest on charges that included the usurpation of functions, and he left for Spain. The term to which the tally sheets elected him began on the tenth of January 2025 and was exercised by the man the proclamation named. When that man was removed by force, the office he had held without the electorate’s attribution did not pass to the one who held it. Nothing in the removal explains why the absence of a president the electorate did not choose should open the office to anyone but the one it did.

On the night of the capture, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Tribunal ordered the executive vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to assume the presidency as its encargada. The Constitution of 1999 knows two kinds of absence. A temporary absence is supplied by the executive vice president for up to ninety days, which the National Assembly may extend by ninety more; once it has lasted beyond ninety consecutive days, the Assembly decides by majority whether it is to be held absolute. An absolute absence within the first four years of a term requires a new election, universal and direct, within thirty consecutive days. The Chamber invoked neither. It called the absence forzosa, a category the charter does not contain, and declared that it was deciding nothing about whether the absence was temporary or absolute. Beneath that omission lay a prior one. To supply an absence is to presume that the absent held the office, and the possession of the office was precisely what July 2024 had placed in dispute. The succession continued a title the electorate had never conferred, and Washington, which had refused to recognize Maduro, formally recognized the authority derived from him.

A term can only run from a classification. By declining to classify, the Chamber did not suspend the Constitution: it placed the absence where none of its clauses could reach. On the third of April the Assembly could have declared the absence absolute, and did not; nor did it vote the extension the charter permits, since no temporary absence had been declared to extend. On the third of July the period beyond which the charter allows no temporary absence to be supplied ran out, and the Assembly, presided over by the encargada’s brother, said nothing. The thirty days that would have followed a declaration passed without a convocation, because there had been no declaration from which to count them. In September the encargada said that elections would come when the country was ready. Readiness has no date, and no organ of the state is obliged to certify it.

González’s privation is not exile alone, and it is not the loss of something once held. He has never been seated, so nothing can be restored to him in the strict sense: what is withheld is a first seating. Each month of the interim is a month of his term spent by someone else. The amnesty enacted in February released many held for political reasons, his son-in-law among them, and gave González nothing, because an amnesty reaches offenses and does not reach office. What was taken from him was not a liberty that a law could return, but a mandate that only the recognition of the vote could seat.

Machado asks for presidential elections by July 2027. The encargada promises an election and gives no date. The United States has convened talks between the government and a part of the opposition that is neither the one the tally sheets favored in 2024 nor the one that returned today; the parties speak of a vote and offer no timeline. Each of these positions concerns when an election will be held. None concerns what an election would do to the judgment already given. A vote called without any reckoning with the mandate of 2024 would not execute that judgment; it would replace it. The arrangement could then present a new election as the repair of the crisis while retiring the only judgment the electorate has already rendered, and the vote would be called by an authority descended from the very title the earlier vote had denied.

Three kinds of standing now meet in the country, and none can be substituted for another. Machado holds political leadership and the visible support of those who received her in Lara. González holds the title the tally sheets recorded. Rodríguez holds the exercise of power under an arrangement no vote produced. Leadership is not title, and power is neither. Machado’s return adds presence to the opposition and adds no authority to it, because authority was never what her absence had removed. A crowd shows the support of those who gather. It cannot set the day on which the electorate’s judgment takes effect, nor decide whether the judgment given in 2024 is still owed its effect.

The absence was called forzosa because it was imposed by force, and it is held where it was placed by the convergence of every party able to move it. The Chamber that invented the category has not revisited it. The Assembly that could name the absence absolute is presided over by the family of the one who would lose the office by that naming. The government that benefits from the interim does not convoke its end. The United States installed the arrangement, recognized it before the region’s governments, reportedly instructed its own prosecutors to set aside an investigation of the encargada, and its president has said the country is not ready for elections while the United States works to extract its oil and other resources; its officials now describe the present moment as acceptable. Machado’s entry this time was neither aided nor prevented, after earlier attempts that were turned back, and admission to the territory is not admission to the deliberation in which a date would be fixed.

Even a date, if one were set, would bring a vote over an office whose principal resources have already been committed. The hydrocarbons law signed in January opened the production and sale of oil to private companies, and the agreements concluded with the United States since then, which Machado has criticized, were made by an authority no voter conferred. Whoever is eventually elected will inherit them as claims upon the office, whatever force they are finally found to carry. The electorate would be asked to choose the holder of an office whose arrangements were concluded before it was asked anything.

The charter of 1999 provided for the absence of a president. It did not provide for an absence that no one is obliged to name, or for a mandate that no one is obliged to seat. The clock it set to the absence was never started, and the clock it set to the mandate has never stopped. One holds the office without a term. Another holds a term without the office. The one who returned today holds neither, and stands among those whose judgment would settle the matter if anyone were obliged to carry it out.