From “Plan Condor” to “Plan Parrot”: The Right Has its Candidate to Challenge Nicolas Maduro

Lorenzo Santiago
Photo: Far-right María Corina raises the arm of the unknown Edmundo González Urrutia (center), whose mission is to defeat Maduro in the hearts of the population.

Edmundo González Urrutia took part in the first campaign event in an attempt to popularize his name for the elections

Edmundo González Urrutia speaks very little, for a candidate in the middle of an election campaign. He’s not used to being in the spotlight, but in the space of a fortnight he’s become the right-wing candidate in the Venezuelan electoral race. His answers are short and, so far, he hasn’t made many proposals. Except one: “rapprochement” with the United States.

Urrutia has no political career. He worked for the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs long before Hugo Chávez was elected, and was ambassador to Algeria and Argentina. His candidacy is backed by the right-wing and far-right “Plataforma Unitaria” coalition, as a forceps solution to the conflict between former far-right deputy María Corina Machado and the right-wing governor of Zulia state, Manuel Rosales.

With just over two months to go before the elections scheduled for July 28, Edmundo Urrutia – who lives in Miami – returned to Venezuela for a while to take part in his first campaign event, on May 18. The chosen venue was La Victoria, a symbolic city since he was born there.

But the Unity Platform candidate’s campaign is struggling to get off the ground. Urrutia refuses to take part in rallies, and the person responsible for popularizing Edmundo’s name is his far-right mentor, María Corina Machado, who, in the absence of “her” candidate, holds up a photo of him at marches organized in right-wing strongholds.

The Chavists call him a “poster-candidate”, and so far Edmundo doesn’t seem to want to shed this condition. At the event in La Victoria, as ultra-liberal ex-deputy María Corina delivered her speech, he stood at the back of the stage, behind the members of the “Unitary Platform”. The ultra-liberal had to pull him by the arm so that the audience could see him.

María Corina had initially tried to position herself as the main right-wing candidate. Declared ineligible by the courts for corruption and her constant participation in right-wing violence and coups d’état since 2002, she refused to register her NGO party on the electoral register (1). Not without victimizing herself in front of the world’s cameras (“the dictatorship prevents me from being a candidate!”). Before being rreplaced in extremis by an 80-year-old university professor, Corina Yoris, a political unknown who received no support from other opposition groups. The governor of Zulia and candidate for Un Nuevo Tiempo, Manuel Rosales, had criticized this authoritarian choice, made by Machado without consulting the other parties in the coalition, and launched an arm wrestling with the’oligarch. After two weeks of negotiations, Machado succeeded in obtaining Rosales’s withdrawal. The two signed a hard-fought agreement to launch a candidate unknown to the general public, Edmundo Urrutia. But for María Corina the big challenge now is… to make him known.

A parrot on the balcony

Not content with being an unknown, Edmundo remained absent from social media for a long time.

Before the “candidate” was registered in March, his last post on his X account was in January 2017.Twice he had to issue a statement explaining that it was indeed his original profile because, according to him, “someone took the liberty of opening an unauthorized account”.The far right’s initial strategy is to boost its presence on platforms, using bots, as with Milei, Trump or Bolsonaro.As a result, more and more publications, photos and texts describing the candidate have begun to appear.In one of them, Edmundo appears to be feeding parrots on the balcony of his apartment, a common hobby in the solitary apartments of Caracas’ eastern bourgeoisie.

For Fernando Medina, professor of political economy at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, this way of publicizing Edmundo is not very effective.“Nobody knows Edmundo, and it’s ridiculous to publicize him via parrots, or the way María Corina promotes this candidate. In the places where she gives speeches, she carries a photo of him saying ‘this is the candidate’. But Edmundo is not present in the streets, he doesn’t organize debates and he doesn’t speak to the heart of the voters, the majority of the Venezuelan people”.

The second step was to build an image opposite to that of María Corina Machado.

For lawyer and political economy expert Juan Carlos Valdez, former far-right deputy Machado and current candidate Urrutia are obeying a well-known role-playing game: “the good cop and the bad cop”. “Edmundo must embody the antithesis of María Corina Machado in the media.The latter’s “Milei-like” extremism generates the fear that Chavism will grow stronger for fear of her seizing power. His role is therefore to soften María Corina’s image.But she remains important to him because she attracts the vote of the hard right.In short, it’s up to him to be the good cop, to be measured, to speak simply, not to be too expressive in interviews”.

According to Valdez, another important tool used by the campaign of the ex-diplomat of the pre-Chávez regimes is the appeal to experts and political analysts to “reinforce” Edmundo’s qualities.“ His team now relies on other players. There are several well-known political analysts in Venezuela who speak very highly of Edmundo Gonzalez, praising his image and even his intellectual qualities, which you can’t measure in interviews because he doesn’t say much.”
Photo: Edmundo Urrutia declared that he felt “not physically strong enough” to campaign in the streets, leaving this task to María Corina Machado…

An empty project… and the spectre of “Plan Condor

So far, Edmundo Gonzalez has presented few concrete proposals. But this is not the candidate’s responsibility alone.Interviews with the Venezuelan media (mostly opposition) and the foreign press (also opposed to the left-wing government), focus on the confrontation with chavismo and the possibility of a return to “capitalist efficiency”. But usually, when asked questions, Urrutia answers briefly or changes the subject. The online opposition newspaper TalCual published a nearly 30-minute interview with the former ambassador. Asked about the first steps he would take as head of government, Edmundo remains vague: “The first thing I would do? The reconstruction of the country, the reinstitutionalization of Venezuelan democracy”.

For Fernando Medina, the lack of projects and proposals shows that there is a hidden agenda because it is unpopular. “What is the proposal for education? What’s the proposal for health?What’s the proposal for the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean?What is the proposal for social rights?Edmundo and María Corina focus more on confrontation and radicalization than on debate between programs”.

The only area Edmundo is clearer about is precisely the one in which he has made his career.In foreign affairs, he promises to move closer to the United States and abandon relations with the countries Venezuela has drawn closer to in recent years. Russia and Iran are just some of the countries Edmundo intends to abandon relations with if he becomes president, an imperial re-satellation similar to that of Milei in Argentina, to counter the influence of the BRICS that so worries Washington. “In recent years, we have established alliances with countries that are foreign to our tradition as a peaceful and democratic country, with Iran, Russia, Belarus… These are not traditional allies of the foreign policy that Venezuela has pursued in recent years, totally foreign to the behavior of democratic Venezuela,” he explains to right-wing journalist Luis Olavarrieta.

Edmundo’s relationship with the United States has been criticized by the Vice-President of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, the main Chavist party), Diosdado Cabello. In his weekly program “Con el Mazo Dado”, he revealed that the former ambassador had maintained links with the US Intelligence Agency while he was a Venezuelan diplomatic official in Washington in 1976. Urrutia is also said to have collaborated with death squads that operated in El Salvador in the 1980s. The current candidate was an advisor to the Christian Democrat Venezuelan ambassador to El Salvador, Leopoldo Castillo, and is said to have acted as an intermediary in the CIA’s relations with the country’s far-right paramilitary groups.
Photo: Urrutia at the time of El Salvador’s “Plan Condor”, in the 1980s.

For Professor Medina, the “candidate’s” desire for closer ties with the United States expresses his trajectory, his worldview, the ideology of María Corina Machado and of the far right as a whole. “Edmundo has always been closely linked to State Department policy.Edmundo’s main idea, when he says he wants to get closer to the United States, is the same as that of Maria Corina.They represent the putschist opposition.Not the democratic right that sits in the National Assembly.

Defeating Maduro would make it possible to apply the “Milei shock” to Venezuela: privatize and bring the economy back into U.S. orbit. For Machado, the aim is to make Venezuela “a country of owners and entrepreneurs” by privatizing everything that can be privatized – such as the state-owned oil company or the five million housing units that the “regime” has built free of charge for the working classes.

On May 16, the Venezuela News website revealed evidence that María Corina Machado had received a $3.2 million bribe from an American lobby to sell the state-owned oil company (PDVSA) to Chevron if her protégé won the presidential election.

All this would quickly lead to repression, given the social discontent generated by the loss of public resources, the privatization of public services, the abolition of social programs and the explosion of poverty, as is the case in Argentina today. Both Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Urrutia embody the counter-insurgency school of the United States. The former has signed a “strategic cooperation agreement” with Israel’s Likud party, including “geopolitics and security” (photo below). On May 28, opposition newspaper El Universal revealed that Marica Corina Machado wrote to Netanyahu back in 2018, imploring him to help her “change the regime”, including through military intervention.(2).
Maria Corina Machado has been involved in all the coups d’état and street violence against Venezuela’s left-wing government (rebranded by the media as “people’s revolt-against-Maduro”), and is the daughter of Venezuelan steel magnate Henrique Machado Zuloaga, head of one of Venezuela’s largest steel companies. The company was nationalized in 2008 by President Chávez when he began his policy of redistribution in favor of the poorest. Machado has retained a thirst for revenge and is the perfect embodiment of Venezuela’s racist oligarchy, eager to erase the Bolivarian revolution and its inclusion of the “non-white” majority.