Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, there is good reason to believe the election was fair. The mainstream U.S. reporting on this is extremely biased; the U.S. has a long history of deeply anti-democractic attitudes towards Latin America (since at least the Monroe Doctrine). Excellent and detailed reporting here:[1] "...key opposition candidates in the governor's races in Venezuela are gradually accepting the results as legitimate, except for one co…
My go-to source on this has actually been Jacobin - first because socialist regimes abroad are their wheelhouse, and second because they're particularly incentivized to give a positive view of Venezuela. They gave Chavez consistent support well past 2002, which makes me think they're not subject to the criticism you've offered here. And yet... Well, these days their reporting looks like: https://www.jacobinmag.com/20…
In a recent article, Mike Gonzalez pronounced the Bolivarian Revolution dead: “This project has failed.” Needless to say, this cavalier suggestion would come as a surprise to those on the ground... Gonzalez begins with a strange conspiracy theory: that a helicopter attack against government targets was really a false flag operation carried out by the government itself. Unfortunately for him, this unsubstantiated innuendo — which echoed right-wing talking points — didn’t age well: less than a week later, Oscar Pérez made an appearance at an opposition rally.
It continues,
By portraying a chaotic constellation of facts without explaining their causes, by heaping blame onto the government while letting the opposition and imperialism off the hook, Gonzalez’s account shares much with its professed adversaries... left almost entirely out of this picture are the hundreds of thousands struggling for socialism on the grassroots level and having to make difficult decisions — with real consequences — amid the crisis of the present.
And your third source explicitly calls "to reject any and all calls for imperialist interventions aimed at 'saving' Venezuela." In conclusion it calls for us
to stand in solidarity with the majority of Venezuelans who are suffering at the hands of a vengeful, reckless opposition, and an incompetent, unaccountable government. There is little doubt popular-class support for the government has declined in recent years... It is equally clear popular-class support for the opposition remains limited, likely due to the popular classes’ well-founded distrust of and disgust towards the opposition, and particularly its violent, leading edge.
In short, they had an election where the people had to make some hard choices, like many democracies. Your sources do not dispute the validity of the election. A foreign country undermining an election in support of the violent opposition, which was explicitly rejected by the popular vote, is objectively not "in the interests of the people."
