How Venezuela’s recent history can inform its present-day election crisis

For Tenreiro, the present-day crisis reminds her of a tumultuous period she lived through more than 60 years ago.

At the time, she was a 20-year-old college student, and Venezuela’s last military dictator, Marcos Perez Jimenez, was in the final throes of his rule.

"I see so many similarities. A fraudulent election being the first one,” Tenreiro told Al Jazeera.

On December 15, 1957, Perez Jimenez held a referendum to decide whether he should remain in power. Within a few hours of the vote, a result was announced: The widely unpopular Perez Jimenez had somehow won in a landslide.

But the suspect nature of the results triggered a backlash. The vote was widely denounced as fraudulent, and within just 39 days, Perez Jimenez fled to the Dominican Republic.

Tomas Straka, a historian and professor at the Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said many Venezuelans are comparing the current election crisis to that period of military dictatorship, from 1948 to 1958.

“There is an aspect in which they are all very similar. A broad sector of Venezuelan society and the international community have serious doubts about the results announced by the electoral authority,” Straka told Al Jazeera.

But there are also significant differences. According to Straka, Perez Jimenez never had to “confront important protests in Venezuela or distrust from a large part of the international community” as a result of the election fraud.

“It was the middle of the Cold War. Venezuela was the first oil exporter in the world, and Perez Jimenez essentially had the blessing of the West,” he said.

By contrast, Straka points out that Maduro faces much more pressure both domestically and internationally. Protesters in Venezuela and foreign leaders alike have demanded that his government release precinct-level voting tabulations, as it has in the past, to justify the results.

Even Maduro’s regional allies, Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, have been reluctant to recognise him as the winner, going as far as to suggest that the elections should be repeated.

Nevertheless, Maduro has clung to power, something Tenreiro highlighted as a big difference between the past and present.

"Perhaps back then, the process felt a lot faster. They were long, uncertain days, but this seems like it will be a lot slower," she said of a possible government transition.