Latin America is in the midst of a crucial election year in countries including Venezuela, whose ruling party claimed another win last month amid opposition boycotts.

Opposition leaders called for voters to abstain from casting ballots in protest of last July’s contested presidential election results.

Advocates say last month’s results — where many voters stayed home — could further roil the country’s political landscape.

“In this election, people did not go to vote,” said Ana Gil Garcia, co-founder and chair of the board of directors of the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance. “In July last year, we saw the polls indicating a clear preference for the opposition candidate. Everywhere that you went, there was people on the street going to the polls to vote. This time, nobody was around. I mean really the winner was the absenteeism.”

The results showed the Venezuelan ruling party will keep control of the legislature by winning nearly 83% of votes cast, according to the electoral authority.

The National Electoral Council said the turnout to choose 24 state governors and 285 lawmakers was at 42.6% of 21 million eligible voters. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, however, said voter turnout was below 15% of 21 million eligible voters.

The opposition and the international community, including the U.S., continue to question the 2024 presidential results that declared opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez the winner. Gonzalez went into exile in Spain amid political boycott arrests and the wave of repression following the election.

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Read More: Election Results Are Being Disputed in Venezuela. What It Could Mean for the US and Chicago

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Experts say this election year could significantly reshape Venezuela’s political landscape and influence the direction of governance and policy.

“Venezuela has been a major catastrophe for decades now,” said Alberto Coll, professor of law and U.S. foreign relations at DePaul University. “And what these recent elections did was that they confirmed the sense that the opposition called for a boycott precisely because last year, they won the presidential elections very cleanly. And yet [President Nicolás] Maduro ignored those results and has stayed in power. So this time around, the opposition said, ‘Well, why should we participate in these elections, which are just for show?’ In some districts, the boycott rate was about 80% of eligible voters who did not vote for these parliamentary elections.”

Garcia said the country has seen significant consequences in the aftermath of the presidential election.

“New policies have definitely increased repression,” Garcia said, “and we now have more political prisoners. We have more people trying to leave the country to the neighboring countries because of the new policies in the United States regarding immigration. Those actions have led the Maduro regime to being isolated from the international community. We see more social consequences, like no food, no jobs. Less and less people want to do things because they are so afraid of talking to each other because definitely, freedom of expression is not part of the picture.”

Garcia also said the country continues to suffer economically due to U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan oil.

“Recent United States actions — which was revoking Chevron permission to pump Venezuelan oil — could impact the Venezuelan economy, and we know that that would be a direct consequence to the country,” Garcia said. “And we see the social impact. The U.S. has engaged in deporting Venezuelan immigrants, and that really is bringing social and humanitarian consequences.”

Venezuelans in the U.S. are facing challenges to their temporary protected status. Venezuelans who were protected under the 2023 TPS designation saw that status end on April 7. TPS under the 2021 designation for Venezuela is still in effect, expiring on Sept. 10; that could affect close to 350,000 people.

“There are many questions that we don’t know, because there is no clear ruling in the system,” Garcia said.

Other countries seeing a shift in political activity include Bolivia, Honduras, Chile and Mexico. Mexico had its first-ever judicial elections on June 1. The tallied votes show Mexico’s ruling Morena party is set to control the country’s Supreme Court. The majority of the newly elected justices share similar ideological alignments with the ruling party.

“I think it’s not good news, and I think that we all should worry about what’s happening in Mexico,” Coll said. “What we’re seeing in Mexico is the gradual growth of what I call soft authoritarianism. Is not authoritarianism through an outright coup or tanks on the streets, but it’s an authoritarianism through which the ruling party, the Morena party, has a lock on the Congress and they created this new system in which judges are elected.”

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