In many countries, politicians attempt to win over religious voters by highlighting areas of shared interest between their agenda and the faithful’s priorities. In Venezuela, candidates are offering pastors money.
With lower than three months until Venezuela’s presidential elections, incumbent Nicolás Maduro is expanding two initiatives specifically aimed toward the evangelical community, which represents 30.9 percent of the country’s population.
Bono El Buen Pastor (“The Good Shepherd Bonus”), created last yr, and Plan Mi Iglesia Bien Equipada (“My Well-Equipped Church Plan”) offer resources to pastors and their churches, including money, chairs, construction materials, and expensive sound equipment—no strings attached. Mi Iglesia Bien Equipada exists under Misión Venezuela Bella, a government program that invests in recreation and humanities spaces, which has remodeled nearly 3,000 churches since 2019.
At the start of March, Maduro gathered 17,000 people in a pastors-only event within the northern city of Carabobo and announced that 20,000 additional pastors had turn out to be beneficiaries of the Bono El Buen Pastor program, which might deliver a monthly stipend of 495 bolivars (around $14 USD) to every recent member. (Venezuela’s minimum legal monthly wage is 130 bolivars or $3.50.)
Officially, the federal government says this system goals to provide churchgoers dignified spaces where they’ll develop their faith. There are, nonetheless, those that view the state’s generosity with some suspicion.
César Mermejo, president of the Evangelical Council of Venezuela and a frontrunner of the Federación de Iglesias Mizpa de Venezuela, called these efforts by Maduro an try to buy the souls of evangelicals.
“As is the norm for political processes, [politicians] seek for votes in every sphere of society,” he said. “Evangelical churches can’t escape this.”
The seek for support from evangelicals dates back to the time of Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution.
While those outside of Venezuela is perhaps surprised to see a socialist ruler reaching out to evangelicals, its political leadership has long turned to evangelicals in quest of political support.
In 2004, when confronted with a referendum about whether he should remain in office, then-president Chávez reached out to evangelicals. At one point, representatives from 2,000 churches gathered, petitioning for divine protection for the leader. In 2006, after clashing with Catholic church authorities, Chávez even declared himself an evangelical.
Maduro, who served as vice chairman starting in 2012, assumed the presidency when Chávez died the next yr after battling cancer. He continued to court churches and their leaders in efforts that seemingly have culminated within the two initiatives he’s now expanding.
The electoral success of the endeavor is uncertain, says David Smilde, professor of sociology at Tulane University, who has studied the connection between “Chavismo”—the populist ideology related to Chávez—and evangelicals for 30 years.
“No matter how much money the Venezuelan government spends on these programs, there isn’t any evidence that Maduro has managed to manage evangelicals,” he said.
For Smilde, the denominational diversity of the evangelical church in Venezuela makes it difficult for it to be manipulated by politicians. “Evangelicals have free will on the core of their beliefs. This includes the liberty to vote for whoever they imagine is best for his or her country,” he said.
Leading this a part of Maduro’s reelection strategy is his son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, who has personally delivered chairs and sound equipment to churches, as some government officials have enthusiastically posted about on social media. In March, he celebrated a recent ruling that Venezuela would not tax recent religious civil organizations, including church startup taxes.
“President Nicholas Maduro continues strengthening the spirituality of our people and facilitating the loving work for those in need in every corner of the country,” he wrote on Instagram.
One of the beneficiary churches of those government programs has been the family ministry called Ministerio Familiar Fe Renovada (also often called Miffer). It operates in the middle of Caracas in an old constructing that was donated to the church by the local government.
Pastor Edgard Martínez is grateful for what the programs have offered—and doesn’t imagine they’ve hurt his ability to talk his mind politically.
“I feel that one cannot curse those things which might be a blessing to you,” he said. “Because now we have received this aid, now we have not abandoned the ministerial approach, and we won’t stop calling the nice, good, and the bad, bad.”
But the federal government just isn’t the just one guilty for wanting to control the evangelical church in these elections.
Mermejo believes that opposition candidates aren’t innocent and are also attempting to woo churches for political support.
“For me, probably the most worrying thing in each cases is the convenience with which the opposition and government discourse are inclined to create the conditions to realize this conquest, attempting to turn the evangelical people into ‘useful fools,’” he said.
For similar reasons, Gabriel Blanco, who pastors a young church in Valencia called Comunidad de Fe Valientes, has sought to maintain his church’s independence.
“We pray for the authorities, we bless the authorities—but now we have made the choice to not become involved in anything that has to do with politics or to receive assistance from the federal government,” he said. “Thank God our people contribute to the social events that we do as a church. It allows us to keep up our independence.”
Blanco also directs Festival Juventud Libre, a youth conference, where he’s booked international Christian artists like Alex Campos, Christine D’Clario, and Montesanto. Politicians often covet appearances at events like this one, which pulls tens of hundreds of young people. But Blanco has decided that it’s not price opening the stage to political leaders.
“In our organization, now we have all the time stated that our events are for lifting the name of Jesus and aren’t platforms for lifting the name of a celebration,” he said.
Martínez defends his church’s decision to receive government resources by comparing his case with that of Nehemiah.
“Sometimes, God uses the bad for his profit. Just as Nehemiah received help from King Artaxerxes to rebuild the partitions of Jerusalem, we’re using these resources within the moral reconstruction of Venezuela,” he said.
Despite this courting, Maduro may not need the evangelical vote, thanks largely to a recent decision of the supreme court of Venezuela to ban the candidacies of María Corina Machado and Leocenis García, two of the principal opposition candidates.
“The government has committed two despicable acts,” García told CT. “First, a misogynistic act by removing María Corina, the one woman who could rise up to them in these elections. And also a racist act, by removing me from the race, who was the one Black candidate leading within the polls.”
These allegations of fraud have turn out to be increasingly common during presidential elections in Venezuela.
In 2018, quite a few voters boycotted the elections, and outdoors observers, including those within the US, claimed the elections were fraudulent.
Only about 60 percent of Venezuelans plan to vote within the 2024 elections, in keeping with a survey from March from the Venezuelan pollster Datanálisis. Of them, 15 percent said they were supporters of the present government, 36 percent said they were supporters of the opposition, and 41 percent said they didn’t discover with either side.
“Evangelicals from the poorest neighborhoods supported Chávez when he democratically got here to power in 1999,” explained professor Smilde. “But the economic crisis generated by Maduro’s bad government has made him a tremendously unpopular president. That’s why he desperately needs evangelicals if he desires to win reelection without leaving any room for doubt.”
The economic and social crisis in Venezuela has spurred probably the most significant migration movement in Latin America this century. According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, as of November 2023, there have been greater than 7.7 million Venezuelan migrants or refugees scattered internationally, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean. The country’s population stands at 29.4 million.
A pastor running for presidency
Following the supreme court’s controversial decision to remove Machado and García from the ballot, eight candidates now vie for the Venezuelan presidency. Among them is Javier Bertucci, an evangelical pastor and deputy within the National Assembly who’s running for the second time with the Christian center-right Hope for Change Party. In 2018, Bertucci finished in third place, winning greater than 1 million votes and capturing 10 percent of the full.
In the past, Bertucci faced legal proceedings and was even briefly detained on charges of smuggling. He was also implicated within the Panama Papers scandal, which exposed individuals from the political and business realms operating in offshore tax havens.
Bertucci noted that, through the 2 initiatives, the federal government has focused on delivering aid to churches within the poorest neighborhoods of Venezuela’s largest cities. But simply because churches eagerly accept these donations doesn’t mean the congregations now support Maduro, he says.
“Although the pastors are receiving the things that [politicians] are sending them, these pastors aren’t actually being bought off,” he said. “[Politicians] aren’t managing to persuade pastors to [accept] their socialist political ideology.”
Smilde believes the Venezuelan government is using Bertucci to divide the opposition’s votes.
“[Bertucci] believes in what he’s doing and is convinced that he can turn out to be the primary evangelical president of Venezuela,” he said. “However, Maduro is making the most of his candidacy to have a weak rival to beat easily on July 28.”
Bertucci has a solution to those that criticize him for participating in these questioned elections.
“The opposition has historically made a mistake by calling for a boycott. That has only served to proceed socialism,” Bertucci said. “Surveys indicate that greater than 60 percent of Venezuelans wish to exit to vote because they desire a change from this terrible government. Not [running for office] can be to fail those individuals who imagine in the potential for a return to democracy.”
Whether or not Maduro is reelected in July, the recent strategies launched by the federal government prove the political importance of the evangelical people in Venezuela. In 2023, Venezuela’s evangelical population grew faster than in another Latin American country, in keeping with a Latinobarómetro survey.
“With faith in political leaders—each government and opposition—disappearing, people have increasingly clung to non secular beliefs,” said former presidential candidate García. “That is proportional to the degrees of poverty and inflation. Politicians cannot move anyone today, but churches can.”
Hernán Restrepo is a Colombian journalist who lives in Bogotá. As of 2021, he manages the social media accounts for Christianity Today in Spanish.
