North Macedonia and Venezuela lie 9,400 kilometers away from each other, have different languages and have not established diplomatic missions between them (as of January 2025). Yet, they do have tales that began with a soap opera and in more recent turns, politics and alleged hackers. In 2024, the name of one of the two countries became a symbol of digital activism in the other.
A Venezuelan telenovela (soap opera of Latin American origin) called “Kassandra,” was hugely popular in the Balkans back in 1997, during an intermission of Yugoslav Wars. Over 150 episodes, “Kassandra” tells the story of a young woman switched at birth and raised by a Romani circus, played by Coraima Torres.
“Kassandra” was so popular that streets would empty when local TVs would show it. Quite a few people named their daughters after the main character, who was listed among top ten most popular persons in Macedonia (the other 9 were politicians). The series spawned a merchandise industry and concert tour of the crew across the region. Stickers with the soap opera characters can be found today at the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade as part of exhibition of artifacts donated by ordinary people, depicting everyday lives.
Truth can be stranger than fiction, though. In 2024, North Macedonia popped up in the conversations of many Venezuelans and not because of its previous history.
On July 29, 2024, a day after last July’s highly controversial Venezuelan presidential election, the South American country’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, accused “hackers from North Macedonia” of disrupting the local Nacional Electoral Council’s (CNE) transmission systems and data, allegedly under orders from opposition leaders (Venezuela uses electronic voting in polling stations). The CNE proclaimed Nicolás Maduro the winner of the vote for the 2025–2031 presidential term.
In this video, Attorney General, Tarek William Saab condemns attack on the CNE by hackers from North Macedonia.
On July 31, Stefan Andonovski, minister of digital transformation of the Republic of North Macedonia, strongly denied Saab’s accusation, while the Ministry of Interior announced that they hadn’t received a request for investigation from Venezuela. Andonovski said:
I hope that besides the comments which become public and which we noticed and follow with attention, that the state authorities [of Venezuela] would provide appropriate evidence for the alleged interference by some of our citizens or state institutions.
On the same day, Venezuelan authorities announced that they would form a special commission and “ask Russia and China to assess the cyberattack on the country’s electoral system”, but have not made public any further investigation advances on Saab’s claims since.
There is no evidence that Venezuela’s electoral system was the target of a cyberattack during elections last month, Jennie Lincoln, head of the Carter Center delegation that was invited to monitor the Venezuela election, told AFP on August 7, also confirming figures that give the opposition candidate victory.
Six months later, on January 10, 2025, Nicolás Maduro assumed power for a third term. At the moment of closing this article, the CNE website www.cne.gob.ve that was closed down during the elections is still not operational. Venezuelan government has not explained why CNE website is still down, nor has provided any new information about the case, or evidence that supports Maduro’s proclamation.
Birth of a political meme
The alleged hacking attempt inspired the use of the term North Macedonia in three independent initiatives involving Venezuela and its Balkan counterpart: an investigative journalism piece and two citizen websites which all used variations of “hackers from North Macedonia” meme to attract public attention.
In December 2024, the Venezuelan outlet Armando.Info published an investigative article titled “The ‘hacking’ from North Macedonia was aimed at PDVSA and not at the elections,” prepared by journalists from from Venezuela and Investigative Reporting Lab from North Macedonia, joined through the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
The investigative article details how a now-defunct bank from North Macedonia, Eurostandard Banka, allegedly received deposits of EUR 110 million from “Venezuelan clients” via “briefcase companies” opened in Skopje (the capital of North Macedonia) by former officials and contractors from Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the main state-owned oil and gas company in the South American country.
Rise of the activists providing elections data
Two Venezuelans, both residents of Barcelona (in Spain) and supporters of the opposition, Giuseppe Gangi and Luke Quintana, were riled up after the July 2024 presidential elections and the Venezuelan hacking claims. Each of them decided to build a website that presented the election-related data that the Venezuelan government failed to disclose.
Thus MacedoniaDelNorte.com (“North Macedonia dot com” in Spanish) and DeMacedoniaConAmor.com (“From Macedonia with love”) were born.
MacedoniaDelNorte.com is an open data repository independently created by the Venezuelan programmer Giuseppe Gangi to index and publish the election tallies compiled by opposition witnesses on the day of the election. The data is carefully indexed by state, city, and polling station and matched with public announcements of the tally results shown in citizen videos that verify the data uploaded by Gangi.
The name of the website DeMacedoniaConAmor.com or “From Macedonia with Love” references the title of the 1963 James Bond movie, “From Russia with Love,” also alluding to the close alliance between Maduro’s government and the Kremlin. With a satirical touch, the website tells the story of the protests that rose up right after the election and the repressive response from the government. The website hosts a 30-minute documentary and testimonials released on January 8, 2025, two days before Maduro’s inauguration.
“We recounted the key moments of the execution of the electoral fraud and the popular uprising that took place throughout the country,” its coordinator, Luken Quintana, told Global Voices. He is a content creator and coordinator of the team behind the documentary, “Hacha y Machete.”
The film “De Macedonia, con Amor” is on YouTube with English subtitles.
After they published their Macedonia-themed publications, Gangi and Quintana started to collaborate, sharing video and data resources. They are mostly self-financed, though Gangi also managed to get some support through crowdfunding.
Both activists spoke to Global Voices via WhatsApp about their creations and their links with North Macedonia.
Global Voices (GV): Did you know anything about North Macedonia before your initiative? Have you received any contact from there thus far?
GV: Would you be open to discussing or sharing the experience of your work with Macedonians?
GV: Do you have any future perspectives you would like to share about your initiatives?
