He is clinging to power. Only removing him will pull Venezuela back from the brink
Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s dwindling band of foreign supporters like to claim, is a theatre in a new cold war. Donald Trump’s administration and his hawkish foreign policy advisers, with their occasional threats of military intervention, provide the perfect props. So does Jair Bolsonaro, the new far-right president in Brazil. But the real contest in Venezuela is between democracy and dictatorship. Maduro leads a corrupt authoritarian regime that has stolen and broken a once-prosperous country, staging a coup against its own constitution.
On Saturday 12 January, a power cut at the University Hospital in Caracas caused the deaths of six patients, according to a union representative. It was not an isolated incident: in the two months from mid-November, 40 hospitals in Venezuela monitored by a local doctors group suffered power cuts lasting an average of three hours a day. But the deaths at the University Hospital were a particular embarrassment to Maduro, Venezuela’s ruler since 2013. Highlighting his country’s descent into criminal public mismanagement, they happened just after he was inaugurated for a second six-year term as president, in a sparsely attended ceremony at the supreme court and not the national assembly, as the constitution requires.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FV9omb
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