Nicolás Maduro

A new presidential term is set to begin officially in Venezuela on January 10. Despite the electoral commission’s failure to release the results of the July 28 election, Nicolás Maduro’s swearing-in appears inevitable. Opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia, however, says he’ll be inaugurated as the country’s new leader. Will he return to Caracas? That’s the question Venezuelans keep asking, with González Urrutia having promised exactly that. “I am going to return to Venezuela to take the responsibility that 8 million citizens gave me,” he told Infobae five days ago after meeting with Argentinian president Javier Milei. This week he also met with President Biden, Uruguayan president Lacalle Pou and Panamanian president José Raúl Mulino.

Nicolás Maduro’s rival Edmundo González and opposition leader María Corina Machado told reporters at around 6:30 p.m. Monday that with more than 70 percent of votes counted, González is more than doubling Maduro’s votes. During the press conference, both candidates emphasized peaceful protests, especially as thousands began taking to the streets the day before, when the country’s electoral council declared that Maduro had won with 51 percent of the vote. They called on voters to gather at 11 a.m. Tuesday. “I speak to you with the calmness of the truth,” González said to his cheering supporters from outside his campaign’s headquarters in Caracas. “We have in our hands the tally sheets that demonstrate our categorical and mathematically irreversible victory.

Sunday night was a long one in Venezuela. At midnight, the much anticipated yet dubious results came in for the South American country's election. The head of the National Electoral Council, Elvis Amoroso — a close ally of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro who has served as a deputy for his party — said that with 80 percent of ballots counted, Maduro had won with 51 percent of the vote. His rival, Maria Corina Machado’s replacement, Edmundo González, ended with 44 percent. The opposition has a different story. “Venezuela has a new president and his name is Edmundo González Urrutia. We won! And everyone knows it,” Machado said from a press conference following some silence after Maduro’s announced win.

At 3:45 a.m., the sun was not yet out in the Venezuelan valley of Caracas, but Andrés, a twenty-two-year old who lives in the outskirts, woke up and with the Gloria Al Bravo Pueblo national anthem at maximum volume, roused his family too. From deep in the valley, Natalia showed up to the polls at 7 a.m. She then headed back to pick her elderly parents; “they can skip the line now,” she tells me.  Like them, thousands of others got up Sunday morning with a mission: make the Venezuelan presidential election — the most consequential one in twenty-five-years — fraud-proof. The logic: the world has to see what Venezuelans see, eyes don’t lie.  “It's 5 a.m. and we have work!,” said the face of the opposition, María Corina Machado.

Venezuelans will gear up to vote in what has devolved into an unfair and unfree presidential election Sunday — one that nonetheless offers its citzens the best chance in a decade to get rid of the twenty-five-year-old Chavista regime that brought the oil-rich nation to its knees. Nicolás Maduro, the man who, among other things, caused a forty-two-place drop in Venezuela’s Press Freedom Index in ten years, will be facing Edmundo González. González, a little known diplomat who served in Algeria and Argentina, became the opposition’s unitary candidate after the government banned María Corina Machado from running. Though “inabilitated,” as Venezuelans put it, this election continues to be a Maduro versus Machado match.

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population.

Venezuela has been leading the United States on, maintaining the pretense that they will ensure that the upcoming presidential elections are free and fair. That's despite the US relieving sanctions, releasing prisoners and months of “diplomacy.” The Nicolás Maduro regime has also gone on offense, threatening to take back the Esequibo, an area now under Guyana’s jurisdiction, where American oil companies have invested billions. This Wednesday, Maduro mocked the Biden administration once again, arresting two high-level officials from opposition candidate María Corina Machado’s team and issuing arrest warrants against several others.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan illegal immigrant, was charged in connection with the gruesome murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia last week. Another Venezuelan, thirty-two-year-old Renzo Mendoza, was arrested last week on two felony charges for sexually assaulting an underage child in Virginia.  These cases, along with a series of others connected to Venezuelan migrants, have become central to the debate on immigration policy. Tuesday morning, for instance, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for more information about Ibarra.

Venezuelan presidential hopeful María Corina Machado had filed a claim in December, arguing to the country’s highest court, that a ban prohibiting her from holding office was unconstitutional. The verdict came last week — and the ban was upheld. As south Florida congresswoman María Elvira Salazar told The Spectator, the conclusions reached by the “Chavista-controlled” tribunal were “unfortunate but not surprising.” The upholding of the ban comes after months of negotiations, where the Biden administration eased sectoral sanctions in pursuit of a “path to democracy.” This approach riled up Florida Republicans, a state with a vast Venezuelan-American population.

Venezuela has become a headache for Washington. Just after the Biden administration engineered a rapprochement strategy, Nicolás Maduro did more than just double down on not following through his promises of democratization: he is now pushing to annex neighboring Guyana. These developments, though, should have been anticipated, as Venezuela becomes a crucial part of China’s geopolitical strategy. "Ready for what will be a historic visit to strengthen ties of cooperation and the construction of a new global geopolitics. Good news will rain for the Venezuelan people," said Maduro after landing in the Chinese city of Shenzhen back in September.

Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro carried out a controversial referendum on whether more than two-thirds of Guyanese territory is Venezuelan land this Sunday, challenging the international community and making a mockery of the Biden’s administrations rapprochement. The results for the referendum are in, with all of the propositions receiving more than 95 percent approval, according to the country’s electoral council.

Eight years ago in Guyana, an Idaho-sized country on the northern coast of South America, ExxonMobil discovered massive oil reserves. So massive, that it’s speculated that the tiny nation, which is one of the least densely populated countries on the planet, could become the richest country per capita. Estimates indicate that Guyana has around 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent, boosting the nation to the third position in terms of proven oil reserves in the region. To contextualize the enormity of these discoveries, consider that the tiny nation has almost five times more proven oil reserves than Argentina, a country thirteen times larger by land mass. Only Brazil, the fifth largest country, and Venezuela, the country with the largest proven oil reserves, surpass Guyana.

In 2006, there was Manuel Rosales. In 2012, there was Henrique Capriles. In 2018, there was Juan Guaidó. All managed to capture the hopes of Venezuela’s opposition, but as hopes slipped away, so did their popularity. Now, there is a new opposition leader in town: Maria Corina Machado, an ideologically driven fighter and a woman who was not afraid to call former president Hugo Chávez a “thief” to his face. As Venezuelans often imprudently say, she “tiene las bolas bien puestas,” meaning that, although female, she “has her testicles in the right place.” That's something that millions of Venezuelans can’t say about the charming yet gutless men who have monopolized the country’s hopes in the past. In July, Dr.

2019 was a banner year for Juan Guaidó, a relatively obscure Venezuelan lawmaker who announced to a crowd of thousands in the heart of Caracas that he, and he alone, was Venezuela’s new interim president. The United States and dozens of other countries in Europe and Latin America quickly followed up with official recognition for the fresh-faced head of the Venezuelan National Assembly. Nicolás Maduro, the man who took over the presidency after Hugo Chávez’s death, was for all intents and purposes relegated to the status of an isolated despot who had no legitimate claim to the Miraflores palace. 2022, however, has brought Guaidó and his international supporters back down to earth, with the opposition ditching his government in a 72-28 vote.