How to Steal A Country: Will Venezuela's dictatorship survive? [View all]
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21718572-how-steal-country-will-venezuelas-dictatorship-survive
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To remain in power, Mr Maduro’s state-socialist regime is extinguishing democracy. The opposition won a big majority in a legislative election in 2015. Since then, the government has used its hand-picked supreme court to nullify parliament. The similarly tame electoral authority blocked the opposition’s drive for a recall referendum. It failed to call an election for mayors and regional governors, due last year. The authority is now requiring the re-registration of opposition parties, a process whose rules are so impractical that it appears designed to abolish many of them.
Talks between the opposition and the government, brokered by the Vatican and the South American Union, collapsed in January because Mr Maduro showed little interest in freeing political prisoners or restoring constitutional rule. Instead he is becoming more repressive. His new hardline vice-president, Tareck El Aissami, heads a “national anti-coup command”. This has kept General Baduel in prison and jailed several other army officers along with members of Popular Will, an opposition party whose leader, Leopoldo López, has been a prisoner since 2014. It is one of the regime’s fantasies that it faces constant coup plots. Another is the quasi-religious official cult of Chávez, who died of cancer four years ago this week.
What can be done to halt Venezuela’s implosion, organise a humanitarian rescue and achieve a return to democracy? Radicals in the opposition trusted in a popular uprising. But repression has worked: people seem too scared and preoccupied with survival to sustain mass protests. A negotiated solution remains the most plausible option. But it will take pressure from both within and without.
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Wonder if there are any remaining UI's in this thread willing to defend this regime.
= new reply since forum marked as read