The New Yorker:

In the aftermath of Venezuela’s disputed election, the compact that has long bound the region’s left together appears finally to be breaking down.

By Jon Lee Anderson

Like most of Venezuela’s official institutions, its supreme court is an assemblage of pro-government loyalists. Three weeks ago, the tribunal’s president announced its “unequivocal” support for President Nicolás Maduro’s questionable claim of victory in the July 28th Presidential election, bringing an end to the idea that negotiations might somehow resolve the country’s political crisis. On September 2nd, an arrest warrant was issued for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, whom Maduro claims to have defeated. Last Saturday, González flew to Spain, on a Spanish Air Force plane, and he has been guaranteed political asylum there.

The latest iteration of Venezuela’s long-running crisis began after the head of the National Electoral Council, a Maduro apparatchik, declared him the victor on July 29th, with fifty-one per cent of the vote to forty-four per cent for González. Maduro has been Venezuela’s President since the death in office of his mentor, the strongman Hugo Chávez, in 2013. Maduro’s latest “win” will give him an additional six years in office when his current term ends, in January. Maduro’s claims are widely regarded as specious, not least because neither he nor Venezuela’s electoral council have produced any evidence to support them—namely the vote tallies. Meanwhile, the opposition has published the tallies of more than eighty per cent of the voting machines which suggest that González won by a factor of more than two. Maduro’s government denounced the documents as “forged,” part of an “unprecedented and barbaric fraud.”

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