Mr. Maduro's Drive to Dictatorship
Following a contentious vote on Sunday that effectively set Venezuela on the path to outright dictatorship, the United States has imposed personal sanctions on President Nicolás Maduro, putting him in the rarefied company of sitting leaders like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, whose rapacious greed for power has brought their countries to ruin. There is no longer any question that this is where Mr. Maduro belongs.
No nation should have to suffer such a leader. And Venezuela, with possibly the world’s largest oil reserves, had the chance to be one of South America’s leading democracies. But overdependence on oil has led to political and economic turbulence, which became disastrous when Mr. Maduro sought to emulate his left-wing predecessor, Hugo Chávez, with lavish public spending that falling oil prices and chronic mismanagement rendered unsustainable.
Today Venezuela is a basket case. The estimated inflation rate for 2017 is 720 percent; 80 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty, suffering from malnutrition, illness and outright hunger, while corrupt politicians and their military allies shamelessly enrich themselves. Mr. Maduro’s response has been to assail spreading street protests with an iron fist and to erode the power of the National Assembly, in which his opponents have a majority.
More than 120 people have died in several months of protests. The deadliest day was Sunday, when Mr. Maduro brought to a vote his transparently power-grabbing plan to elect a tame Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution that would tighten the government’s hold on power, and in the meantime allow the president to dismiss any branch of government deemed disloyal. The opposition boycotted the vote, allowing Mr. Maduro to claim victory despite what appeared to be a small turnout. Early on Tuesday, two opposition leaders already under house arrest were seized by state security agents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/nicolas-maduro-sanctions.html
