Venezuela Humanitarian Crisis
Juan Guaidó, the president of Venezuela's National Assembly, declared himself acting president on 23 January 2019, and was recognised within days by the United States and some fifty other governments. The constitutional argument was that Nicolás Maduro's re-election in May 2018 had been fraudulent — held early, with the main opposition parties banned and their leaders imprisoned or exiled — so the presidency was vacant and passed to the head of the legislature. The economic context was catastrophic. Output had fallen by around two-thirds since 2013, hyperinflation had reached figures in the millions of per cent, the health system had collapsed, and something over seven million people had left the country, the largest displacement in the hemisphere's history. The cause was a combination of the oil price fall from 2014, two decades of expropriation and price control, the hollowing out of the state oil company, and, after 2019, American sanctions on oil exports that deepened the contraction sharply. Maduro kept power because the armed forces did not defect. A call for a military uprising on 30 April 2019 produced a handful of soldiers and nothing else; humanitarian aid convoys were blocked at the Colombian border in February; and Russian, Cuban and Chinese support held. The parallel government progressively lost credibility and was dissolved by the opposition itself in December 2022. Maduro claimed victory again in July 2024 without publishing the tallies, while the opposition published its own showing a heavy defeat. Sanctions were eased and retightened repeatedly in the years afterwards without changing the outcome. Guaidó left the country in 2023. The episode is now the standard case against recognising a parallel government that does not control the state.
- Year: 2019 CE
- Category: Political
