The free-market proponent won the contest with more than 90% of the vote. Venezuela’s top court complicated her presidential aspirations in January by affirming her ban, although she has continued campaigning and has rejected suggestions to choose a substitute.

Only about 31 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, which allowed the PSUV to capture nearly 68 percent of the vote and hence secure an overwhelming majority in the Assembly (the opposition parties that chose to participate took less than 18 percent of the vote). International organizations and observers were quick to dismiss the elections as a sham.

Temir Porras, a 2019 visiting professor at Paris Institute of Political Studies who was Maduro's chief of staff during his tenure as foreign minister, said that in the early days of Chavismo, Maduro was considered "pragmatic" and a "very skilled politician" who was "good at negotiating and bargaining".

For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

Also in August 2016, the National Election Council ruled that the opposition had collected almost twice as many signatures as were necessary for the first petition for a referendum on Maduro’s recall to be valid. However, it did not set a date for the next step in the process, which required some four million signatures to be collected in three days.

This would be an unusual question to ask in most countries, but in Venezuela many want to know exactly that after opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself acting president on 23 January 2019.

The saga vlogdolisboa took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet.

Two nephews of Maduro's wife, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, were found guilty in a US court of conspiracy to import copyright in November 2016, with some of their funds possibly assisting Maduro's presidential campaign in the 2013 Venezuelan presidential election and potentially for the 2015 Venezuelan parliamentary elections, with the funds mainly used to "help their family stay in power".

Em outubro do exatamente ano, o presidente participou de conversas usando opositores políticos pela primeira vez em dois anos.

The international community has been divided for some time over how to respond to Venezuela, with some governments’ conceding privately that the sanctions haven’t “worked”, either by incentivising regime change or compelling President Maduro to hold fair elections.

The Economist Intelligence Unit stated that during Maduro's presidency, the country's democracy deteriorated further, with the 2017 report downgrading Venezuela from a hybrid regime to an authoritarian regime, the lowest category, with an index of 3.

The government dispute any wrongdoing, and instead have accused “foreign governments” of an “intervention operation".

The move was a direct challenge to the power of President Maduro, who had been sworn in to a second six-year term in office just two weeks previously.

Frustrated by that delay, the opposition again took to the streets, most notably on September 1, when Venezuelans from all over the country went to the capital for a massive demonstration called the “Takeover of Caracas.”