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How the hell does a dictator tighten their grip on power?

Is it the difference between maintaining appearances and dropping the façade? Because that's all it could ever seem like IMO.

Maduro claimed 51 percent of the vote, with González earning 44 percent according to the national electoral commission. But González was quick to challenge those results, with his party claiming their exit polls showed the opposition winning as much as 70 percent of the vote. Several countries, including the US, have cast doubt on Maduro’s victory given alleged irregularities, and the fact that international election observers were, in many cases, unable to perform their duties.

Sunday’s results mean Maduro seems headed for a third term in office — something that wasn’t possible before his predecessor and mentor Hugo Chávez amended the constitution in 2009 to remove presidential term limits.

But Maduro seemed to backtrack on his authoritarian tendencies in October 2023, when his government agreed to hold free and competitive elections in exchange for further easing of US sanctions (Chevron has been permitted to operate in Venezuela since 2022).

“If Maduro had both the capacity and the desire to totally shut this thing down, he would have done it by now — so he’s either lacking the will or the capacity,” Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox. “My guess is he’s lacking the capacity, there’s some kind of internal politics within Chavismo, some kind of internal constraints keeping him from taking more radical action like banning González or arresting María Corina Machado.”

Maduro’s Chavismo, rather than being practiced as a consistent socialist ideology, is more about understanding the US as interlopers in Venezuelan politics — and the opposition as their proxy. That’s not totally without foundation, given a bizarre 2020 coup attempt that involved Americans and the US’s extremely antagonistic stance towards Maduro, with the Trump administration supporting a rival who declared he was the true president.

But what that response might look like is unclear. The US reimposed sanctions in April, after loosening them last October on the basis of Maduro’s concession to hold elections. And the Biden administration gave up Maduro ally Alex Saab in a prisoner swap deal earlier this year — depriving the US of key leverage.

After Chávez was elected in 1998, poverty decreased due to socialist government programs, but his mismanagement of the oil sector — plus a variety of US sanctions — meant that, over time, there wasn’t enough money to support those programs. Chávez also seriously damaged democratic institutions, yet he was still highly popular among Venezuelans, especially those in the working class. Maduro, once Chávez’s bodyguard, continued and even accelerated Chávez’s authoritarian tendencies, without really being able to uphold the socialist measures that made his predecessor popular. Venezuela’s economy has spiraled particularly since he took office, resulting in a surge of migration out of the country — to neighboring Colombia and to the US.

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