As conditions worsen, Venezuela’s government is at odds with itself
Joshua Boulet, Staff Writer
Photo Courtesy of Pixabay.com
In the South American country of Venezuela, people have been facing large scale inflation, power outages, food shortages and more. There is a lot of civil unrest and the political parties are vastly opposed to each other. As of early 2019, the situation managed to become extremely convoluted when Venezuela somehow ended up with two presidents.
Obviously, a country can’t have two presidents under normal circumstances. This actually started back in 2013, when the socialist leader of Venezuela died and Nicolás Maduro who was mentored by the previous leader, took his place.
At this time, many people started to realize that Maduro wouldn’t fix the problems set in motion by the previous president. The amount of inflation has increased dramatically and it is predicted that it will reach 10 million percent during the year 2019. Currently, 80 percent of households don’t have enough food.
Between 2014 and 2019, over 3 million people fled the country to get away from the madness.
Due to the massive controversy around Maduro, many people hoped he would not get elected to a second term in office. Their dreams did not come to fruition. Unfortunately. one of these reasons was not that the majority voted for Maduro.
Many of the most promising opposing candidates were either jailed or banned from running. Many other candidates fled the country entirely. Even with all of those precautions taken, it was revealed that the votes were also rigged in favor of Maduro to ensure his victory.
This brings us to Jan. 2019, Maduro is elected and many people aren’t happy about it. Specifically the national assembly agreed that his election was too rigged to be considered valid and declared the seat vacant. Given their position as a part of the Venezuelan government, this gives them validity.
So, the national assembly cites a couple of articles in their constitution, and claims Juan Guaidó to be the new president.
In this case, he wouldn’t be a permanent president, just one long enough to hold a more legitimate election. The system works in a way that if the president seat is vacant, then the president of the national assembly, in this case Juan Guaidó, becomes the temporary president.
Juan Guaidó is from a pretty standard family background. Before getting involved in politics, he went to school for engineering. After seeing how poorly the government of Brazil handled flash floods that killed many people, he decided to switch gears and rose in rank to become the acting leader of the national assembly.
Venezuela is at a standstill. National security would be the ones to deal with this, but they are in Maduro’s pocket. He has consistently given the security and military divisions money and other benefits to make sure he has someone on his side.
He once gave 16,900 soldiers awards for loyalty to the government. To many, this was in incredibly poor taste given that the UN came out with a report showing that Maduro had ordered hundreds of killings for no good reason.
Many have come out in support of Guaidó in Venezuela. President Trump even posted a tweet along with the official announcement of his support of Guaidó. Maduro was not a fan and cut ties with the United States.
