As the deadline expired yesterday for the Maduro government in Venezuela to show detailed poll-by-poll voting records, opposition candidate Edmundo González was recognized as president-elect of Venezuela by the governments of Argentina, the United States and Uruguay. (Peru already recognized him on Tuesday).
But on the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities, there was no sign this week that the Maduro government was reconsidering its strategy of claiming victory and seeking to crush dissent through force.
On Friday, the opposition reported that its headquarters, El Bejucal in the Caracas district of Altamira, was raided and vandalized overnight by a group of six armed and hooded men wearing camouflage.
Arrests of volunteer poll workers continued across the country, as the government sought to prevent the opposition from uploading digitized receipts from individual polls that show the opposition with a margin of victory of more than two-to-one.
Venezuelan social media is full of videos of raids showing opposition volunteers being dragged from their homes. In some cases, angry crowds have attempted to prevent the arrests.
Venezuelans have also been posting videos of uniformed foreigners on the streets of Caracas, including Cubans and a soldier wearing the insignia of the Wagner Group, a notorious mercenary group linked to the Kremlin that has played a major role in wars in Ukraine and various parts of Africa.
Others have tracked flights arriving from Cuba, or photographed Russian aircraft landing in Caracas.
Well, yeah. Maduro knows what giving up power does to a dictator’s life expectancy.
Brazil has a long list of dictators that abandoned power and did just fine. As a sibling commented, so does Argentina. I can only remember Peru in South America that made a fuss about it… and then reversed course.
But holding to it when things escalate does usually end very badly.
Left wing dictators maybe. Pinochet did just fine after handing things over.
Well mussolini was the og right wing dictator and he didn’t have a fun end
The OG right wing dictators are called kings.
(Also literal Roman dictators)
Technically, there was no right wing as we understand it today before the French revolution. The left sat to the left of the king (represented the people) and the right…to the right (represented the nobility and the clergy). The king was supposed to be in the “middle” and arbitrate.
The romans had two factions in the Senate which you could associate with right/left: the optimates and the populares. e.g. Caesar, a dictator, was in the populares (a populist?), so according to your anachronistic view he was a left-wing dictator.
There are more examples of kings that tried to reduce the power of the nobility by appealing to the common people, distribute wealth and build infrastructure.
That’s how absolutism came to be, strengthening of royal power as opposed to that of nobles, making the royal army stronger without vassal troops, and that infrastructure being built too strengthened central power.
Yea, absolutism took power away from everyone into the state at a time when states were embodied in kings.
Mussolini was the OG fascist. Certainly not any OG dictator.
Well he also like lost WW2…