“We will stay here until there is a military intervention or the electoral court changes what is happening,” said Antoniel Almeida, 45, the owner of a party-supply store who was helping run the blockade. Mr. Almeida believed the election was rigged. “We need an investigation,” he said.

"Many of us, even if we have university degrees, have to work in whatever we can to survive and to support our families who're still in Venezuela," she explains.

Maduro was parodied in the animated web series Isla Presidencial, along with most of the other Latin American leaders, portrayed as a man of limited intelligence, twisted speech, and capable of talking with birds, the latter being a reference to a comment made by Maduro during the 2013 presidential elections, when he said that the late Chávez had reincarnated in a little bird and talked to him to bless his candidacy.[299]

Maduro’s last dance? Venezuela’s ultimate political survivor faces toughest challenge yet Maduro’s government moved to block her, starting with a June announcement that she was banned from running for office.

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.

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Maduro and the second or maternal family name is Moros.

Maduro to ditch some extreme policies like price and currency controls. The private sector was given an increasingly prominent role, public attacks against business owners had stopped and hyperinflation and rampant crime subsided somewhat.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward.

He had been accused of undermining Brazilian democracy by falsely claiming that the electronic ballots used were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.

During the Venezuelan presidential crisis, Venezuelan National Assembly president Juan Guaidó said that the Maduro government had plans to steal for humanitarian purposes the products that entered the country, including plans to distribute these products through the government's food-distribution program CLAP.[264]

But despite the difficulties facing them abroad, the flow of Venezuelans escaping turmoil in their homeland has not let up.

The Constitutional Chamber admitted the demand and requested the presidency and the Electoral Council to send a certified copy of the president's copyright, in addition to his resignation from Colombian nationality.[198] In March 2018 former Colombian president André especialmentes Pastrana made reference to the baptism certificate of Maduro's mother, noting that the disclosed document reiterates the Colombian origin of the mother of the president and that therefore Maduro has Colombian citizenship.[196]

In the press, he's been dubbed both a mad genius and Twitter's biggest troll - known as much for his lofty ambitions as his petty fights, not to mention the more serious lawsuits he and his companies have faced from regulators, investors and others over issues such as racial discrimination and the trustworthiness of his claims.

Seemingly disenchanted with the shortage of goods, galloping inflation, and lack of better short-term prospects for the economy as a whole, Venezuelans went to the nikolas maduro polls in large numbers on December 6, 2015, and handed the ruling PSUV a devastating loss, ending 16 years of rule by the chavismo