Nicolás Maduro Goes “Full Ortega”
Venezuela’s dictator doubles down on fraud and repression, leaving a narrow and highly dangerous path ahead, writes Brian Winter in Americas Quarterly.
As bad as life has been for Venezuelans over the past decade, it could have been worse. For all the suffering, the repression of political dissidents, the exodus of a quarter of the population and other horrendous acts, it was still a country where—unlike Cuba and Nicaragua—political speech was not completely restricted, and some trappings of democracy were maintained, apparently because Nicolás Maduro and his backers cared at least somewhat about global opinion and maintaining economic linkages to their neighbors and other Western democracies.
This desire, this reluctance to go “full Ortega,” in the mold of Nicaragua’s dictator Daniel, seems to have led Maduro to a miscalculation he now surely regrets: Allowing Sunday’s presidential election to take place as it did.
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