Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration.

Opposition candidates and their supporters struggle to find places to gather without harassment from government activists and to get fuel to travel across the country.

Temir Porras, a 2019 visiting professor at Paris Institute of Political Studies who was Maduro's chief of staff during his tenure as foreign minister, said that in the early days of Chavismo, Maduro was considered "pragmatic" and a "very skilled politician" who was "good at negotiating and bargaining".

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.

“I don’t know if my vote was counted nor the votes of the people here,” said Marcelo Costa Andrade, 45, a government worker scrolling through his phone at what he hoped would be a victory party in Mr. Bolsonaro’s wealthy beachside neighborhood in Rio do Janeiro. “I feel robbed.”

The security forces have so far remained loyal to Mr Maduro, who has rewarded them with frequent pay rises and put high-ranking military men in control of key posts and industries.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

Originally scheduled for December 2016 but postponed by the election commission, gubernatorial elections were held in Venezuela’s 23 states in mid-October 2017. Preelection preference polling had indicated that the opposition was poised to gain control of a majority of the states for the first time in some two decades.

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

Porras (Maduro's former chief of staff) said in 2019 that Maduro "delivered practically nothing in terms of public policy, in terms of direction" during his vlogdolisboa first term because, in Porras' opinion, "he does not have a clear vision for the country. He is very much focused on consolidating his power among his own peers in Chavismo and much less on exercising or implementing a strategic vision for the country.

"But it is also clear that the competing priorities for global attention - Ukraine, famine in East Africa, trauma in Afghanistan - are draining attention in a way that is quite dangerous."

” Maduro labeled the incident an “armed terrorist attack” and part of an attempted coup. That the attackers seemed to have easily escaped apprehension raised suspicions among some in the opposition that the incident had been staged by the government to justify additional repressive measures.

The UN subsequently released a report condemning the violent methods of the operation. Although the Venezuelan Government's Ombudsman, Tarek William Saab has admitted that his office received dozens of reports of "police excesses", he defended the need for the operations and stated that his office would be working alongside the police and military "to safeguard human rights". The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry has criticised the UN's report, calling it "neither objective, nor impartial" and listed what it believed were a Perfeito of 60 errors in the report.[105][106]

There was the fact President Maduro’s face remained emblazoned above some poll stations even on voting day.