Maduro’s sham win is his country’s loss

The issue in Venezuela is not whether Nicola´ s Maduro won another term fairly or not. Neither the Lima Group of Latin American countries plus Canada, nor the United States or the European Union recognised the election as legitimate. The question is how to get rid of Maduro before he completes the destruction of his country.

The devastation he and his leftist firebrand predecessor, the late Hugo Cha´ vez, have visited on Venezuela is hard to fathom, especially as the country has the world’s largest oil reserves.

For the fourth straight year, Venezuela has been ranked the world’s most miserable economy by Bloomberg. The economy has shrunk by more than 30 per cent since the collapse of oil prices in 2014, and the oil industry is collapsing; the inflation rate is by far the world’s highest, set to reach 13,000 per cent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. More than a million people have fled the country since 2015; people scrounging for food in garbage has become the new normal.

Maduro must go. The best means of ousting him is in collective action by the Western Hemisphere, led by Latin America, to further choke off funds to his government while supporting the National Assembly, which has been sidelined. Maduro and his suffering countrymen must understand that in the eyes of their neighbours, he and his ilk are the root cause of their misery.