Socialist Apocalypse

Venezuela is on a fast track to the apocalypse — with the regime’s efforts to lock in its control only making it worse. Thanks to the socialist misrule of the late Hugo Chavez, the country was already the murder and kidnapping capital of the world when Nicolás Maduro took over as president.

Now it’s No. 1 in inflation, too. Food is scarce; medicine scarcer still. Regime thugs answer protests with deadly force.

Maduro has used corrupt courts to sideline the opposition-run parliament, and is in the process of setting up a phony “constituent assembly” of loyalists to replace it.

In the wee hours Tuesday, the government “arrested” two prominent regime critics who’d questioned the vote in Sunday’s “election” to that assembly. Wednesday, the firm that provided the voting machines announced that it already has evidence of at least 1 million falsified votes.

Washington has put new sanctions on Maduro and other top officials, and President Trump warns he’ll hold Maduro personally responsible for those imprisoned opposition leaders. More sanctions are surely ahead — maybe even on oil, Venezuela’s only profitable resource.

But the regime clearly is bent on keeping power to the end — that is, until it has so ruined the nation that the government can’t even feed or pay the troops that keep the starving masses at bay.

The only real question is whether military leaders will find the nerve to launch a coup while there’s something left to save.