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How a yearslong battle over U.S.-Venezuela relations aided President Trump’s campaign in Florida

prompted a standing ovation from Republicans and Democrats alike. “Maduro’s grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken,” Mr. Trump proclaimed. In the 2020 battleground of South Florida, home to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan expatriates and Cuban-Americans who support their cause, Mr. Trump’s embrace of Mr. Guaidó drew a rapturous response.

Although recent polls show Mr. Trump running close to his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., among Florida’s Latino voters, his administration’s harsh sanctions have failed to oust Mr. Maduro, while leaving Chinese, Russian and Iranian interests more firmly entrenched in Venezuela.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro just increased the nation's minimum wage by 40%.

inflation is expected to soar by nearly 500% this year and 1,660% next year

Venezuela's minimum wage, including food subsidies, is rising to 90,812 bolivars a month.

Biden Gives Venezuelans Reprieve to Remain in U.S. Trump Had RejectedHundreds of thousands of Venezuelans can temporarily continue to live and work in the United States as the administration considers its next steps in the effort to force out Venezuela’s president.

WASHINGTON — As many as 320,000 Venezuelans living in the United States were given an 18-month reprieve on Monday from the threat of being deported, as the Biden administration sought to highlight how dangerous that country has become under President Nicolás Maduro.

Two senior Biden administration officials said the new protections would be offered to those who can prove they are living in the United States as of Monday. The cutoff date aimed to discourage smugglers from enticing other Venezuelans to make the arduous journey to the United States at a time the Biden administration is already struggling with how to accommodate thousands of Central American migrants headed to the southern border.

“The first months of this crisis suggest that the world order that emerges on the other end is likely to be permanently altered,” wrote Ben Rhodes, a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “America’s response to 9/11 committed the familiar mistake of hastening a superpower’s decline through overreach; the Trump presidency, and our failure to respond effectively to COVID-19, show us the dangers of a world in which America makes no effort at leadership at all.”

The pandemic casts the signature theme of Trump’s foreign policy in shadow. His “maximum pressure” campaigns — the sanctions squeezing the Iranian regime, the efforts to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the stalled push to compel North Korea to denuclearize, the bullying tactics used in trade spats with Europe, China and other countries — hinged on Trump’s penchant for seemingly tough unilateral action

a global public health crisis is exposing the limits of “America First,” as even the world’s most powerful country has found itself seeking foreign assistance in the battle against the virus.

Venezuela’s opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, defied a travel ban and crossed into Colombia on Sunday to round up greater international support for regime change in Venezuela.

Mr. Guaidó was to meet with the Colombian president, Iván Duque, who welcomed him with his own tweet on Sunday, and with Mike Pompeo, the United States secretary of state, who is visiting Bogotá ahead of a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Mr. Guaidó is also bound for Davos.

President Trump endorsed the opposition leader just minutes after that declaration, and he has remained one of Mr. Guaidó’s strongest international supporters. He followed up his initial recognition with a series of punishing economic sanctions aimed at Mr. Maduro and his government in an attempt to force him to cede power.But as Mr. Guaidó’s campaign to take power waned over the past year, Washington eased the pressure on Mr. Maduro and turned its attention to the Middle East. That allowed Mr. Maduro to adapt to sanctions, stabilize exports and consolidate political power.

Last Wednesday, President Donald Trump made a mockery of our rule of law. His baseless denial of the results of the presidential election, his refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power and his subsequent incendiary language have brought us to this chaotic moment.

The harm could be particularly severe throughout Latin America, where the devastation of the pandemic, dire economic straits and the growing impact of climate change have shaken public confidence.

And for countries aspiring to democracy but not yet succeeding — chief among them Venezuela — Trump’s actions are particularly destructive. In 2017, the United States led the international community in condemning the fraudulent elections that kept Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in power and in standing behind Venezuela’s democratic forces.

This country has long been accustomed to painful shortages, even of basic foods. But Venezuela keeps drifting further into uncharted territory.

In recent weeks, the government has taken what may be one of the most desperate measures ever by a country to save electricity: A shutdown of many of its offices for all but two half-days each week.

Many people cannot make international calls from their phones because of a dispute between the government and phone companies over currency regulations and rates.

A massive nationwide protest against President Nicolas Maduro is expected Wednesday.

Venezuela's democracy is nearing collapse after Maduro quashed a referendum vote seeking to remove him from office.

All this is happening in a year when its citizens have battled with food and medicine shortages, sky high inflation and dwindling options.

Venezuela halts effort to recall president

A drive to hold a recall referendum on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been halted, Venezuela's National Electoral Council announced in a statement.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles said Friday, "Yesterday in Venezuela there was a coup d'état. There is no other way to call it. What we feared so much was hatched."

Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals

“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.

It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.

But the Venezuelan military man-turned president took his mentor's ideology and reasoning one step further.

He could achieve a popular socialist revolution through the ballot box and keep repeating the process.

Venezuela was meant to be another step on the country's journey towards President Chavez's dream of becoming the perfect socialist utopia

Venezuela's opposition party has claimed the majority of seats in the National Assembly in elections held Sunday, the first major shift in power in the legislative branch since the late President Hugo Chavez took office in 1999.

The Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) took 99 seats to just 46 for the United Social Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Tibisay Lucena, president of Consejo Nacional Electoral

This is the first time in 17 years that Chavismo has not won a nationwide election in Venezuela.

blocs start to align in what looks like a new world energy order. 

“This represents the biggest re-drawing of the energy and geopolitical map in Europe — and possibly the world — since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not the end of World War II,

The outcome, he said, could be “a sequel to the Cold War.”

the Miami-Fort Lauderdale region eclipsed Los Angeles in 2012 as the major metropolitan area with the largest share — 45 percent — of immigrant business owners

Colombians, who first began to settle here in the 1980s, are the largest group of South Americans. They now make up nearly 5 percent of Miami-Dade’s population. They are joined by Argentines, Peruvians and a growing number of Venezuelans. Brazilians, relative newcomers to Miami’s Hispanic hodgepodge, are now a distinct presence as well. The Venezuelan population jumped 117 percent over 10 years, a number that does not capture the surge in recent arrivals. Over half of Miami’s residents are foreign born, and 63 percent speak Spanish at home.

he latest surge of South Americans was turning the city into a year-round destination and luring more entrepreneurs and international businesses. Latin American banks have proliferated as they follow their customers here.

After years of watching his influence in Latin America slip away, Mr. Obama suddenly turned the tables this week by declaring a sweeping détente with Cuba, opening the way for a major repositioning of the United States in the region.

Washington’s isolation of Cuba has long been a defining fixture of Latin American politics, something that has united governments across the region, regardless of their ideologies. Even some of Washington’s close allies in the Americas have rallied to Cuba’s side.

“We never thought we would see this moment,” said Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who chided the Obama administration last year over the National Security Agency’s surveillance of her and her top aides. She called the deal with Cuba “a moment which marks a change in civilization.”

Venezuela is raising petrol prices for the first time in 20 years, although the president claims it will still be the cheapest in the world.

President Nicolas Maduro said pump prices of premium fuel would rise from the equivalent of $0.01 a litre to about $0.60 (£0.40).The cost of lower grade petrol would rise to about $0.10 a litre.

He unveiled a series measures to help ease Venezuela's economic crisis, including devaluing the currency.The rise in the heavily-subsidised fuel price will save $800m a year.

Venezuelan Opposition Claims a Rare Victory: A Legislative Majority

Tibisay Lucena, the head of the electoral commission, announced about 12:30 a.m. Monday that the opposition, represented by the Democratic Unity coalition, had won 99 seats and that the government’s United Socialist Party had won 46 seats.

He predicted that Mr. Maduro would not reach the end of his term in 2019 and that he would be removed by “constitutional means,” such as a recall referendum, a change to the Constitution, or by being forced to resign.

The Venezuelan government on Friday declared an emergency to address the country’s deteriorating economy.

The plan was short on specific policy changes but sought to give President Nicolás Maduro the power to bypass the National Assembly on spending matters, among other measures. But any expansion of executive power would have to be approved by the National Assembly, which is controlled by Mr. Maduro’s rivals who took control of the chamber in January with their own promises to address Venezuela’s economic problems.

Also on Friday, Venezuela’s central bank announced some grim economic figures, noting that the economy contracted by 4.5 percent during the first nine months of 2015 and that inflation reached 142 percent during the 12-month period ending in September.

“I thank all the Colombians for having received us Venezuelans so kindly,”

Colombia has never tried to stop people like Colón from coming in. Officials knew they couldn’t. The border between the countries, much like the one dividing the United States from Mexico, runs more than 1,000 miles through open country and is punctuated by hundreds of illegal crossings.

From the very start, the national migration authority here worked to document the new arrivals, but struggled to keep up. It issued hundreds of thousands of identity cards to Venezuelans, allowing them to come and go freely within a specially designated border zone, though not further inland, and created a new immigration status applicable to Venezuelans already in the country.

"I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

You could imagine Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying something like this. It’s not a stretch to say that Benito Mussolini would toss words like this aroun

President Trump’s bully-boy threat shows the lengths to which he would go (or contemplate going) to keep power and his disdain for the foundational principles of democracy. And that Republican pundits, donors, think-tankers and lawmakers would not be horrified and consider such comments disqualifying suggests that the survival of our democracy depends on the GOP’s convincing defeat in 2020.