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Mr. Maduro’s survival is, in part, a parable of foreign policy in Mr. Trump’s Washington — where ideologues, donors and lobbyists compete to seize the attention of an inexperienced and highly transactional president, warping and reshaping American diplomacy along the way.

The tug-of-war over Mr. Trump’s Venezuela position pitted Cuban-American activists and Florida politicians, who viewed Mr. Maduro as a proxy and energy supplier for Cuba’s Communist regime, against pro-Trump business interests advocating closer engagement with Mr. Maduro.

“Trump saw Venezuela 110 percent through the prism of Florida’s electoral votes,”

nder Mr. Maduro’s leadership, the economy of the once-wealthy country had cratered, its health system failed and opposition was often met with violence.

‘It’s going to be bad for your image, and he’s going to manipulate you.’”

In summer 2018, Mr. Sargeant flew with an associate to see Mr. Trump at a New York fund-raiser, trying — unsuccessfully — to deliver a letter from Mr. Maduro.

Mr. Gorrín, in turn, helped arrange for Mr. Sargeant to meet state oil company officials in Caracas; when he arrived, he found himself in a session with Mr. Maduro as well. In an interview, Mr. Sargeant said he told Mr. Maduro that Venezuela needed American businesses to help rebuild its economy.

The Venezuelan said that Mr. Ballard connected him to Harry Sargeant III, a billionaire Trump donor from Florida who had worked in Venezuela in the 1990s.

After Mr. Maduro won a second term in an election widely denounced as a sham, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions.

Now, American officials and the Venezuelan opposition needed back channels of their own. According to the opposition leaders, Mr. Gorrín and other intermediaries were asked to convey U.S. offers of leniency to cooperative regime figures.

Mr. Gorrín, whose discussions with regime figures were reported by The Wall Street Journal last year, denied playing any role in the effort, and said he had no contact with Mr. Claver-Carone after their 2017 meeting.

Nothing would come of the effort. After Mr. Stryk and a law firm filed disclosure forms revealing their proposed work for the regime, the blowback was severe. Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, pledged to blackball all the firm’s clients unless it withdrew. It did.

“It is a shame where we are right now,” said Steve Goldstein, a former top State Department aide to Mr. Tillerson. “Maduro should not be the president of Venezuela.”

Venezuela is in its third year of recession. Its economy is expected to contract 10% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The IMF forecasts Venezuela will be in recession until at least 2019.

Venezuela has the world's largest oil reserves, but the problem is that oil is the only game in town. It makes up over 95% of Venezuela's revenue from its exports. If it doesn't sell oil, the country doesn't have money to spend.

Years of excessive government spending on welfare programs, poorly managed facilities and dilapidated farms set the stage for the crisis.

Venezuela's broken engine: oil

Venezuela's currency has plummeted in value.

Oil prices were over $100 a barrel in 2014. Today, they hover around $50 a barrel, after dropping as low as $26 earlier this year.

Soaring food prices & broken hospitals

Venezuelans went weeks, in some cases months, without basics like milk, eggs, flour, soap and toilet paper.

the government continued enforcing strict price controls on goods sold in the supermarkets. It forced food importers to stop bringing in virtually everything because they would have had to sell it for a major loss.

ood imports were down by nearly 50% from the same time a year ago, according to several estimates.

The country's public hospitals have fallen apart, causing people, even infants, to die due to the scarcity of basic medical care.

China used to bail out Venezuela and loan it billions of dollars. But even China has stopped giving its Latin American ally more cash.

"Tempers are getting hot in Venezuela," says Eric Farnsworth, vice president at Council of the Americas. "All the indicators are that the situation is deteriorating fast and it's not going to get better anytime soon."

Last week, protests turned violent in parts of the country where demonstrators demanded empty supermarkets be resupplied. And on Friday, the government said it would continue its truncated workweek for an additional 15 days.

American officials say the multiplying crises have led Mr. Maduro to fall out of favor with members of his own socialist party, who they believe may turn on him, leading to chaos in the streets.

The regional tensions came to a head last week when Mr. Maduro went on television to chide the Organization of American States, which has criticized Venezuela’s handling of the economic and political crises.

Mr. Almagro responded with an open letter blasting the president, calling on him to allow the recall referendum his opponents are pushing this year to remove Mr. Maduro from office.

Venezuela’s public schools are now closed on Fridays, another effort to save electricity. So Ms. González was waiting in line with her elder child at an A.T.M., while her husband watched over the other one at home.

Venezuela’s government says the problems are the result of an “economic war” being waged by elites who are hoarding supplies, as well as the American government’s efforts to destabilize the country.

But most economists agree that Venezuela is suffering from years of economic mismanagement, including over-dependence on oil and price controls that led many businesses to stop making products.

On a recent day in the downtown government center, pedestrians milled about, but nearly every building — including several museums, the public registry office and a Social Security center — was empty, giving the appearance of a holiday.

For years, the world watched in horror as man-made humanitarian and political crises turned Venezuela into a failed state,” the senators said in a joint statement. “Despite these disastrous and dangerous conditions, Venezuelans were still forcibly deported ba

“It gives us protection,” he said, “but also reminds us that we’re here because there’s a dictatorship in our country.”

The immigrants also will be allowed to work legally in the United States as part of the temporary protective status the administration issued as it considers the next steps in a yearslong American pressure campaign to force Mr. Maduro from power.

Venezuela is mired in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises under Mr. Maduro, who, through a mix of corruption and neglect, oversaw the decay of the country’s oil infrastructure that had propped up its economy. The United Nations has estimated that up to 94 percent of Venezuela’s population lives in poverty, with millions of people bereft of regular access to water, food and medicine.

The United States has been at the fore of an international campaign to force Mr. Maduro from power since disputed elections in 2018. It is one of the few foreign policy priorities that has been advanced by both the Biden and Trump administrations, each of which recognizes Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader and former head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, as the country’s legitimate leader.

Roberto Marrero, a Venezuelan opposition leader who moved to Florida after spending a year and a half in jail in Venezuela, called Monday’s decision a “bittersweet victory.”

"The time has come to defend Venezuela's constitution," he said at a news conference, adding that "next Wednesday, we're going to take Venezuela from end to end." He didn't specify what might happen beyond protests.

Maduro, heir to the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, has vowed that efforts to remove him from office won't succeed.

Many people are fed up with the widespread shortages of basic goods and medical supplies, factory shutdowns and

blackouts.

Opposition groups collected signatures of 1% of the voting population during the first petition drive last summer. That was enough to trigger the second round.

In the decades after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, about 1.4 million Cubans fled the island, many heading for the United States, where they transformed the social and ethnic fabric of Miami. During the 1980s and 1990s, more than 1 million people — more than a quarter of the population — were displaced during El Salvador’s civil war.

y, the growing Venezuelan diaspora is reshaping cities from Miami to Buenos Aires to Madrid. But most Venezuelan migrants are staying in Latin America, where countries are handling a dire situation in different ways.

Chávez’s handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has reached a breaking point, with lower oil prices and economic mismanagement leading to the world’s highest inflation rate and spiraling indexes of poverty and malnutrition.

Our migration levels are now comparable to Syria or to [the Rohingya going to] Bangladesh,”

leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, thousands of Venezuelans — especially from the upper classes — moved out of the country

Venezuelans have enjoyed access to special permits good for two years in Colombia’s border region, allowing them to stay up to seven days at a time.

Facing severe food and medical shortages at home, most have stocked up on supplies, or visited hospitals, before returning across the border.

bringing a dramatic surge across the border that reached a peak of 90,000 people a day in December. In early February, President Juan Manuel Santos suspended the issuing of new temporary visas and declared a massive militarization of the border.

The moves cut the daily flow almost in half — though critics say it has only motivated migrants to cross at dozens of illegal entry points along the border, putting them at risk of harm from guerrillas and criminal bands

Locals, meanwhile, are accusing the Venezuelans already here of harming the economy and driving up crime.

They come with fruit they buy for nothing in Venezuela and sell for prices here that I can’t compete with. They come here, killing and robbing Colombians. We need take our city back.”

The family had recently arrived from Venezuela. The little girl was malnourished and also had developed a life-threatening heart blockage. The hospital was petitioning national authorities for funds before proceeding with the costly operation.

Instead, he said, it was carrying out special operations designed to limit the number of Venezuelans without valid visas.

“Like any country, we need to have a safe and secure border,” Martinez said. But many Venezuelans weren’t able to get passports in their homeland because of the cost and long wait.

The operations are sending as many as 100 migrants a day back to Venezuela.

You have to go,” said a female officer. More than a dozen Colombian officers surrounded the thin Venezuelan. “I can’t,” Andie said, her voice breaking. “Please. I’m pregnant, and we won’t survive there.”

It is the fourth time Maduro has increased the minimum wage this year. Food stamps and worker bonuses make up most of workers' total "wages" in Venezuela.

The raise comes one day before opposition leaders, who want to oust Maduro, planned a nationwide strike of businesses

Tensions fired up last week when Maduro denied the opposition party any chance to call a referendum vote on him.

On Wednesday, huge protests across the nation called for Maduro to resign.

After meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, Maduro said he would meet with opposition leaders on Sunday to try to find common ground.

Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.

At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.

The hospital has no fully functioning X-ray or kidney dialysis machines because they broke long ago. And because there are no open beds, some patients lie on the floor in pools of their blood.

This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high.

So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.

Ms. Parucho, a diabetic, was unable to receive kidney dialysis because the machines were broken. An infection had spread to her feet, which were black that night. She was going into septic shock.

In a supply room, cockroaches fled as the door swung open.

In April, the authorities arrested its director, Aquiles Martínez, and removed him from his post. Local news reports said he was accused of stealing equipment meant for the hospital, including machines to treat people with respiratory illnesses, as well as intravenous solutions and 127 boxes of medicine.

A holiday had been declared by the government to save electricity, and the blood bank took donations only on workdays.

For the past two and a half months, the hospital has not had a way to print X-rays. So patients must use a smartphone to take a picture of their scans and take them to the proper doctor.

Near him, a handwritten sign read, “We sell antibiotics — negotiable.” A black-market seller’s number was listed.

The ninth floor of the hospital is the maternity ward, where the seven babies had died the day before. A room at the end of the hall was filled with broken incubators.

The day of the power blackout, Dr. Rodríguez said, the hospital staff tried turning on the generator, but it did not work.

"This is a victory for democracy," said Jesus Torrealba, executive secretary for the MUD.

He blamed the defeat on "the economic war" waged by political interests inside and outside Venezuela.

The exodus is so large that it is reshaping the very concept of childhood in Venezuela, sending grade-schoolers into the streets to work — and leaving many exposed to the swirl of abusive players who have filled the vacuum left by the collapsing Venezuelan state, including sex traffickers and armed groups.

In rare situations, children have been passed from grandparent to cousin to neighbor, with each caretaker migrating or disappearing, until young people finally have found themselves alone.

The arrival of the new coronavirus in Venezuela has isolated these children further. To combat the spread, President Nicolás Maduro has announced a countrywide lockdown, sending the military into the streets to enforce the measures.The effort has cut many young people off from the teachers and neighbors who may be their only means of support. At the same time, borders are now closed, severing these children from the rest of the world and making it impossible for their parents to return, or to come and retrieve them.

Already, on both sides of the Atlantic, calls are growing for the administration to consider a significant rethink, particularly when it comes to Iran

critics say that the U.S. restrictions have chilled even permitted trade with Iran and scared away foreign entities from taking the risk.

it is clear that the Iranian health-care system is being deprived of equipment necessary to save lives and prevent wider infection.”

The sanctions Trump reimposed on Iran as part of his gambit to smash the 2015 nuclear deal had already crippled the Iranian economy and appear to have enfeebled its public health capacity at a dire time of need.

“Just because Iran has managed the crisis badly, that does not make its humanitarian needs and our security ones any the less. Targeted sanctions relief would be both morally right and serve the health and security interests of the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world.”

, it would be in keeping with the Trump administration’s stated support for the Iranian people. Doctors and nurses are “key pillars of Iranian civil society,” independent of the theocratic regime, he said, adding that “what we’re describing in this statement is ultimately a demand for the Trump administration to live up to its own rhetoric.”

In Venezuela, the United States has stepped up its pressure on Maduro, indicting him and some of his close associates on narcoterrorism charges

The country’s health-care system is broken, while difficult conditions abroad in the shadow of the pandemic have forced thousands of Venezuelan refugees to start making the forlorn trek back to their ruined homeland.

“The U.S. should be helping Venezuela and other countries to contain this devastating pandemic.”

The president of the United States cannot condemn dictatorships like the Maduro regime in one breath, then seek to unilaterally overturn American elections in the next. In light of Wednesday’s insurrection, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement the day before condemning Maduro’s manipulation of recent legislative elections rings hollow.

In doing so, Trump aligns himself with despots like Maduro rather than the great American presidents of past and future. On Wednesday afternoon, Venezuela’s foreign ministry issued a short but mocking statement: “With this unfortunate episode, the United States is experiencing what it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression.”

Venezuela’s democratic opposition, at greater risk of persecution since Maduro and his cronies regained control of the National Assembly, could face arrest or worse, and have lost the moral boost that America has their back if they keep up their dangerous push for democracy.

Venezuela is not the only country where Trump’s inconsistencies could have a destabilizing effect. Though Latin America’s democratic institutions have proved remarkably resilient under the circumstances, the coming months could be pivotal. Chile, Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua and Ecuador are all set to hold presidential elections this year.

Furthermore, with severe lockdowns devastating the region’s economies and largely failing to slow the spread of the virus, the region’s political class as a whole has watched approval ratings plummet. In an increasingly hostile political landscape, those fighting to defend democratic institutions could face growing pressure from outside challengers.

Trump’s rabble-rousing has given anti-democratic leaders an updated playbook: use social media and other alternative information sources to spread misinformation to stir loyal followers, and then use those tools to organize a violent attack on the heart of democratic institutions.

To mitigate the damage in Latin America and the world, President-elect Joe Biden will need to re-engage with allies and rebuild America’s reputation by openly acknowledging the healing needed after the chaos of his predecessor.

However, other countries, including Saudi Arabia also have extremely cheap, subsidised petrol prices.

Food and petrol price increases in 1989 sparked nationwide protests that resulted in scores of deaths, unrest that is considered to have paved the way for the late President Hugo Chavez's rise to power.

Venezuela's economy has been pushed to the brink by the collapse in the oil price, which accounts for about 95% of the country's export revenues.

The economy shrank 10% last year, amid rampant inflation and shortages of some basic products,

According to the Bloomberg news agency, the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela incurred $15.2bn in costs in 2013 to maintain Venezuela's fuel subsidy.

Investors have become increasingly concerned about Venezuela's potential default on its huge debts.

enezuela's working classes who had benefited from the Socialist Party's giveaways

Nicolas Maduro still enjoyed the support of the party faithful and V

others in the wider Venezuelan society were no longer unquestioning

failing to acknowledge why the opposition had won such a commanding majority in Congress and, again, blamed his defeat on foreign elements seeking to commit "economic warfare" in Venezuela.

Nicolas Maduro still believes this is a "Chavista" country which has been diverted only temporarily from the path set out by the great revolutionary.

This time, by contrast, Sanders arguably talks about foreign policy more than any other declared candidate does. Of the four senators who launched their candidacies via video—Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Sanders—only his mentioned foreign policy

What distinguishes Sanders is the same quality that distinguished him on domestic policy in 2016: his willingness to cross red lines that have long defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion

He’s produced videos that call Gaza an “open-air prison,” he’s depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism,” and, most controversially of all, he’s suggested cutting U.S. military aid to Israel.

He’s the only presidential candidate in recent memory who regularly describes the Cold War not as a heroic American victory, but as a cautionary tale

Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.

he wants America to shun the quest for global supremacy that leads it to overthrow regimes it can’t control and to instead pursue a foreign policy based on “partnership, rather than dominance.”

He called for putting the United Nations—which he called “one of the most important organizations for promoting a vision of a different world”—near the heart of American foreign policy

Sanders challenged the domestic side of the exceptionalist creed: the belief that American capitalism—buttressed by modest regulations and welfare provisions—provides upward mobility.

Now Sanders is poised to challenge exceptionalism in foreign policy: the belief that America, as a uniquely virtuous nation, can substitute its own self-interest and moral intuition for international institutions and international law

A 2017 Pew Research poll found that Americans over the age of 30 were far more likely to say that the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than to say, “There are other countries that are better than the U.S.” But among adults under 30, the latter view predominated by a margin of more than two to one.

For a presidential candidate, challenging American exceptionalism would, until recently, have seemed like a sure path to political oblivion

In 2020, Americans will learn whether there’s a market for his anti-imperial heresies too.

The effective barring of Roth from entering Hong Kong is not an isolated incident, happening days after a U.S. photographer covering the pro-democracy protests was also banned from entering the financial hub.

“I think it’s worth stressing that what happened to me pales in comparison to what is happening to the pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Hong Kong. They’re the ones who are facing tear gas, beatings and arrest, and I just had another 16 hour flight [back to New York],” Roth says. “But what it does reflect is a real worsening of the human rights situation in Hong Kong.”

At a press briefing on Monday after the incident involving Roth, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that “allowing or not allowing someone’s entry is China’s sovereign right,” adding that foreign NGOs were supporting “Hong Kong independence separatist activities.”

“The justification they put forward was laughable, and insulting to the people of Hong Kong,” says Roth. “They don’t need me to tell them to take to the streets — they are looking to defend their own human rights, their own political freedoms and their own rule of law.”

Roth says Beijing’s explanation for barring him shows how fearful the authorities are of demonstrations in the city, and is an attempt to persuade those in the mainland not to emulate the pro-democracy protests. “They simply cannot admit to people on the mainland that hundreds of thousands Chinese citizens would take to the street in opposition to the increasingly dictatorial rule that is coming from Beijing.”

The Chinese government has attempted to deter, track and deport journalists and foreign investigators from reporting on forced indoctrination and detention of at least a million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in China’s western province of Xinjiang, highlighted in Roth’s lead essay in the HRW report.

On Monday, Chinese state media reported that the semi-autonomous region of Tibet would introduce forthcoming regulations to “strengthen ethnic unity;” echoing language used in regulations introduced in Xinjiang four years ago.

Beyond the worrying crackdown within China’s own borders, HRW’s report highlights Beijing’s efforts to deter the international community from scrutinizing its human rights abuses, taking “full advantage of the corporate quest for profit to extend its censorship to critics abroad.”

And at the individual level, the export of censorship is reaching dissidents and even universities in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.; the report notes that students from China who wanted to join campus debates felt unable to do so for fear of being monitored or reported to Chinese authorities.

The export of the Chinese censorship system also permeates governments and international institutions, and has “transformed into an active assault on the international human rights system,”

China has also consistently worked with Russia at the U.N. Security Council to block efforts to investigate human rights abuses in Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. “China worries that even enforcement of human rights standards someplace else will have a boomerang effect that will come back to haunt it,” says Roth.

Aside from China, the report also looks at several other concerning situations around around the world, including civilians at risk from indiscriminate bombing in Idlib province in Syria, the desperate humanitarian crisis resulting from Saudi-led coalition’s actions in Yemen, the refugee crisis emerging from Maduro’s grip on power in Venezuela, and Myanmar’s denial of the genocide of the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice. And while Roth is encouraged by a growing international response to China’s actions in Xinjiang, particularly from Muslim majority nations, there remains much more to be done. From a U.S. perspective, the report notes that strong rhetoric from officials condemning human rights violations in China is “often undercut by Trump’s praise of Xi Jinping and other friendly autocrats,” as well as the Trump-administration’s own policies in violation of human rights, including forced separation at the U.S.-Mexican border.

But the push may have come too late to regain lost ground.

From last October to March nearly half of asylum claims made by Venezuelans were denied, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.