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The authorities in Venezuela charged a leading opposition politician on Wednesday with taking part in a plot to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro. The politician, María Corina Machado, was informed of the charge in a meeting with prosecutors but was not detained. The national prosecutor’s office said in a statement on its website that Ms. Machado was charged with conspiracy and that, if found guilty, she could be sentenced to eight to 16 years in prison.

Ms. Machado, who denies taking part in a plot, was a vocal supporter of widespread antigovernment protests this year. Another politician who supported the protests, Leopoldo López, was charged with promoting violence and has been imprisoned.

The State Department in Washington issued a statement saying, “We are deeply concerned by what appears to be the Venezuelan government’s continuing effort to intimidate its political opponents through abuse of the legal process.”

On Jan. 10, 1978, my father was assassinated by hit men of the Somoza regime. His death meant the end of whatever remained of Nicaragua’s political arena. But it also unleashed an enormous wave of protests nationwide, because the country now saw rebellion as the only way left to end the dictatorship.Four decades later, we have gone through a tortuous cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, civil war and foreign aggression, democratic transition and, now, a return to authoritarianism. History is repeating itself as farce under the regime of Daniel Ortega, the former guerrilla leader who was the elected president from 1985 to 1990 and who returned to power in 2007.

Ironically, when the Sandinista revolution’s leaders were voted out of power in 1990 (allowing my mother, Violeta Chamorro, to become Nicaragua’s president for seven years), it was Mr. Ortega himself who contributed to the establishment of an electoral democracy by conceding defeat, thereby setting the country on course to transfer power peacefully among political parties. However, Mr. Ortega and the next president, Arnoldo Alemán, who later was accused of corruption, arrived at a political compact in 1999 that weakened the trend toward pluralistic democracy by setting up bipartisan control of the electoral system. In 2007, that, too, collapsed when Mr. Ortega, now back in office, took sole control.

In 2008, well-documented fraud marred municipal elections. And in 2011, Mr. Ortega, defying term limits law, was “re-elected” in balloting that was denounced as unconstitutional. He has used the time since to consolidate an institutional dictatorship that concentrates absolute power and that derives political support from an alliance with private business interests and from citizens who benefit from government policies that aid the poor.

Chavez and Uribe started yelling and called each other names, using obscene language.

Mr Chavez then accused Mr Uribe of planning his assassination by a paramilitary squad and threatened to walk out of the summit in disgust. "An angry Uribe then shouted: 'Be a man! These issues are meant to be discussed in these venues. You're brave speaking at a distance, but a coward when it comes to talking face to face'," the diplomat said. Mr Chavez is reported to have replied: "Go to hell!"