Venezuela crisis simmers

Yet another nation — this one in our own hemisphere — is sliding rapidly into dictatorship and the world must not let Venezuela become the next Cuba.

Nicolas Maduro, the handpicked successor of the late Hugo Chavez, has managed not only to bankrupt his once-prosperous, oil-rich nation, but now wants to rob it of the democracy it once enjoyed. This week saw the arrest of the nation’s two most prominent opposition leaders — they were actually already under house arrest but Tuesday were dragged off to prison.

The following day the software company involved in setting up a nationwide election last weekend issued a statement saying, “We know, without any doubt, that the turnout of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated.”

The vote itself was virtually meaningless since voters had no way of voting against the list of hand-picked Maduro cronies (including his wife) who would be charged with rewriting the nation’s constitution to give Maduro even more power than he already has. The opposition and millions of voters boycotted the sham election. But dictators being dictators, this one apparently sought to “adjust” the turnout figures.

And yet even amidst the economic privation and rampant malnutrition, there lives a spirit that has forced ordinary citizens to take to the streets in protest. Some 120 of them have lost their lives in street protests in the past several months.

Thus far the United States has responded by levying personal sanctions against Maduro and refusing to recognize the loyalist assembly that met for the first time yesterday.

The foreign ministers of South America’s largest nations meet in Lima, Peru, next week to wrestle with the issue of how to halt this nightmare on their doorstep. Treating Maduro like the outlaw that he is would certainly be a start.