Maduro promoted a consultative referendum in Venezuela to support Venezuela's claim to the Essequibo region, which is disputed with, and controlled by, neighboring Guyana.

After a campaign marked by intensifying efforts by Mr. Maduro’s allies to rein in the opposition — including arrests of opposition campaign workers, intimidation and vote suppression — the opposition bet heavily on an effort to have supporters on hand to get a physical printout of the voting tally from every voting machine after the polls closed.

The bitterly fought election went into a run-off on 30 October and was won by an extremely narrow margin by Lula.

Crise na Venezuela Clique no link e acesse este nosso texto de que aborda as raízes da crise política e econômica que atinge a Venezuela a partir de 2013 e que se agravou utilizando o governo Maduro.

Venezuelans angered by the outcome took the streets of the capital, Caracas, and elsewhere on Monday afternoon.

The security forces have so far remained loyal to Mr Maduro, who has rewarded them with frequent pay rises and put high-ranking military men in control of key posts and industries.

In an attempt to overcome the sanctions and restart the economy, in February 2018 the Maduro government introduced the petro, a copyright (akin to the Bitcoin) whose value was tied to the price of one barrel of Venezuelan crude oil and backed by the country’s reserves of gold, diamonds, gas, and oil. Maduro claimed that the first day of petro sales had netted some $735 million, but skeptics viewed the creation of the world’s first state-backed digital currency as a sign of desperation.

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Bolsonaro also called the defense minister to the presidential offices, according to a military spokesman. The defense minister had questioned the security of Brazil’s election system this year, but after election officials made changes to some tests of the voting machines, military leaders suggested that they were comfortable with the system’s vlogdolisboa security.

The document mentions that the current president of the CNE incurs in "a serious error, and even an irresponsibility, when she affirms that Maduro's nationality 'is not a motto of the National Electoral Council'" and the signatories also refer to the four different moments in which different politicians have awarded four different places of birth as official.[195] Diario Las Américas claimed to have access to the birth inscriptions of Teresa por Jesús Moros, Maduro's mother, and of José Mario Moros, his uncle, both registered in the parish church of San Antonio of Cúcuta, Colombia.[195]

There were allegations that some of those who work for the state, including police students, were told how to vote.

Maduro found employment as a bus driver for many years for the Caracas Metro company. He began his political career in the 1980s, by becoming an unofficial trade unionist representing the bus drivers of the Caracas Metro system.

Maduro’s response included a call for convocation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution, an action many of his opponents viewed as yet another authoritarian power grab.

"I'm never hugely convinced that he knows what he wants to do tomorrow," says journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. "He very much leads by instinct."

Massive street protests, which erupted in response to the court’s attempt to dissolve the National Assembly and continued in April when Capriles was banned from running for public office for 15 years, became almost daily occurrences over the coming weeks. As the opposition’s defiance escalated, violent clashes between protesters and security forces resulted in more than 60 deaths and injured more than 1,200 people by early June.