What Trump should do about Venezuela’s drift toward a full-blown dictatorship

(Photo: Evan Vucci AP)

President Trump has remained surprisingly silent about the recent events in Venezuela, which is drifting into a full-blown dictatorship under his watch. It’s time he does something to help restore democracy there.

In recent weeks, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has curtailed some of the last remaining powers of the opposition-majority National Assembly, announced that he will give out 500,000 rifles to pro-government civilian militias, refused to hold long overdue regional elections and banned opposition leader Henrique Capriles from running for office for the next 15 years.

Now, elections have been indefinitely postponed, and virtually all of the country’s top opposition leaders are either in jail, or under house arrest, or banned from running for office for many years.

To make things worse, on May 1, amid massive anti-government protests that have already left 29 dead and more than 500 wounded, Maduro announced that he will convene a constitutional convention of «workers, farmers and indigenous» people to draft a new constitution. In other words, he plans to impose a Cuban-styled constitution that in effect would abolish all democratic institutions.

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