“We will stay here until there is a military intervention or the electoral court changes what is happening,” said Antoniel Almeida, 45, the owner of a party-supply store who was helping run the blockade. Mr. Almeida believed the election was rigged. “We need an investigation,” he said.

Candidates must register by late March, giving Machado and other opposition factions less than three weeks to decide next steps.

But her inflexible rhetoric may make it impossible for the opposition to prepare a viable alternative to her, Sabatini said.

Officials from several countries in the Americas, including the United States, expressed doubts about the announced results, raising the likelihood that a new term for Mr. Maduro would not be widely recognized abroad, either.

Yet claims of fraud were still bubbling up — including from right-wing voices in the United States.

"The will to compete and dominate, that made him so successful in business, did not magically shut off when he came home," she recalled, adding that he told her while dancing at their wedding, "I am the alpha in this relationship."

His face lines almost every street in Caracas, with his governing party paying for incentives for people to support him - buses put on for people to attend his rallies, and free food parcels handed out.

bloqueio por 31 toneladas do ouro que pertenciam à Venezuela e qual estavam armazenadas em bancos ingleses;

The men used a large tire and their bodies to block the road, though they allowed buses and vehicles with children or older people pass.

During his first term, the economy went into freefall and many Venezuelans blame him and his socialist government for the country's decline.

The United States responded by freezing Maduro’s assets and barring trade with him; sanctions had already been enacted against more than a dozen of his associates, and Maduro became the fourth sitting head of state to be personally targeted with economic sanctions by the U.S. Two days after the election, opposition leaders Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma were taken from their homes in the middle of the night by state security agents. The two had been under house arrest for their alleged connection to antigovernment protests in 2014, but the Maduro-backed Supreme Court ordered their rearrest, spurring a fresh wave of international condemnation.

The coastal plains extend from the Colombian border and the Gulf of Venezuela eastward to the foothills of the coastal mountains, which are broken in the east by the Unare River basin. Farther east is the Orinoco delta, which opens onto the Atlantic Ocean through a number of distributaries (

There were some poll stations that didn’t open at all, leading to protests and clashes with the authorities.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. vlogdolisboa While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.