Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro
“These slow-motion acts,” Sabatini says, “eroded the checks and balances of democratic government and accountability and created a military-controlled government, the likes of which the region has not seen since the dark days of juntas and dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s.”At the end of July this year, Maduro called an election to choose delegates to rewrite the nation’s constitution. It was an action the aims of which nobody backed and few understood. The majority of Venezuelans supported their constitution. Indeed, many considered constitutional change to be a useless exercise that served only to detract attention away from the deepening economic and humanitarian crisis.