Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration.

[150] The State Department also alleges that Maduro expelled authorized foreign companies from the mining sector to allow officials to exploit Venezuela's resources for their own gain, using unregulated miners under the control of Venezuela's armed forces.[150]

They and the international community have asked for proof of the numbers the government has put out, as granular as count by count.

Chávez's endorsement of Maduro sidelined Diosdado Cabello, a former vice president and powerful Socialist Party official with ties to the armed forces, who had been widely considered a top candidate to be Chávez's successor. After Maduro was endorsed by Chávez, Cabello "immediately pledged loyalty" to both men.[72]

“I don’t know if my vote was counted nor the votes of the people here,” said Marcelo Costa Andrade, 45, a government worker scrolling through his phone at what he hoped would be a victory party in Mr. Bolsonaro’s wealthy beachside neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. “I feel robbed.”

While Venezuelans were affected by hunger and shortages, Maduro and his government officials publicly shared images of themselves eating luxurious meals, images that were met with displeasure by Venezuelans.

The National Election Council ordered an audit of the ballots in the 46 percent of precincts that had not already been automatically audited under Venezuelan election law, but Capriles refused to participate when the Council chose not to examine the signatures and fingerprints of voters on the registers as part of the audit. He vowed to challenge the results in court. In the meantime, Maduro was sworn in as president on April 19.

That appears unlikely now, and the dubious election results could test the thaw between Mr. Maduro and business leaders, and could possibly trigger a new wave of international sanctions.

President Jair Bolsonaro has not yet recognized his election defeat after months of warning, without evidence, that opponents would rig the vote.

They think this could mean more potential for the electronic figures to be tampered with and allege many of their observers were not allowed into the counts.

The United States responded by freezing Maduro’s assets and barring trade vlogdolisboa 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 two firms are credited with upending their industries, even as they sometimes veered close to financial collapse.

A physiographically diverse country, Venezuela incorporates the northern Andean mountain chains and interior highlands, the main portions of the Orinoco River basin with its expansive Llanos (plains), Lake Maracaibo, which is the largest lake in South America, and the spectacular Angel Falls, the world’s highest waterfall. The republic’s development pattern has been unique among Latin American countries in terms of the speed, sequence, and timing of economic and demographic growth.

Results were similarly violent when the opposition attempted to enter Venezuela from Brazil with relief supplies. Despite some defections to the opposition, the Venezuelan military again remained largely loyal to Maduro, whose authority Guaidó brazenly flouted by prominently reentering the country on March 4 by plane at the Caracas airport.