Nicaraguans were back on the streets in their thousands on Sunday to protest what they called a government breach of a two-day truce agreed during Church-mediated peace talks. Students at a university in northeastern Managua claim police attacked them during a demonstration outside the campus on Saturday night in which four students were shot and injured.
Venezuela’s populist leader Nicolas Maduro won a new six-year term on Sunday, but his main rivals disavowed the election alleging massive irregularities in a process critics decried as a farce propping up a dictatorship. Victory for the 55-year-old former bus driver, who replaced Hugo Chavez after his death from cancer in 2013, may trigger a new round of western sanctions against the populist government as it grapples with a ruinous economic crisis.
Little by little, around noon on this Sunday, Venezuelans living in Uruguay gathered in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Montevideo to protest against what they consider “unfair and fraudulent” presidential elections. The diplomatic office, where an electoral table was installed where 405 Venezuelans living in Uruguay would be authorized to vote by the electoral register, was fenced with by the police for fear of violent attacks.
A few hours before the presidential election of May 20 in Venezuela, which is not recognized by dozens of countries in the region and is classified as fraud by the opposition of that country, official statements and messages favorable to the candidate and current president , Nicolás Maduro, have flooded the programs of the open media in Venezuela, according to a report by the Press Institute and Venezuela Society (IPYS).
Two days before presidential elections in Venezuela, the Trump administration on Friday announced sanctions against a powerful governing party politician, accusing him of drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering and embezzling government money.
Venezuela's diplomatically isolated president got a show of support from his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan and Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona on Thursday ahead of a weekend election widely decried as unfair. The United States, the European Union and major Latin American countries have criticized Sunday's vote in which populist President Nicolas Maduro is likely to win re-election to a six-year term.
The United States based cereal maker Kellogg is pulling out of Venezuela because of the economic deterioration in the country. Workers said they were prevented from entering the plant in the central city of Maracay on Tuesday. The announcement comes ahead of Sunday's presidential elections.
US Vice President Mike Pence on Monday urged Venezuela to suspend a divisive May 20 election he denounced as a sham, as Washington slapped fresh sanctions on Nicolas Maduro's regime. In an address to the Organization of American States, Pence slammed the upcoming presidential vote -- boycotted by the opposition and branded illegitimate by much of the international community.
Oil prices rose for the fourth straight day on Monday to hit levels not seen since late 2014, boosted by the latest trouble for Venezuelan oil company PDVSA and the possibility that the United States could re-impose sanctions on Iran.
The European Parliament voted on Thursday for the immediate suspension of the presidential elections on May 20 in Venezuela, considering that they do not guarantee any credibility for their lack of transparency and inclusion. In this way, the body and the representative of the European Union (EU) for Foreign Policy, Federica Mogherini, call for the restructuring of an electoral agenda in which there are no outlawed candidates and the necessary electoral guarantees are fulfilled.