In the words of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nicolas Maduro’s government is increasingly a “dictatorship whose economic policies and generalized corruption have terribly impoverished” Venezuela. A founding member of OPEC with extensive petroleum reserves, the once prosperous nation is plagued by shortages of goods, a stratospheric unemployment rate, and epidemic levels of crime, including an escalating crescendo of crimes committed by the state.

When students took to the streets in February 2014 over thirty of them were killed. How did the government respond? Were the security forces investigated? Were enforcement policies changed? Perhaps the government actually listened to the students’ demands for free and fair elections? No. Instead the government responded to its own killing spree by arresting opposition leader and former mayor of Chacao Leopoldo López on the grounds that organizing protests calling on the government to step down amounted to a putsch. Maduro doesn’t appear to understand the difference between a free and fair election and a coup d’état.