In a statement, he called Mr. Maduro a “bad leader who dreams of becoming a dictator.”There is also the potential powder keg on Venezuela’s streets. “We need order, justice,” Mr. Maduro said during an interview with state television this month. It helped enable Mr. Chávez to redistribute state wealth to the poor, nationalize foreign assets and make him popular with his supporters. Now Mr. Maduro has taken that option at a time when the leftists are dogged by their deepest crisis in decades. But many fear that a likely first step will be the abolition of the country’s legislature, a tactic first used by Mr. Chávez when rewriting the Constitution in 1999.

Source: New York Times July 29, 2017 08:40 UTC