like many leftists, i had some cautious optimism for bolivarianism as devised by hugo chavez, but maduro is not an appropriate successor. from what i can tell, claims of rigged elections are mostly propaganda, although the revolt by the small venezuelan upper middle class against the much larger working class is very real. maduro does seem to retain popular support overall, despite being extremely unpopular with the wealthy. maduro is being targeted as a russian proxy, like assad was; it has nothing to do with democracy, it's a part of this post cold war clean up operation that's been underway since 2003 and has resulted in the americans removing about a dozen russian-backed dictators or democracies (the form of government doesn't matter and it isn't what this is about) and replacing them with washington aligned autocrats. the orwellian irony is that while the governments removed have sometimes been democratic, the united states always replaces them with obedient dictators.

i don't have the intellectual support for maduro that i did for assad, who i think should have been allowed to carry out his reforms. the best way to a stable, democratic syria was through assad. as expected, the americans (via turkey) replaced him with a bloodthirsty islamic fascist nazi dictator, which assad wasn't. the new regime in syria is everything america falsely accused the old regime of being.

maduro isn't worth supporting and should really resign. if he had some democratic legitimacy at one point, he's been president too long and needs to move on.