Venezuela

The news in our country and abroad has been relentlessly bad ever since we entered the calamitous Biden Era just months ago, but there are a few hopeful signs out there still.

One of the best is a story receiving almost no coverage in the larger press: the Venezuela elections this November. The democratic opposition has agreed to participate after years of boycotting the Maduro regime’s rigged voting. The EU will send a large team of election monitors and Maduro has already been releasing some political prisoners in a bid to end sanctions. Some are even predicting Maduro would be willing to retire from office at the end of his current term in 2024.

Get back to me when Maduro is toppled.

A seemingly endless lake of cardboard and tin shacks surrounds the perimeter of a former airport runway in Colombia’s desert-like city of Maicao. Known locally as La Pista, the area is home to more than 2,000 families, and is one of 44 informal settlements to have emerged around the city in the past two years.

The old airport has become a landing strip for desperate migrants and bi-national indigenous Wayuu people fleeing the economic and political crisis in Venezuela, where the basic essentials of life are hard to come by.

The continuing exodus of millions of Venezuelans is reaching “a tipping point” as the response to the crisis remains critically underfunded.

More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships. It has become the largest external displacement crisis in the region’s history, and the most underfunded.

Venezuelan authorities seized the main offices of the anti-government El Nacional newspaper on Friday after the media organization failed to pay a $13 million (€10.7 million) fine related to a defamation ruling.

Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) ordered the paper to pay the fine last month, ruling on a 2015 lawsuit against the outlet filed by Diosdado Cabello, a lawmaker and member of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

MIAMI (AP) — Matthias Krull pulls up his pant leg and slides a gardening shear on the ankle monitor that for two years has been a constant reminder of his crimes.

…Krull’s troubles stem from his time as a banker in Venezuela, a nation that has been plagued by epic corruption in two decades of socialist rule, first under the populist President Hugo Chávez, then his handpicked successor, Nicolás Maduro. During that time, Krull, who worked for the Julius Baer Group, played a singular role as the go-to private banker for the so-called Bolichicos — the privileged offspring of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution — as they looked to shuttle their overnight fortunes offshore. Among his would-be clients: Maduro’s stepsons.