On the last Sunday of July, millions of Venezuelans headed to the polls to vote in their presidential election.
After a decade that has seen a drastic economic decline and the exodus of more than a quarter of the country’s population, the opposition was hopeful it would win and that Nicolás Maduro’s 11-year reign would be brought to an end.
But that night, with little evidence to support the claim, Venezuela’s strongman leader was declared the winner.
As the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips describes to Helen Pidd, almost immediately thousands of people took to the streets to protest over what they saw as an election stolen. The government crackdown on protesters in the weeks since has been brutal.
With neither the opposition nor Maduro willing to concede defeat, where does Venezuela go now?
Photograph: Alfredo Lasry R/Getty Images
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