In Venezuela, the 1% won yesterday-there's nothing else you can say.

[Ken Burch]

95. At the very least, the anti-Chavista left parties should have formed their own alliance.

There was no excuse for them to align with the economic royalists around Capriles in the MUD, and to endorse the right-wing narrative that the PSUV not a "legitimate government". There was never any chance of Venezuela turning into the DDR of South America, for Goddess' sakes.

Also, it's probably that nothing authoritarian would ever have happened under Chavismo if the "opposition" hadn't keep trying to overthrow Chavez over and over again. There was never any justification at any time for anti-Chavez coup attempts, like the one in which Capriles himself scaled the walls of the Cuban Embassy looking for Bolivarians to kidnap(and, if he had succeeded in kidnapping, probably had executed).

Why couldn't they have just been a "loyal opposition"? Why did they ever have to start the orchestrated melodrama in the streets? The acceptance of defeat by the PSUV proves that none of that was ever needed, just as the acceptance of defeat by the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections proves that the entire Contra War and the thousands of innocent lives it took should never have happened at all.