CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Polls have opened in Venezuela, where people are voting Sunday in a presidential election whose outcome will either lead to a seismic shift in politics or extend by six more years the policies that caused the world’s worst p
CARACAS, Venezuela — Polls have opened in Venezuela, where people are voting Sunday in a presidential election whose outcome will either lead to a seismic shift in politics or extend by six more years the policies that caused the world’s worst peacetime economic collapse.
González is representing a coalition of opposition parties after being selected in April as a last-minute stand-in for opposition powerhouse Maria Corina Machado, who was blocked by the Maduro-controlled Supreme Tribunal of Justice from running for any office for 15 years. Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, and once boasted Latin America's most advanced economy. But it entered into a free fall after Maduro took the helm. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000% led first to social unrest and then mass emigration.
The capital, Caracas, saw an increase in commercial activity after the pandemic, bolstering an economy the International Monetary Fund forecasts will grow 4% this year — one of the fastest in Latin America — after having shrunk 71% from 2012 to 2020. The opposition has tried to seize on the huge inequities arising from the crisis, during which Venezuelans abandoned their country's currency, the bolivar, for the U.S. dollar.
Most Venezuelans who migrated over the past 11 years settled in Latin America and the Caribbean. In recent years, many began setting their sights on the U.S.
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