| The inside baseball details of yesterday’s story. |
...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions...
advocates and behind-the-scenes lobbying, U.N. member-states on Thursday elected Venezuela
...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeds places like Honduras and El Salvador, and a significant proportion of the populace as refugeed to Colombia and points south...onto the world’s body’s Human Rights Council, handing the socialist Maduro regime more votes than Costa Rica, a stable liberal democracy.
Until the small Central American country declared its candidacy just weeks ago, Venezuela had been virtually assured a seat on the Geneva-based HRC, since it was one of two candidates running for two seats earmarked for the Latin America and the Caribbean group.
But Costa Rica’s candidacy, while turning the "closed slate" election into a competitive race ‐ with three countries running for two vacant seats ‐ failed to win over sufficient member-states.
Voting by secret ballot in New York, 105 members of the U.N. General Assembly threw their support behind the Maduro regime. Costa Rica received 96 votes. (Brazil, the region’s third candidate, won 153 votes.)
Amid a deep political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, the U.S. and 54 other countries no longer recognize Nicolás Maduro’s regime as the legitimate government. They support the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó
...Venezuelan politician, a member of the social-democratic Popular Will party, and serves as a federal deputy to the National Assembly representing the state of Vargas. In 2019 he was appointed by the Popular Will party to become the president of the National Assembly, after which he declared he was acting president of the country, challenging Nicolás Maduro's presidency and starting the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis....
, as interim president in accordance with the constitution, pending new elections.
But Maduro retains strong support in the bloc of developing nations known as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), whose 120 members comprise a majority in the General Assembly.