This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 16th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What is Chavizmo without Hugo Chavez?

The contested and possibly fraudulent election in Venezuela has meant protests

and the now President Nicholas Maduro struggling to hold on to power in a country

that the Chavez regime left devastated. Juan Carlos Adago, the Project Coordinator for Latin America

at the Cato Institute, comments.

The opposition claims that there was electoral fraud last Sunday when the government control electoral council announced that

Nikolaas Maduro, the air of Ugo Chavez, won the election by 235,000 votes.

There were many irregularities reported after the polls closed on Sunday.

Security forces taking away ballots from voting stations without being counted,

or armed goons preventing people from participating in the count of the votes in the electoral centers.

But also apparently the information that the opposition had prior to the announcement

was that they were actually leading the votes as long as they had

representatives in the voting stations counting the votes those representatives could

send the Caprile Central Command, the Opposition Central

Command information about what was the state of the vote and the information

they had is that they were actually leading the vote.

However, by 11 PM or so,

the Electoral Council announced that Madura

was the one who won the election by 200,000 votes.

And this of course set the stage for this protest, especially because now the electoral

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