Still, the people who have had it with Maduro are willing to take great risks to resume the recall referendum. Since Chavez’s death, global oil prices have collapsed, decimating Venezuela’s export earnings—95 percent of which came from oil in December 2014. The country’s long-time comrade in the global Communist struggle, Cuba, is now in a period of full-on détente with capitalist Washington, while the leftist Worker’s Party in Brazil is in tatters. Party officials have been implicated in corruption and narcotics trafficking. The once-fractured political opposition, meanwhile, has begun to coalesce, as extreme shortages of basic foodstuffs and medicines have metastasized desperation into rage.

This week, I spoke with as Francisco Toro, a columnist for The Washington Post and executive editor of Caracas Chronicles, a Venezuela-focused news and analysis site. Toro has long predicted that, if the government failed to handle the referendum process shrewdly, the people would respond. And they have. So is the end nearing for Maduro? A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Siddhartha Mahanta: First off, how do you situate the current turmoil in the grander sweep of things?

Francisco Toro: In some ways, it feels similar to protest movements against chavismo starting back in 2002, when the first big protest happened. But there are many more differences than similarities. The thing to understand about the chavista movement [is that] it’s moved towards authoritarianism really gradually. This kind of glacial, but steady pace of breaking down civil liberties, of taking over institutions, of undermining checks and balances. The degree of democratic drift that we’ve seen, the institutional drift, is pretty extreme.

The one aspect of the Cuban model that Chavez understood was going to be really dicey was going to be having elections. In the modern world, if you have no elections, that clearly qualifies you as a dictatorship. But [the government of] Chavez was rich enough, he had enough money, and he was popular enough, [and] charismatic enough, that he could get away with having elections and win them because there was plenty of money around and everybody liked Chavez.

In the last three years, you don’t have Chavez and you don’t have money. The math is fairly easy to do. The last survey I saw had Maduro losing on the recall question eight to one. That’s where we are now. They’ve understood that if they’re going to hang on to power—that is clearly their priority—there just can’t be any more elections. And the opposition has understood that, if you let this one go, that’s it. Game, set, match.

Mahanta: Why does the opposition want to remove Maduro from power? And who exactly is the opposition?

Toro: It’s really difficult to get across how badly governed the country is. If you just describe what happens, [you sound] like a shrill, far-right-wing lunatic who’s describing some kind of Fox News dystopia. But, it’s like that. [The government has] taken over virtually all of the large companies. [It has] taken over most of the mid-size manufacturing companies—everything that makes something you might want to consume. The few [it] hasn’t taken over, you’ve created this regulatory nightmare around them where you can’t do anything and nothing works. Nothing works. Businesses can’t produce. That sort of worked when oil prices were very high, because [under those conditions] who needs to make anything? You sell oil, you get money, and you buy stuff abroad. You just import your way out of the crisis. Oil prices fall and suddenly the basic lunacy of trying to run the country this way comes home very clearly.