Venezuela's opposition and President Nicolas Maduro's government are locked in a high-stakes stand-off after each side claimed victory in the nation's presidential election.
Several foreign governments, including the US, held off recognising the results as election officials delayed releasing detailed vote tallies after proclaiming Maduro the winner with 51 per cent of the vote, to 44 per cent for retired diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez.
“Venezuelans and the entire world know what happened,” Gonzalez said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has “serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people”.
Gabriel Boric, the leftist leader of Chile, said "the Maduro regime should understand that the results it published are difficult to believe”.
Meanwhile, on the streets of Caracas, a mix of anger, tears and loud pot banging greeted the announcement of results by the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council.
"This isn't possible," said Ayari Padron, wiping away tears. "This is a humiliation.”
Voters lined up before dawn to cast ballots on Sunday, boosting the opposition’s hopes it was about to break Maduro’s grip on power.
The official results came as a shock to opposition members who had celebrated, online and outside a few voting centres, what they believed was a landslide victory for Gonzalez.
Opposition Leader Maria Corina Machado said the margin of Gonzalez’s victory was “overwhelming”, based on voting tallies the campaign received from representatives stationed at about 40 per cent of ballot boxes.
Authorities delayed releasing the results from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours”, hampering attempts to verify the results.
Gonzalez, 74, was tapped in April as a last-minute stand-in for opposition powerhouse Machado, who was blocked by the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court from running for any office for 15 years.
The delay in announcing a winner - which came six hours after polls were supposed to close - indicated a deep debate inside the government about how to proceed after Maduro’s opponents came out early in the evening all but claiming victory.
After finally claiming to have won, Maduro accused unidentified foreign enemies of trying to hack the voting system.
“This is not the first time that they have tried to violate the peace of the republic,” he said to a few hundred supporters at the presidential palace.
He provided no evidence to back the claim but promised “justice” for those who try to stir violence in Venezuela.
Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, and once boasted Latin America's most advanced economy.
But it entered into a freefall after Maduro took the helm. Plummeting oil prices, widespread shortages and hyperinflation that soared past 130,000 per cent led first to social unrest and then mass emigration.
Economic sanctions from the US seeking to force Maduro from power after his 2018 re-election - which the US and dozens of other countries condemned as illegitimate - only deepened the crisis.
