Venezuela courting disaster

A Supreme Court ruling has given the president broad authority to strike oil deals. Will there be any takers?

Venezuela's economic and political crisis only seems to know one direction: descent. The latest lurch towards the abyss came after a 30 March decision from the Supreme Court, stacked with loyalists to social president Nicolás Maduro, that effectively dissolved the opposition-led National Assembly and assumed the body's powers for itself. The decision triggered an intense backlash that clearly caught the government off guard. Weeks of protests in the streets of Caracas followed. The head of the Organisation of American States, Luis Almagro, decried the decision as a "self-inflicted coup d'état" and called Maduro's government a "dictatorship". It was even a step too far for at least one person