This weekend marks one year since Nicolas Maduro became president of Venezuela in a narrow election victory. Maduro promised to carry on the legacy of his mentor, Hugo Chavez. While Maduro's supporters say he has done a lot for a country struggling with high crimes rates, unemployment and soaring inflation, his rioting opposition label him a failure.

When Judith Faraiz's son was near death after a severe motorcycle accident, she put his life in the hands of God and Cuban doctors. 

In the dark before dawn one night last February, Colonel Googlis Martín Caballero was driving a white Ford Explorer through the Venezuelan countryside not far from the Colombian border. With him were his wife, his daughter and roughly half a ton of cocaine. 

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and opposition coalition representatives agreed Tuesday to hold talks on ending two months of anti-government protests that have left 39 people dead in their oil-rich nation.

The color red sets off alarm bells these days in this western Venezuelan city, where anti-government protests sparked nationwide demonstrations that have endured since early February. Save for the red stripe on the Venezuelan flag, which also has yellow and blue, here anything of that color looks suspiciously allusive to the late president Hugo Chávez, who popularized red among his supporters as the official color of his self-styled “Bolivarian” revolution.

As much of the world’s media continues to focus on the politics of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and the continued violent protests in the Ukraine, another country closer to home threatens to descend into civil war. Street demonstrations throughout Venezuela, now entering their second week, have turned a country already suffering from high rates of violent crime and murders into a battleground.

Tens of thousands of white-clad demonstrators flooded the streets of eastern Caracas yesterday in the largest show of strength so far against President Nicholás Maduro’s rule. The arrest of opposition firebrand Leopoldo López for fomenting unrest – and the heavy-handed tactics of security forces – hasn’t snapped the momentum of the demonstrations. Instead, Venezuela's fractured opposition banded together to denounce the jailing of Mr. López and the government’s broader crackdown on dissent.