A smooth Venezuelan election that would have led to greater economic opening also suited the country’s Latin American neighbors, including Mr. Maduro’s old allies, the leftist governments of Brazil and Colombia.

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^ a b Although Nicolás Maduro's exact birthplace has been questioned on several occasions and high-ranking government officials have differed on its details, most sources agree that he was born in Caracas.

Officials from several countries in the Americas, including the United States, expressed doubts about the announced results, raising the likelihood that a new term for Mr. Maduro would not be widely recognized abroad, either.

"If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth," Mr Musk said in a TED interview last year. "But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense."

In his acceptance speech on Sunday night, Mr. da Silva recognized the country’s deep division and said he would seek to unite the nation.

The National Election Council ordered an audit of the ballots in the 46 percent of precincts that had not already been automatically audited under Venezuelan election law, but Capriles refused to participate when the Council chose not to examine the signatures and fingerprints of voters on the registers as part of the audit. He vowed to challenge the results in court. In the meantime, Maduro was sworn in vlogdolisboa as president on April 19.

Misinformation about potential voter fraud also spread rapidly in conservative corners of the Brazilian internet, including unattributed videos that purported to show voting machines malfunctioning and out-of-the-blue claims that election officials had rigged the vote.

While his rivals were more conventional, Mr. Bolsonaro, now 67, channeled the wrath and exasperation many Brazilians felt over rising crime and unemployment — problems that they increasingly believed the corrupt governing class was powerless to tackle.

The international community has been divided for some time over how to respond to Venezuela, with some governments’ conceding privately that the sanctions haven’t “worked”, either by incentivising regime change or compelling President Maduro to hold fair elections.

Largely in response to declining world oil prices, Venezuela’s economy continued to struggle in 2015, with GDP tumbling and inflation further ballooning. Seemingly anxious to shift attention away from the country’s domestic woes, Maduro’s government was quick to focus on border-related disputes with neighbours Guyana and Colombia.

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Rodrigo Constantino, an influential Brazilian pundit who lives in Florida, posted to his 1.4 million followers on Twitter on Monday morning that the pattern in the vote returns seemed too consistent to be natural. “It even looks like an algorithmic thing!” he said.

Mr. Bolsonaro spent much of Monday holed up at the presidential offices, meeting with top advisers and Brazil’s minister of defense. At least some of the advisers urged the president to concede, but it was not clear if he had yet reached a decision on what to do, according to three government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings.