Maduro recently ordered all American diplomats to leave the country, giving them a deadline of 30 days to comply. Many top U.S. officials, including President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the leader of the country.

Protests against Maduro's government have been widespread for more than a week. More than two dozen people have died, and several hundred have been detained by police.

Guaido took the unusual step of swearing himself in as interim president. A number of other countries, including Brazil and Canada and the U.S., announced their support for the move. Officials from Russia, long an ally of and investor in Venezuela, have opposed the move.

Maduro was re-elected to a second six-year term as president in May 2018, in an election that most opposition parties boycotted. Many opposition candidates had been prohibited from running; others were in jail; still others left the country. Maduro won by a large margin; the National Assembly did not recognize the result.

The political polarity is evident at the highest levels of government. The National Assembly, long the country's top legislative body, has a majority of opposition members. In 2017, Maduro's government created a new top legislative group the government-majority National Constituent Assembly, ostensibly to draft a new constitution but also to act as a a supreme legislative body. It was the National Constituent Assembly that banned three of the country's most influential opposition parties from participating in the 2018 presidential elections.

Maduro was elected in 2013, succeeding his mentor, the very popular Hugo Chavez, who had died. Maduro's first term was marked by a tremendous decline in the economy and a steep increase in the number of people leaving the country.

Some reports have said that up to half a million Venezuelans had left in the past year alone and that the number of refugees in the past few years was more than 3 million. The country has been mired in an economic crisis for several years. Shortages of food and medicine have become the norm, as prices for those items and many other kinds of everyday things have skyrocketed.