'I feel very afraid' Maduro's refusal to resign raises fears for future

It was election night in Venezuela in 2013, and among the Chavista activists at Caracas city hall, nerves were jangling as early results showed their candidate, Nicolás Maduro, trailing his charismatic rival for the presidency, Henrique Capriles.

- Tom Phillips

"We were totally surprised.

We never thought Capriles would come so close," said Andrés Izarra, a former minister for Maduro's recently deceased mentor, Hugo Chávez, who recalls overhearing a disturbing conversation between two powerful Maduro allies.

"I remember clearly... they said: 'We are not going to surrender power under any circumstances,"" Izarra claimed. "I was surprised when I heard that... [I thought:] What the fuck do you mean, 'we're not going to give up power"?"

In the end, Maduro narrowly won the 2013 election. He has governed ever since, in increasingly authoritarian style. But 11 years after that overheard conversation - first reported in a book about Venezuela's collapse called Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse - the calculation of the South American strongman and his inner circle appears to be the same, after he allegedly committed "the largest electoral fraud in Latin America's history" last month so as to avoid losing power.

"The same thing I heard [in 2013] is the same attitude they have today," said Izarra, who went on to serve as Maduro's tourism minister but later fled to Europe after falling out with his boss and being accused of treason. "They will not give up power: never, never, never, ever," he predicted. "They can't live without it."

Maduro's refusal to quit despite growing international consensus that the election was stolen throws up a complex and troubling question for a country already reeling from one of modern history's worst peacetime economic and humanitarian meltdowns: what next?

Those who know Venezuela offer bleak projections. A former Brazilian foreign minister warned last week a "very serious conflict" was possible. "I don't want to use the expression 'civil war' - but I feel very afraid," Celso Amorim told the Brazilian channel GloboNews.