00:00I'd hoped you and I could talk about political transition. And I guess what's sort of peculiar
00:03about this moment is you have Maduro being removed from power, yet it seems like there
00:08hasn't been much of a political transition yet. I imagine the key to that is elections at some
00:15point. Are they being talked about? What would they need to look like to remove what I imagine
00:20is a huge hurdle here for there being any kind of viable political change?
00:25Well, as we like to say in crisis group, a transition is a process, not an event. And
00:30one of the things I think that is problematic about the way some people in the opposition
00:35regard the term transition and the idea, the concept of transition, is that they don't
00:41distinguish between transition and regime change. In other words, transition for them is you
00:46leave power, we take power. That's a transition. A transition for us is a process whereby the
00:52government that is still in power concedes certain things over a period of time. Elections, at
00:59least a presidential election, to my mind, should be closer towards the end of that process
01:05than the beginning. One of the reasons why 2024 didn't work, I mean, the presidential election
01:12in 2024, which ought to have led to a transition. I mean, the opposition clearly won, the government
01:17refused to accept it. Why? Because that would have meant precisely that, you evacuate the
01:23presidential palace and we move in. That's not going to work if the people in decision-making
01:30positions, many of them aren't, say this for us is an existential issue. We can't just hand over
01:37power to these people who want to see us behind bars. And that can only be achieved through a thorough
01:41process of negotiation. That process of negotiation hasn't even started. But at the moment, we may be in a
01:47transition, but not necessarily a transition to democracy. It may be a transition to another form of authoritarian government.
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