Venezuela's exiled National Assembly deepened the country's institutional crisis Wednesday by appointing parallel officials to two key government posts, establishing shadow Attorney General Larry Devoe and Ombudsman Eglée González Lobato to challenge the Maduro regime's control over judicial institutions.
The opposition legislature, according to Venezuelan media El Nacional, approved both appointments in a virtual session reflecting the parliament's forced exile. The move creates yet another layer in Venezuela's complex parallel government structure—two legislatures, two sets of judicial officials, but only one with actual enforcement power.
The opposition-controlled Assembly has operated largely from exile since 2020, when the Maduro government established its own loyalist legislature following disputed parliamentary elections that international observers deemed neither free nor fair. While the opposition parliament retains diplomatic recognition from dozens of countries, including the United States and most of the European Union, it controls no territory and commands no security forces within Venezuela.
Devoe and González Lobato join a growing roster of opposition officials appointed to positions they cannot actually occupy. The regime's Attorney General Tarek William Saab and Ombudsman Alfredo Ruiz continue to control the physical offices, institutional resources, and prosecutorial apparatus inside Venezuela.
The appointments carry symbolic rather than practical weight, but signal that Venezuela's opposition—battered by years of repression, mass emigration, and internal divisions—has not abandoned its claim to institutional legitimacy. In Venezuela, as across nations experiencing collapse, oil wealth that once seemed a blessing became a curse—and ordinary people pay the price.
