Under Maduro, the once-rich oil producer has spiraled into a severe crisis that has driven millions of Venezuelans to leave the country.

The Lima Group, including Costa Rica, issued a statement: "The main message is without a doubt the non-recognition of the legitimacy of the new period of the Venezuelan regime."

Dozens of people waited for the independence torch in Peñas Blancas, the Costa Rican town on the border with Nicaragua. There, the two countries are divided by a diagonal line where Costa Rican asphalt meets Nicaraguan cement.

Damage to bee populations has wide-ranging effects.

We’re a more unequal society, grumpier, more distrustful.

The government of President Nicolás Maduro qualified the result as a major victory, since polls showed the opposition as the clear favorite in the elections.

Venezuela's Foreign Minister called her Costa Rican counterpart a “political illiterate” and accused him of promoting violence in Venezuela.

San José’s Parque Nacional was filled with a sea of orange on Wednesday, as groups from across the country gathered for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, a day designated by United Nations resolution in 1999.

Barely a news cycle passes in the region without some cabal of political chiefs and cronies getting caught with their hands in the public till. A recent report by Global Financial Integrity pegged Latin America for nearly a fifth of the yearly global outflows of illicit funds, worth 3.3 percent of regional GDP, from 2003 to 2012.

A man who shot up an anti-government protest in Nicaragua last week says a government critic put him up to it. Others say the Sandinista party was behind it.