President Maduro’s appeal to oil-rich nations Sunday laid bare just how isolated he has become, a Latin American oil expert says, before describing Venezuela as “broke” and drowning in $150 billion of debt.

The Venezuelan dictator’s plea came in a letter in which he appealed to OPEC for support, claiming that U.S. “direct aggression” was undermining Venezuela’s energy sector and threatening global oil stability.

In a letter to OPEC Secretary-General Haitham Al Ghais and published by Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil, Maduro wrote, “I hope to count on your best efforts to help stop this aggression, which is growing stronger and seriously threatens the balance of the international energy market, both for producing and consuming countries.”

TRUMP GAVE MADURO ULTIMATUM TO FLEE VENEZUELA AS LAND OPERATIONS LOOM: REPORT

“OPEC is unlikely to get involved,” Francisco J. Monaldi, Latin American Energy Policy Director, told Fox News Digital.

“Saudi Arabia is the key player, and they will not want to confront the Trump Administration. But more importantly, they never get involved in this kind of conflict,” he added.

In his plea, Maduro argued that U.S. actions were designed to “destabilize” Venezuela and urged oil-producing nations to show solidarity.

The U.S. imposed sanctions on Venezuela targeting government officials, state-run industries like oil and mining, and financial transactions in response to concerns over corruption, trafficking and human-rights abuses.

TRUMP PUSHES PEACE IN EUROPE, PRESSURE IN THE AMERICAS — INSIDE THE TWO-FRONT GAMBLE

His request followed President Trump’s order to close U.S. airspace over Venezuela, a move that tightened Washington’s pressure campaign and further restricted the regime’s ability to carry out international business.

Yet Monaldi stressed that Maduro knows his appeal was only symbolic and had “framed” the situation to suit his own narrative over oil.

“Maduro knows perfectly well that he is not going to get the reaction that he would want, but is framing the conflict as a conflict about oil,” he argued.

“Venezuela could once again become a major oil producer and produce about 4 million barrels a day in less than a decade, significantly quadrupling their current output.

WASHINGTON’S SHADOW WAR: HOW STRIKES ON CARTELS THREATEN TO COLLAPSE MADURO’S REGIME

“The country could increase production if the oil sector is opened fully to private foreign investment, and that requires regime change.

Four million barrels of oil per day will be the equivalent of about $90 billion per year in revenues, which is similar to what Venezuela received in the best of times.

The income could allow Venezuela to pay the debt back and recover swiftly, micro, economically, although it will take years to get to that figure.”

TRUMP SAYS VENEZUELA’S MADURO DOESN’T WANT TO ‘F*** AROUND’ WITH THE US

“Now Venezuela is a country that is broke and has $150 billion of debt,” he said.

Tensions escalated further this week after a call between President Trump and Maduro, in which Trump said the Venezuelan leader should step down and leave the country, a direct push toward political transition.

“A regime change is something that the U.S., if they can achieve it, would consider a positive outcome,” Monaldi said.

But he emphasized that Washington’s goals extend beyond energy. Venezuela, he said, has endured years of mismanagement and instability, making it not necessarily a safe bet.

MADURO BRANDISHES SWORD AT RALLY AS HE RAILS AGAINST ‘IMPERIALIST AGGRESSION’ AMID RISING TENSIONS WITH US

The broader U.S. priority, he added, is maintaining the Western Hemisphere.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

“The U.S. has priorities to preserve the Western Hemisphere as a region in which geopolitical rivals are not strong,” Monaldi said.

“The U.S. wants to reduce crime and drug trafficking in the region and the negative effects that Venezuela has had, you know, that have impacted the rest of the Latin American region,” he added.

A member of Honduras’s election council has accused one of her colleagues of seeking to derail proceedings as the Central American country awaits the outcome of Sunday’s presidential election.

In a social media post on Tuesday, Cossette Lopez-Osorio of the National Electoral Council (CNE) alleged that her fellow panel member, Marlon Ochoa, sought to delay a news conference through “intimidation”.

“The press conference to mark the resumption of the results release was disrupted,” Lopez-Osorio wrote.

“Councillor Marlon Ochoa opposed restarting the process and sent members of the LIBRE party, as well as members of his staff, to storm the Hotel Plaza Juan Carlos, engaging in acts of intimidation to prevent the public appearance.”

The accusations escalate the already heated atmosphere surrounding Sunday’s race.

Currently, two candidates are in a dead heat as votes continue to be counted: Salvador Nasralla of the centre-right Liberal Party and Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the right-wing National Party.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Nasralla had inched ahead with more than 39.93 percent of the vote, with Asfura close behind at 39.86 percent.

A former frontrunner in the race, Rixi Moncada of the left-leaning LIBRE party, had fallen behind in early vote counts. According to the CNE, approximately 20 percent of the votes have yet to be tallied.

Infighting on the council

But even before the first ballots were cast in Sunday’s election, controversies had gripped the council, resulting in accusations of malpractice from all three leading parties.

The CNE is led by a three-person panel. Each CNE councillor is selected by Honduras’s legislature to represent the three main political parties: the Liberal Party, the National Party and LIBRE, the party of outgoing President Xiomara Castro.

Lopez-Osorio represents the National Party. She has had a tumultuous relationship with her LIBRE counterpart, Ochoa.

In October, Ochoa filed a complaint with federal prosecutors, alleging that Lopez-Osorio had been caught in audio recordings conspiring with the Honduran military to influence the results.

Lopez-Osorio has denied the allegations. “These are fabricated recordings,” she told the Honduran newspaper La Prensa, calling Ochoa’s complaint “outrageous”.

Attorney General Johel Zelaya nevertheless opened an investigation into the audio recordings on October 29.

Ochoa, meanwhile, continued to raise doubts about the election proceedings as the November 30 vote drew near.

On November 9, for instance, he posted on social media that a test of the voting system had “failed”, citing connectivity issues.

That result, he said, “constitutes further proof that the leaked audios are true and that there is a conspiracy against the electoral process, orchestrated from within the electoral body itself”.

The CNE has faced other high-profile conflicts as well. Also in October, the head of Honduras’s joint chiefs of staff, Roosevelt Hernandez, said the armed forces would seek to hold its own vote count.

But the president of the CNE, Liberal Party member Ana Paola Hall, rejected his demand, and legal experts have said there is no constitutional basis for the Honduran military to review the results.

Trouble at the ballot box

Fears of irregularities and electoral interference have long loomed over Honduras’s presidential race.

In March, for example, advocates argued that long lines and delays in the distribution of election material impeded voters from participating in the election. Some polling stations stayed open late into the night as a result of the delays.

This week’s vote count also stuttered amid government website crashes. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Lopez-Osorio addressed some of the “technical failures” and “transmission issues” that have marred the proceedings.

She denied that the hiccups were part of any kind of conspiracy. “It is literally a technical failure in the disclosure platform,” she told CNN host Fernando del Rincon.

Lopez-Osorio explained that the CNE was “searching for explanations” and had been in contact with the company in charge of the technology, ASD SAS. The vote count, she added, would continue.

“We have very narrow margins, and we also have a large proportion of ballots to process in these remaining days,” she said.

A statement published on the CNE website echoed her comments. “The CNE has demanded that ASD SAS provide the fastest possible technical solution, so that all citizens have full and permanent access to the statistical data,” it read in part.

Still, those comments are unlikely to dampen efforts to contest the election results in the coming days.

Already, United States President Donald Trump — supporter of the right-wing Asfura — has amplified election fraud claims with posts on his online platform Truth Social.

“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” Trump wrote on Monday.

Moncada, the left-wing candidate, also appears poised to challenge the results. In a statement this week, she denounced Trump for his “imperial foreign interference” in the election process. She also called the initial election results proof that October’s audio leak was authentic.

“The elections are not lost,” she wrote. “The two-party system imposed its electoral plot on us, following the trap revealed by the 26 audio recordings.”

She added, “I declare that I will maintain my positions and that I will not surrender.”

For her part, Lopez-Osorio also called on the electorate to be vigilant, ending her post about her colleague Ochoa with the message: Stay “alert, Honduran people”.

As São Paulo-based development and training hub BrLab gears up for its 15th anniversary edition in 2026, one of Latin America’s most influential project labs has opened submissions and unveiled a raft of changes designed to expand its reach, deepen its support for emerging talent and push sustainability up the regional agenda.

The 15th BrLab will run April 7-14, primarily in São Paulo, with satellite activities in Brasilia and Recife. Producers, directors and writers from across Latin America, Spain and Portugal will convene for a week of labs, market encounters and open-industry programming.

Applications for its four 2026 workshops – BrLab Features, BrLab Rough Cut, BrLab Audience Design and the new BrLab Kids – are free and open from Nov. 12 to Dec. 12, 2025 via the lab’s website.

“For us, every edition is an opportunity to identify what’s being imagined across the region,” says BrLab founder, director and curator Rafael Sampaio. “The industry trusts us with new ideas year after year.”

Founded in 2011 and organized by Klaxon Cultura Audiovisual, BrLab has grown from a small workshop for Latin American features into a compact but influential platform, more training hub than full-blown market, yet firmly embedded in the regional calendar for projects looking to sharpen their creative and financial strategies.

Supported by institutions such as the Ibermedia program, Projeto Paradiso and Spcine – and now Petrobras as a multi-year sponsor – BrLab receives more than 400 submissions annually, curated by a professional selection committee. 

As of 2025, 62 features that passed through its various sections have been produced and released, 17 more are in post-production and another 10 are financed for production through 2026. By next year the tally of completed films linked to the lab is expected to approach 90.

Many have premiered at top-tier festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Sundance and Toronto. Recent standouts include “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,” which won the top prize at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard; “Levante” (Cannes Critics’ Week 2023); “Légua,” which screened at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight; Sundance title “Los Tiburones”; Berlinale competition multi-prize winner “Las Heiresses”; and San Sebastián Golden Shell laureate “Los Reyes del Mundo.” “The Wolf Behind the Door,” selected in BrLab’s very first edition in 2011, later bowed at Toronto and San Sebastián, announcing a new talent to track in Fernando Coimbra.

Avoiding the Crowded Fall Festival Corridor

Starting with this 15th edition, BrLab has permanently shifted from its traditional October slot to early April. The move is designed to avoid the crowded fall festival corridor and give projects more time to polish scripts and cuts before premiering in the back half of the year.

“This change creates a more useful rhythm for project development,” Sampaio says. “We want our selected teams to take full advantage of the international circuit, and April positions them well to do that – especially for the Rough Cut Lab.”

In 2021, BrLab launched BrLab CoPro, a curated boutique co-production forum aimed at galvanizing new partnerships with Brazil and other Latin American territories. The forum invites producers, funds, sales agents and broadcasters looking to structure cross-border packages at a time when co-production has become essential for financing and circulation.

This platform is deepening BrLab’s role as a connector not only of talent but of the institutional and industrial players that can actually get films made.

Flagship Labs and Audience Design

The program’s backbone remains BrLab Features, focused on fiction features from Latin America plus Spain and Portugal. 12 projects will receive mentorship on script, direction, production and distribution from a roster of regional heavyweights. Longtime backer Programa Ibermedia, a partner since the first edition, will once again offer participation grants to selected teams.

Running in parallel, BrLab Rough Cut caters to fiction and documentary features in the editing stage from across the Ibero-American world, pairing each project with an editing tutor and a small group of peers to help fine-tune the cut and position the film for festivals, sales and distribution.

After an initial phase centered on Brazil, BrLab’s Audience Design program returns with a broader remit, now open to the whole of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Inspired by methodologies Sampaio first encountered at TorinoFilmLab, the workshop helps teams think strategically about audiences from development onwards, mapping core and secondary viewers and plotting release paths that can combine festivals, theaters, platforms and alternative circuits.

“In Brazil everyone talks about ‘creating new audiences,’ but for years people have become disconnected from our own cinema — they’re simply not educated to see themselves on screen,” Sampaio explained. “That’s why we need spaces like BrLab, where Latin American narratives and histories can be developed and protected, even as we keep one eye on the market, because being represented on screen is a right.”

Kids Lab in Recife

The biggest new innovation now announced for 2026 is BrLab Kids, a new workshop dedicated to film and series projects for children and young audiences, which will unspool in Recife. The initiative responds to what Sampaio sees as a chronic lack of specific public policy and institutional support for kids content in Brazil and much of Latin America.

“If children don’t grow up watching Latin American stories, they won’t feel connected to our history and our cinema when they become adults,” he argued.

Projects selected for BrLab Kids will receive tutorship from writers specialized in young audiences, including Janaína Tokitaka and Gabriella Mancini, alongside pedagogical consultants. Recife-based producer Nara Aragão will oversee production mentoring.

For Sampaio, the kids strand is closely linked to the audience-design push, offering a space to tackle the challenges of family titles competing with U.S. studio fare while trying to build a loyal local audience for regional stories.

Green Initiative With Petrobras

Backed for the first time by Petrobras as presenting partner and lead sponsor, BrLab’s 15th edition will also launch a sustainability push. Curated by pioneering green-production specialist Ariane Ferreira, the lab has assembled Think Tank BrLab Petrobras, together with Cinema Verde Festival, an initiative to adapt emerging international eco-standards to Latin American realities and to encourage local institutions to integrate environmental criteria into film funding.

Sampaio points to new European reports and incentive schemes around greener film and TV production as a reference, but stresses that Latin America is starting from a different baseline. The aim, he says, is to convene the industry around practical steps that can be progressively adopted in the region.

“In many cases, the only real green practices in our region are happening on big international streamer shows that arrive with their own protocols,” he says. “If we can pilot ideas in the audiovisual sector, that can also inspire changes in other parts of society.”

Co-Production Hub in a Rebounding Brazil

BrLab’s 15th edition comes as Brazilian cinema experiences renewed momentum. After years of funding paralysis, minority co-production schemes have been revived and Brazil is once again fast consolidating as a sought-after partner on major Latin American projects, often in combination with European finance.

“Today, foreign projects can come to BrLab to find Brazilian minority co-producers,” Sampaio notes. “When we launched, Ibermedia was practically the only co-production avenue. Now there are multiple funds, and the lab has become a natural meeting point.”