By Kejal Vyas, Ryan Dube and Juan Forero 

CARACAS, Venezuela -- For Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the easy part was winning a presidential race where the main opposition candidates were barred, their supporters boycotted the vote, and his government controlled every aspect of the contest, including counting votes.

Now comes the hard part: Trying to pull his increasingly isolated country out of the worst economic crisis in its history and prevent growing chaos from turning a once wealthy nation into a failed state that threatens its South American neighbors.

Mr. Maduro won a new six-year term in Sunday's vote by a landslide, with 68% support versus 21% for Henri Falcón, a breakaway former member of the opposition, and 11% for a former evangelical pastor, according to figures from the government-controlled state election agency. Mr. Falcón said the election was unfair and called for a new vote later this year.

Democracies around the world condemned the election. On Monday, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence called the vote a "sham -- neither free nor fair." He called on Venezuela to allow humanitarian aid into the country and said the U.S. "will not sit idly by as Venezuela crumbles."

The White House also issued a new executive order that broadened a ban on Americans from buying Venezuelan debt. The latest order impedes Venezuela's ability to sell its foreign assets and prohibits Americans from buying any debt owed to Venezuela.

"This executive order closes down a different set of loopholes that we saw the regime attempting to exploit," said a senior Trump administration official, adding that other countries in the hemisphere had taken similar actions Monday and that the U.S. believed that Mr. Maduro's government would see its ability to make such sales "severely circumscribed" as a result.

A coalition of 14 nations from throughout the Americas announced early Monday they wouldn't recognize the result of the vote. The countries urged international entities not to extend Venezuela any credit, and said they would recall their ambassadors from Caracas to protest the unfair and opaque vote.

The diplomatic isolation is likely to increase Mr. Maduro's reliance on a handful of other authoritarian nations, including Cuba, China, Russia, Iran and Turkey -- all of which offered Mr. Maduro their congratulations.

With the win, Mr. Maduro enters the ranks of other strongmen, including Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who held power through dire economic conditions, according to Johns Hopkins University professor Steve Hanke, an expert on hyperinflation.

"You know ultimately it's going to be a death blow, a dagger in the heart, but you just don't know when it's going to come," he said.

The election, which drew the lowest turnout for a Venezuelan presidential vote since the 1950s, leaves Mr. Maduro with little legitimacy, particularly as hyperinflation hollows out the economy and an estimated 5,000 Venezuelans flee the country every day. The U.N. expects up to 1.8 million people to leave by year-end, swamping Colombia, Brazil and other neighbors and creating South America's worst refugee crisis in modern times.

For many ordinary Venezuelans, Mr. Maduro's win means more of the same: a country sliding deeper into crisis with little chance of a turnaround. Prices double roughly every few weeks, the economy is nearly 50% smaller than it was in 2013, and food and medicines are increasingly scarce. Public services like electricity are collapsing, and so is oil production, which provides the country with nearly all of its dollar income. Diseases such as measles and malaria are spreading fast.

Many here awoke on Monday with a sense of dread, anxious that as bad as things are now, they could get a lot worse.

"I feel like crying, I feel depressed, I feel rage," said Adriana Luna, 35, a social worker outside Caracas who had abided by the main opposition coalition's call to boycott the vote. "You feel like you no longer are alive, like you have terminal cancer."

Along with three of her brothers and one of her sisters, she is now set to join a growing exodus of Venezuelans. They plan to head to Colombia or Ecuador and make enough money to send home to keep family members left behind alive.

"It's the only way for the family to survive," she said.

Mr. Maduro, a former bus driver and protégé of the late populist Hugo Chávez, has offered few plans to rescue the economy's decay beyond cutting three zeros off the local currency, a step economists say will do nothing to halt price increases. His government blames the situation on outside forces like the U.S. and big business,

"The economy is Maduro's Achilles' heel," said Asdrubal Oliveros, director of the Caracas-based consultancy Ecoanalítica.

Venezuela faces $6 billion in debt repayments during the second half of this year. Investors holding some of the nearly $3 billion in defaulted government bonds are organizing to target Venezuelan assets -- like oil shipments -- as compensation. Energy giant ConocoPhillips has already begun seizing Venezuelan oil in the Caribbean to recoup $2 billion that an international arbitration court awarded the company for assets that Venezuela nationalized in 2007.

OPEC reported that Venezuela, which sits atop the world's largest oil reserves, saw production fall to 1.4 million barrels a day in April, down from 2.4 million five years ago. That is the lowest level since the early 1950s, when the country was on the rise as one of the planet's top exporters, according to economist Orlando Ochoa.

Falling production will prevent Venezuela from benefiting from rising oil prices. Making matters worse, the country only receives cash for about a third of its current production, economists say. The remainder is given at cut-rate prices to Caribbean allies like Cuba, to repay loans to China and Russia, and to supply the domestic market, where gasoline is virtually free.

"These challenges means that this is an administration that will never be stable or consolidated," said Javier Corrales, a Venezuela expert at Amherst College. "The governance challenges are too huge."

Despite the growing troubles, Mr. Maduro faces few short-term challenges. There were no signs of protests on Monday after the election, and many antigovernment activists are worn out after protest movements in 2014 and 2017 led to harsh government crackdowns and no change.

The country's fractured opposition, meanwhile, seems to be pinning its hopes on outside intervention or a military coup, both of which most analysts see as highly unlikely. While there is growing dissatisfaction within the armed forces, the government has uncovered and neutralized a handful of recent plots.

"He's got the power, he has control of all the institutions," said Michael Shifter, president of the Washington think tank Inter-American Dialogue. "There are no signs of any serious cracks in the ruling circle and military that might threaten his continuing rule."

The opposition, Mr. Shifter said, "doesn't have much leverage to change the situation."

Its decision to boycott the election, Mr. Shifter suggested, hadn't done anything to increase the opposition's stature.

"The game is really Maduro and the ruling clique and institutions it controls. As bad as the economy gets, the country can still limp along on 1.5 million barrels per day," he said. "It's a tragedy and a disaster, but this doesn't spell the end of the regime."

--José de Córdoba in Mexico City and Louise Radnofsky in Washington contributed to this article.

Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com, Ryan Dube at ryan.dube@dowjones.com and Juan Forero at Juan.Forero@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 21, 2018 17:33 ET (21:33 GMT)