Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is getting desperate. With the international community lining up against him, and his own people getting more hungry all the time, Maduro finds himself increasingly alone and isolated.

His solution? Find a million more friendly faces that he can count on when it really hits the fan.

Maduro is calling for a million more members of his personal bodyguard, a civilian militia tasked with keeping the population in line by any means necessary. Those means include roving gangs of street thugs who shoot anyone who looks like they oppose the government.

Since there are already nearly 2 million members of these militias, Maduro's call for a million more could mean that he is beginning to distrust his base in the Venezuelan military. Indeed, Maduro said yesterday that his civilian militia would become part of the military command.

Tass:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has sent a request to the Constitutional Assembly to integrate national militia into the Bolivarian Armed Forces.

"I am asking the Constitutional Assembly and the General Staff to review the main charter of the Bolivarian Armed Forces, in order to grant a constitutional status to the Bolivarian national militia, to make it a part of the Armed Forces," Maduro said in a speech broadcast live on Twitter on Saturday.

Do you think it has anything to do with Maduro's rival, Juan Guaidó, offering amnesty to any military members who come over to his side?

BBC:

The call to expand the militia - which answers directly to Mr Maduro - comes as opposition leader Juan Guaidó seeks to persuade the Venezuelan military to abandon the president.

So far the military has stayed loyal.

Certainly the top brass in the military aren't budging. But they'd have a hard time protecting Maduro if they didn't have many soldiers to command.

Maduro is asking his militiamen to go out to the fields and get some food for the rest of Venezuela.

The president praised the civilian militia for its readiness to "defend, with arms in hand, (the) peace, sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence and the life of our homeland", during a rally in the capital, Caracas.

But he also called on the existing two million members to get involved in agriculture, as Venezuela continues to struggle with a spiralling economic crisis which has left people struggling to afford food.

"With your rifles on your shoulders, be ready to defend the fatherland and dig the furrow to plant the seeds to produce food for the community, for the people," Mr Maduro told the crowd of militia members.

The Chavista thugs that join the militia are interested in protecting the goodies that Maduro has been handing out since he came to power. These are the poorest of the poor who, without Maduro's benificence, would starve to death. They are his natural allies and political base - what's left of it.

Venezuela's agony will continue and may be entering a new, bloodier phase. Guaido is calling for people to take to the streets to "start the final phase of the end of the usurpation". That means confrontation with the militias and probably a lot more bodies in the streets.