Venezuela’s Maduro closes Brazil border to block aid
CARACAS, Venezuela — As a showdown looms over humanitarian aid destined for Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro closed his country’s border with Brazil, vowing Thursday to block the emergency food and medicine that has rallied his opponents and that he claims is part of a U.s.-led coup plot.
Amid the mounting tensions, opposition leader Juan Guaido set off in a crosscountry caravan for the border with Colombia, where much of the U.s.-supplied aid is warehoused and where he has called on thousands of ordinary Venezuelans to assemble Saturday to help bring it across.
Venezuelan lawmakers also headed to the Colombian border were stopped a few hours outside Caracas by national guardsmen in anti-riot gear who positioned a trailer truck in front of a tunnel, blocking the Maduro westbound highway.
A shouting match and scuffle ensued, with the guardsmen firing tear gas before the lawmakers eventually forced their way through and resumed their journey.
Meanwhile, Hugo Chavez’s longtime spy chief became the latest and perhaps mostinfluential military figure to declare his loyalty to Guaido.
Maduro’s decision to close the vast, jungle border with Brazil came a day after he blocked air and sea travel between Venezuela and the nearby Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, where the first cargo of relief supplies arrived Thursday, sent by the large Venezuelan exile community in Miami.
Maduro said he also was weighing whether to shut the border with Colombia, where the bulk of aid is being stockpiled and exiled leaders have been gathering ahead of a fundraising concert Friday organized by British entrepreneur Richard Branson. Several major Latin Volunteers in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, urge people to sign up to help in the transfer of humanitarian aid across the border despite the opposition of President Nicolas Maduro. American pop artists are to perform.
“They are committing an international crime because they are endorsing a military invasion,” Maduro said of the U.S., speaking Thursday on state TV flanked by his top military commanders. “They wanted to generate a great national commotion, but they didn’t achieve it.”
Saturday’s aid showdown comes exactly a month after Guaido declared himself interim president in a mass rally, immediately drawing the support of the U.S. and 50 other countries. But while he has managed to bring hope to Venezuelans crushed by years of recession, food shortages and hyperinflation, he has been unable to win over the military, which has shown little sign of abandoning Maduro.
In declaring his support for Guaido on Thursday, retired Maj. Gen. Hugo Carvajal said Venezuela’s military was in as ramshackle a state as the nation. Carvajal, who ran Chavez’s military intelligence agency for a decade before stepping down in 2012, broke with the government in 2017 over Maduro’s plans to create a constitutional assembly to gut what was left of the oppositioncontrolled congress.
Reading prepared remarks in a video on social media, he urged his former comrades to redeem themselves by abandoning their support for Maduro.
“We can’t allow an army, in the hands of a few generals subjugated to Cuban instructions, to become the biggest collaborator of a dictatorial government that has plagued people with misery,” Carvajal said.