Guaido meets with foreign allies for anti-Maduro strategy
BOGOTA: Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido is meeting with members of a multinational support group in Bogota yesterday to hammer out a strategy to remove his rival Nicolas Maduro from office.
The trip comes after two people were killed and hundreds wounded as Guaido supporters clashed with Venezuelan security forces in a failed attempt to cross in truckloads of humanitarian aid from Colombia and Brazil.
The European Union condemned Venezuela’s use of violence and armed civilians to block the aid entry, while United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was ‘shocked and saddened’ by the civilian deaths.
Guaido, the 35-year-old leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, declared himself acting president in January after the opposition controlled legislature concluded that Maduro was fraudulently re- elected.
Some 50 countries recognize him as Venezuela’s legitimate president.
Guaido flew to the Colombian capital Sunday for the meeting with members of the Lima Group – 13 Latin American countries plus Canada that are seeking to resolve Venezuela’s political impasse.
Upon landing in Bogota Guaido called on the international community to consider ‘all measures to free’ Venezuela.
This is the first time that the Lima Group, which first met in the Peruvian capital in 2017, will speak directly to Guaido.
Venezuela is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis that has seen poverty soar during a prolonged recession and hyperinflation.
Humanitarian aid, much of it from the United States, has been at the center of the standoff between Maduro and Guaido.
Maduro claims the aid is a smokescreen for a US invasion, and has ordered several crossings on Venezuela’s borders with Colombia and Brazil closed.
“Today we consolidated yesterday’s victory, tomorrow we’ll consolidate it even more,” Maduro’s right-hand man Diosdado Cabello said Sunday at a pro-government rally in the border town of Tachira.
“Not a single one of those trucks with aid got through,” Cabello said.
Maduro seems to have won this round in the power struggle, even though 156 members of Venezuela’s security forces deserted to Colombia or Brazil.
After Saturday’s events it is ‘not very clear’ that Guaido has ‘massive’ support in Venezuela, analyst Rafael Pineros told AFP.
However the events, which also led to increased repression by the Maduro regime, may instead result in a forceful foreign intervention in Venezuela, according to political scientist Laura Gil.
“In the Lima Group the consensus is that Maduro must be removed, but there is no consensus on how to do that,” Gil told AFP.