Venezuela’s opposition leader cranks up pressure on Maduro
dead this week in clashes between anti-Maduro activists and security forces.
After four years of economic pain that has left Venezuelans short of food and medicine and driven more than two million to flee the country - which sits on the world’s largest oil reserves - the opposition found its voice this month in Guaido after Maduro was sworn in for a second presidential term following controversial elections.
International pressure on the Maduro regime to agree to a new vote is also mounting.
At a UN Security Council meeting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will urge members to recognise Guaido as interim president, the State Department said. And a European Union diplomat said the bloc wanted ‘an immediate call for elections in the near future’.
Mexico had offered to host talks between the rival leaders, and Maduro professed he was ready to go ‘wherever I have to’ in order to meet ‘ that young man’.
But Guaido, who also has support from several Latin American countries, told supporters in Caracas the public would remain in the streets ‘until we achieve an end to the usurpation, a transitional government and free elections’.
He accused Maduro of only offering talks after ‘repression’ failed to achieve its objectives.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has spearheaded the international pressure on Maduro, who accuses Washington of being behind an attempted ‘coup’, by declaring his regime ‘illegitimate’.
On Friday, Pompeo announced that Washington was naming Elliot Abrams - a central figure in president Ronald Reagan’s controversial anti-Communist campaigns in Central America during the 1980s - as its new envoy to lead efforts to help Venezuela ‘in achieving democracy’.