Trump’s threat of military action against Venezuela is a timely boost for Maduro
US president Donald Trump’s talk of military action in Venezuela could be a lifeline for the country’s unpopular leader, who has long used the threat of US aggression to justify policies that have shredded the economy.
President Nicolas Maduro has continued the free-spending socialist revolution started by his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, about 20 years ago.
Key to the populist speech used by both are constant warnings that the US is planning an invasion to steal Venezuela’s oil.
That threat was laughed off by the opposition until Friday night, when Mr Trump said a military option was not out of the question in dealing with the Venezuelan government’s crackdown on the opposition and deepening social crisis.
“He is doing Maduro a favour by reinforcing the nationalist position that the gringos want to come and attack Venezuela,” said lawyer Luis Alberto Rodriguez, 44.
“This has always been part of Maduro’s rhetoric, and Chavez before him. And it has served them well.
“It’s not going to have any impact other than the government using it to further unify its people and attack the opposition.”
Maduro loyalists, who regularly insult opposition leaders as Washington’s lackeys, wasted no time.
“Mind your own business and solve your own problems, Mr Trump,” said Mr Maduro’s son, also named Nicolas, at the country’s new constituent assembly, which was elected last month to rewrite the constitution.
The opposition fears that the assembly will remove any checks on the president’s powers and critics globally have condemned it as an affront to democracy.
“If Venezuela were attacked the rifles would arrive in New York, Mr Trump,” the younger Maduro said. “We would take the White House.”
The escalating tensions come as US vice president Mike Pence began a tour of Latin America yesterday.
The week-long trip, aimed at co-ordinating a regional diplomatic response to the crisis in Caracas, began in Colombia, a strong US ally that takes hundreds of millions of dollars a year in funding from the US.
The country has little liking for the leftist Venezuelan president. Mr Pence’s trip will also take him to Argentina, Chile and Panama.
The tour will be dominated by the crisis in Venezuela and how US “partners and friends” were looking to the future regarding the country, while others were stuck in the past, a senior US administration official said.
Marches against Mr Maduro were held in Caracas on Saturday. There were few confrontations with state security forces and no deaths.
More than 120 have been killed in unrest since April, as the economy collapses deeper into a recession compounded by triple-digit inflation and shortage of necessities.
Opposition leaders who have counted on the US to apply sustained moral and economic pressure on Mr Maduro have so far been silent about Mr Trump’s remarks and marchers seemed confounded by his military threat.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” one woman said. “It is very complicated.”
The opposition, which controls a congress that has been neutered by a supreme court loyal to Mr Maduro, boycotted last month’s election of the new legislative body.
They called instead for an early presidential election, which Mr Maduro would probably lose as his popularity is pummelled by the country’s economic woes.
“Maduro could not have asked for a greater gift from Trump. He provided substance for Maduro’s heretofore implausible conspiracy theories,” said David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights think tank.
Mr Smilde said the warning of military force “threatened to deflate the emerging regional consensus regarding Venezuela”.