Joe Biden said he ‘confronted’ Nicolás Maduro; is that true?
Joe Biden was winding down a rambling response to a question about the legacy of slavery in America in Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate when he brought up his record on Venezuela and the question of immigration from the troubled country.
Brushing off a moderator who was trying to cut him off, the former vice president talked about his personal experience dealing with Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
“By the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela,” Biden said. “I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro.“
Biden’s remark drew a swift response from the Trump campaign, which tweeted a pair of photos from January 2015 showing Biden and Maduro smiling at each other during former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s swearing-in ceremony in Brazil. The photos were handouts from Venezuela’s presidential office.
“Joe Biden just claimed he ‘confronted’ Maduro,” the account tweeted. “This ... doesn’t look like a confrontation.”
The immediate response from the Trump campaign highlights a potential general-election issue in South Florida, which is home to the country’s largest Venezuelan communities and is in a battleground state in 2020. Trump, despite refusing so far to grant Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans, did choose to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s president in January and has repeatedly brought up the need for Maduro to go.
And a bit more information about the context of the photos emerged late Thursday. A third person who appears in one of the photos with Biden and Maduro, standing between them, said the former vice president’s apparent laughter was because Then-Vice President Joe Biden speaks with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in Brasilia, Brazil. Maduro had asked him to raise the price of oil.
“Hey Trump War Room, I’m the bald guy in that picture,” tweeted Juan S. Gonzalez, who worked as Biden’s Western Hemisphere adviser from 2013 to 2015. “[Biden] laughed when Maduro asked him to raise the price of oil (market didn’t work that way) and that if he wanted to talk he first needed to release political prisoners and negotiate in earnest.”
Biden’s campaign said he “was among the first Democratic foreign policy voices to recognize Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader and to call for Maduro to resign.”
“The Trump Administration appears more interested in using the Venezuelan crisis to rally domestic political support than in seeking practical ways to effect democratic change in Venezuela,” Biden said in a foreign-policy statement made to the Council on Foreign Relations in August.
Eric Farnsworth, who worked in the Clinton White House and the State Department and is now a vice president of the Council of the Americas, said Biden’s remark that he confronted Maduro is open to interpretation.
“I don’t know whether it’s healthy to say [the ObamaBiden administration] confronted [Maduro] or not,” Farnsworth said. “Was it done effectively? Maduro’s still there so draw your own conclusions. Then again, what the Trump administration has done is working its way through the process and Maduro is still there.”
Mark Feierstein, the National Security Council’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs from 2015 to 2017, said Biden’s work on Venezuela laid the ground for Guaidó’s constitutional legitimacy both domestically and internationally.
Feierstein said Biden generated support for international observer missions for the December 2015 Venezuela National Assembly election, an internationally respected result that gave the opposition control of Venezuela’s parliament for the first time since 1999. The Trump administration has cited the legitimacy of that election and the illegitimacy of subsequent elections that favored Maduro as the basis for Guaidó to be recognized as president in an interim capacity.
“The vice president played an important role in that,” Feierstein said.