Dashing around Caracas, Guaidó steers Venezuela to a perilous crossroads

Calls from world leaders were piling up. The prime minister of Denmark was trying to reach him. So, too, was Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister.

>>Ernesto LondoñoThe New York Times
Published : 4 Feb 2019, 03:55 AM
Updated : 4 Feb 2019, 03:55 AM

But Juan Guaidó, the young Venezuelan lawmaker leading an effort to topple the country’s authoritarian government, did not appear to be in a hurry to speak with them, as he held the hand of a woman whose son had been gunned down by security forces during a recent nighttime demonstration.

“This can’t be in vain,” Guaidó told the mother, Ana Cecilia Buitrago, on Sunday morning as tears welled up in his eyes.

“My son had a big heart,” Buitrago, 58, said in a shaky voice. Her son, Jhonny Godoy, 29, was killed Jan. 25 outside his modest home in Caracas. “This government has to fall so we can put an end to all this misery.”

Godoy’s death came a few days after Guaidó, head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, formally launched an audacious bid to force Nicolás Maduro out of the presidency, arguing that Maduro had “usurped” power by taking office on Jan 10, following an election that was broadly seen as rigged.

Since then, Guaidó, a lanky 35-year-old, has spent long days working to shore up his support abroad while leveraging his escalating public support at home to get government insiders, in particular military leaders, to turn on Maduro.

While it is still far from certain that Guaidó will ever set foot in the presidential palace, the number of ordinary Venezuelans and foreign powers taking his side is growing.

So far, more than 20 have recognised him as the country’s interim president, including the United States, Canada and most of the rest of South America. Several European Union countries gave Maduro a deadline of midnight Sunday to call for free and fair elections. France and Austria have said they will recognise Guaidó once the deadline passes.

If Guaidó's gambit succeeds, he and allied opposition leaders will have pulled off an astonishing feat: presiding over a peaceful transition to democracy that they hope will put Venezuela on a path toward recovery following years of economic collapse, widespread graft and iron-fisted rule.

His success would be all the more remarkable considering the scrappy operation Guaidó and his allies have mounted, seemingly overnight, to take down a heavily armed authoritarian government whose leaders stand accused of turning the state into a vast criminal enterprise.

As he tries to rally domestic and international backing, Guaidó has been crisscrossing Caracas with minimal security, at times weaving through traffic on the back of a motorcycle. He fields the calls from world leaders, as well as diplomats and Venezuelan politicians, on a cellphone that gets a torrent of text messages, and his phone’s battery seems always on the verge of dying.

If his sudden rise has been overwhelming, Guaidó shows no sign of feeling frazzled. His demeanour is calm as a volunteer team of aides dart around him frantically. The only outward sign that this tumultuous new life is getting to Guaidó is the hoarseness in his voice. At night, when he stops taking calls and visits, Guaidó said, he has no trouble falling asleep.

“I sleep placidly,” Guaidó said in an interview as his car stealthily moved through Caracas traffic, adding that he had learned to sleep soundly under trying conditions when he and other opposition leaders staged a 15-day hunger strike in 2015, sleeping on cots on the street, to pressure the government to set a date for legislative elections. “It’s an advantage.”

But Guaidó realises the path he is on is full of hazards.

Opposition leaders had hoped that when Guaidó proclaimed himself the country’s legitimate leader at a huge street rally, the chiefs of the armed forces would turn on Maduro in short order. While there have been a handful of high-profile defections, the top military brass has publicly rallied behind Maduro, which may portend a protracted standoff.

“We’re seeing progress, but it’s not happening as quickly as we’d like,” Guaidó said, adding that fear remains a strong impediment, particularly among low-level troops who support what the opposition is doing.

Indeed, Guaidó's success is far from guaranteed. Maduro still holds many of the levers of power, including the state broadcaster, a compliant judiciary, the country’s military leaders and ruthless paramilitary forces known as colectivos.

Those challenges notwithstanding, Guaidó says he sees a clear path to victory, even as his plan enters a perilous phase.

Oil sanctions imposed by the United States last week will soon strangle the country’s already devastated economy, which will most likely cause shortages of fuel and make food and medicine even more scarce.

Bracing for the destabilising effects of the sanctions, Guaidó and his allies in the international community said they intended to start pumping humanitarian aid into the country this week. Doing so would undermine Maduro, who recently scoffed at the prospect by saying “we’re not a country of beggars.”

Guaidó and his allies see the coming week, and the arrival of aid, as a potential make-or-break moment for a movement that has stirred hope for millions of Venezuelans, but has yet to take steps that meaningfully improve their lives.

“There are between 250,000 and 300,000 Venezuelans on the brink of death,” Guaidó said as he dashed across town from his apartment in eastern Caracas to the home of Buitrago. “Literally, they have a death sentence if they don’t get urgent attention.”

If he does manage to take the presidency, Guaidó will have to try to tackle the country’s enormous problems with no prior experience running a government.

Fernando Cutz, a former White House official who worked on Venezuela policy, called Guaidó “the right man for the right moment.” But the next steps will be treacherous, even if Guaidó manages to topple Maduro.

“Things probably will get worse for the people of Venezuela before they get better when you actually start doing things for the greater good,” Cutz said. Managing an eventual transition, he added, “will be a monumental task that will require vision, skill, patience and a lot of time.”

Since becoming the undisputed opposition leader in mid-January — emerging seemingly overnight — Guaidó has filled his days with a slog of clandestine meetings with government insiders, rallies where fans show cultlike devotion and an endless stream of phone calls.

Since he proclaimed himself the country’s rightful leader, Guaidó has lived under constant threat of arrest and violence and often wakes up wondering whether he will spend the coming night behind bars.

Intelligence agents did briefly detain him on Jan 13, and Maduro has disparaged him as the treasonous figurehead of a plot orchestrated by the United States to lay claim to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

Guaidó argues that because Maduro was elected in a rigged vote, the presidency is technically vacant, and that as the head of the National Assembly, he is constitutionally entitled to preside over an interim government until new elections are held.

Even if the armed forces were to throw their weight behind Guaidó, which would almost certainly spell the end of Maduro’s reign, Guaidó said he worried about the actions of the paramilitary forces that would be likely to stay loyal to Maduro.

“We cannot allow that to proliferate,” he said, drawing a parallel with the struggle that neighbouring Colombia has faced from guerrilla and paramilitary groups over the years. “It could portend very serious consequences, even in the short term.”

On Sunday morning, as he paid his visit to Buitrago, Guaidó's attention kept getting jerked between short- and long-term concerns. To console her, Guaidó reached under his dress shirt to remove a rosary he had been wearing in recent days.

“This was given to me for my protection,” he told her, placing it gently on her palm. “It’s a gift.”

Guaidó seemed pained to cut the meeting short as aides whispered that Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, had been trying to get through. So he excused himself and plopped down on Buitrago’s faux cow-print sofa to take the calls.

When Trudeau got on the line, Guaidó thanked him for his recognition that he was Venezuela’s rightful leader.

Guaidó urged the Canadian leader not to be swayed by the group of governments that are calling for new internationally backed negotiations between the government and the opposition to break the standoff.

“This is not the time for dialogue,” Guaidó said firmly.

Guaidó said a lot was riding on establishing pipelines of aid that would include food, medicine and hospital supplies. His team’s hope is to rely on the Catholic relief agency Caritas and other volunteers to get the first deliveries started this week.

The convergence of the effects of US oil sanctions, which are expected to cut off significant sources of revenue for Maduro, and the attempted delivery of humanitarian aid will escalate the standoff. Economists believe fuel and food shortages are likely to worsen in the short run.

“There’s going to be a moment of tension” with Maduro, Guaidó said. “But they destroyed our future, and now we need to ensure that they aren’t able to destroy the present.”

As Guaidó was getting ready to leave the modest home, Buitrago said that the visit had eased her pain.

“This gesture came from the heart,” she said, holding up the rosary. “I am going to keep it with me until I die.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service