Before the fateful day of January 22, less than one in five Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the
35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically marginal far-right group
closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own
party, Guaidó had been a mid-level figure in the opposition-dominated National
Assembly, which is now held under contempt according to Venezuela’s
constitution.
But after a single phone call from US Vice President Mike
Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself as president of Venezuela. Anointed as the
leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom
dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of
the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves.
Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times
editorial board hailed Guaidó as a “credible rival” to Maduro with a
“refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward.” The Bloomberg News
editorial board applauded him for seeking “restoration of democracy”
and the Wall Street Journal declared him “a new democratic
leader.” Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of
right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó
as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he
was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the US
government’s elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing
student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuela’s
socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize
power. Though, he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent
years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington’s halls of power.
“Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this
circumstance,” says Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading
chronicler of Venezuelan politics. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is
like a mixture of several elements that create a character that in all honesty,
oscillates between laughable and worrying.”
Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the
investigative outlet, Mision Verdad says, “Guaidó is more popular outside
Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington
circles,” Sequera remarked, “He’s a known character there, is predictably
right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.”
While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic
restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela’s
most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one
destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely discredited
inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly
weakened opposition.
“‘These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in
opinion polls,” wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela’s leading
pollster. According to Leon, Guaidó’s party remains isolated because the
majority of the population “does not want war. ‘What they want is a solution.’”
But this is precisely why Guaidó was selected by Washington;
he is not expected to lead Venezuela towards to democracy, but to collapse a
country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US
hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two-decades-long
project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.
Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, the United States
has fought to restore control over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves. Chavez’s
socialist programs may have redistributed the country’s wealth and helped lift
millions out of poverty, but they also earned him a target on his back. In
2002, Venezuela’s right-wing opposition briefly ousted him with US support and
recognition before the military restored his presidency following a mass
popular mobilization. Throughout the administrations of US Presidents George W.
Bush and Barack Obama, Chavez survived numerous assassination plots before
succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has survived three
attempts on his life.
The Trump administration has elevated Venezuela to the top
of Washington’s regime change target list, branding it the leader of a “troika
of tyranny.”Last year, Trump’s national security team attempted to
recruit members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort
failed. Reportedly, the US was also involved in a plot codenamed Operation
Constitution to capture Maduro at the Miraflores presidential palace, and
another called Operation Armageddon to assassinate him at a military
parade in July 2017. Just over a year later, exiled opposition leaders tried
and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs during a military parade in
Caracas.
The “real work” began two years later, in 2007, when Guaidó
graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to
Washington DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at
George Washington University under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis
Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists.
Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International
Monetary Fund who spent more than a decade working in Venezuelan energy sector
under the oligarchic old regime that was ousted by Chavez.
The following year, Goicochea was rewarded for his
efforts with the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty,
along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly invested into building his own
Liberty First (Primero Justicia) political network.
Friedman, of course, was the godfather of the notorious
neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial junta
leader Augusto Pinochet to implement policies of radical “shock doctrine”-style
fiscal austerity. And the Cato Institute is the libertarian Washington DC-based
think tank founded by the Koch Brothers, two top Republican Party donors who
have become aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin
America.
The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another
destabilization plan revealed in a series of documents produced by
the Venezuelan government. In May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an
assassination plot against President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks identified the Miami-based
Maria Corina Machado as a leader of the scheme. A hardliner with a penchant for
extreme rhetoric, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the
opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.
The collapse of Popular Will under the weight of the violent
campaign of destabilization it ran alienated large sectors of the public and
wound much of its leadership up in exile or in custody. Guaidó had remained a
relatively minor figure, having spent most of his nine-year career in the
National Assembly as an alternate deputy. Hailing from one of Venezuela’s least
populous states, Guaidó came in second place during the 2015 parliamentary
elections, winning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the
National Assembly. Indeed, his bottom may have been better known than his
face.
Guaidó is known as the president of the opposition-dominated
National Assembly, but he was never elected to the position. The four
opposition parties that comprised the Assembly’s Democratic Unity Table had
decided to establish a rotating presidency. Popular Will’s turn was on the way,
but its founder, Lopez, was under house arrest. Meanwhile, his
second-in-charge, Guevara, had taken refuge in the Chilean embassy. A figure
named Juan Andrés Mejía would have been next in line but reasons that are only
now clear, Juan Guaido was selected.
“There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidó’s
rise,” Sequera, the Venezuelan analyst, observed. “Mejía is high class,
studied at one of the most expensive private universities in Venezuela, and
could not be easily marketed to the public the way Guaidó could. For
one, Guaidó has common mestizo features like most
Venezuelans do, and seems like more like a man of the people. Also, he had not
been overexposed in the media, so he could be built up into pretty much
anything.”
In December 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the border and junketed
to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to coordinate the plan to hold mass
demonstrations during the inauguration of President Maduro. The night before
Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony, both Vice President Mike Pence and Canadian
Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called Guaidó to affirm their support.
A week later, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep.
Mario Diaz-Balart – all lawmakers from the Florida base of the right-wing Cuban
exile lobby – joined President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White
House. At their request, Trump agreed that if Guaidó declared himself
president, he would back him. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met personally
with Guaidó on January 10, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Guaidó might have been an obscure figure, but his
combination of radicalism and opportunism satisfied Washington’s needs. “That
internal piece was missing,” a Trump administration said of Guaidó.
“He was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete.”
“For the first time,” Brownfield, the former American
ambassador to Venezuela, gushed to the New York Times, “you have an
opposition leader who is clearly signaling to the armed forces and to law
enforcement that he wants to keep them on the side of the angels and with the
good guys.”
But Guaidó’s Popular Will party formed the shock troops of
the guarimbas that caused the deaths of police officers and common
citizens alike. He had even boasted of his own participation in street riots.
And now, to win the hearts and minds of the military and police, Guaido had to
erase this blood-soaked history.
On January 21, a day before the coup began in earnest,
Guaidó’s wife delivered a video address calling on the military to
rise up against Maduro.
At a press conference before supporters four days later,
Guaidó announced his solution to the crisis: “Authorize a
humanitarian intervention!”
