Juan
Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by
Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a
champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a
violent campaign of destabilization.
by
Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal
Part
9 - A pawn in their game
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. However, Pompeo could
not pronounce Guaidó’s name when he mentioned him in a press
briefing on January 25, referring to him as “Juan Guido.”
By
January 11, Guaidó’s Wikipedia page had been edited 37 times,
highlighting the struggle to shape the image of a previously
anonymous figure who was now a tableau for Washington’s regime
change ambitions. In the end, editorial oversight of his page was
handed over to Wikipedia’s elite council of “librarians,” who
pronounced him the “contested” president of Venezuela.
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. Her performance was wooden and uninspiring, underscoring her
husband’s political limits.
While
Guaidó waits on direct assistance, he remains what he has always
been – a pet project of cynical outside forces. “It
doesn’t matter if he crashes and burns after all these
misadventures,” Sequera said of the coup figurehead. “To
the Americans, he is expendable.”
***
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