After Four Years of Hugely Costly Tragicomic Farce, the Jig Is Surely Up for Juan Guaidó

After pulling off one last stunt, resulting in his expulsion from Colombia, Gauidó has not only outlived his political usefulness but has become a source of embarrassment to his erstwhile handlers (primarily the US).  

How fortunes have changed for Juan Guaidó, until recently Venezuela’s US-appointed “interim” president. Almost all of the 60 countries that once supported him have abandoned his “presidency” and interim government. In Latin America, all left-leaning governments, including neighbouring Colombia and Brazil, have reestablished ties with Nicolás Maduro’s administration and roundly condemned Guaidó’s attempt to bring it down by using foreign pressure to spark a military uprising.

In what seems like one last attempt to garner international attention, Guaidó began this week by furtively crossing the border from Venezuela into Colombia with the apparent intention of gatecrashing a one-day conference hosted by the Colombian President Gustavo Petro to discuss the fragile political situation in Venezuela. Representatives from 19 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the EU had been invited to the San Carlos Palace on Tuesday. Guaído claims he had also received an invite from Colombia’s Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva, an allegation that Leyva strenuously denies.

On Monday afternoon, Guaído announced on social media that he had crossed into Colombia on foot to evade Maduro’s “persecution.” Spain’s El País reported on the same day that Gauído’s unexpected chess move had put Petro “en jaque” (in check) by causing a diplomatic crisis that threatened to disrupt the Colombian president’s one-day conference, which he had spent months preparing:

Juan Guaidó has become the protagonist of a party to which he was not invited and has sent the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, into an unexpected diplomatic scramble. This is a key week for Petro and his role in the Venezuelan crisis. Representatives from 20 countries will meet this Tuesday at a summit in Bogotá to try to reactivate the dialogue between Maduro’s government and the opposition that has been paralyzed for months. Neither of the two parties will participate in the meeting, but both the government of Nicolás Maduro and the opposition delegation… have given their support to the meeting. However, the presence of Guaidó in Colombia… has become a powder keg that threatens to spoil the conference.

“Juan Guaidó does not exist here or in Venezuela.”

Of course, Guaído’s claim that he had been invited to the conference is risible. Why would the foreign minister of a government that has treated Guaidó as a political non-entity since taking office last June invite him to a conference aimed at helping to resolve the political crisis in Venezuela — a crisis that Guaidó has done nothing but fuel and profit from? In September last year, Colombia’s Ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti, told the Colombian newspaper Semana: “Juan Guaidó does not exist here or in Venezuela.”

It’s arguable whether Guaidó, as a political figure, exists anywhere anymore, apart from in the hearts and minds of certain demented US politicians. In late December, Venezuela’s opposition parties delivered the killer blow by voting to oust him as “interim president” and dissolve his parallel government.

In a statement Leyva said Guaidó was not welcome at the summit — as, indeed, was no other member of Venezuela’s opposition or government. Guaidó had apparently crossed the broader into Colombia in an “irregular” way (i.e., at a location that is not a designated point of entry), opening the door to possible deportation back to Venezuela. His goal, according to Leyva, was to “make noise” at the conference.

This is where it gets really interesting: according to Leyva, Colombia’s immigration authorities were apparently able to track Guaidó down thanks to a tip off from a senior US government official. Guaidó was then told that he had to leave the country as soon as possible and was accompanied by US agents all the way to Bogota’s El Dorado airport. At the airport a one-way ticket to Miami was paid for by the United States. In fact, according to Levya, all of the steps taken to remove Guaidó from Colombia were green lighted by US authorities.

On his arrival at Miami airport, Guaidó was seemingly met by no one but a few journalists:

El opositor venezolano Juan Guaidó fue expulsado este lunes de Colombia, porque "se encontraba en Bogotá de manera irregular", informó el ministerio colombiano de Relaciones Exteriores.
Así llegó anoche a Miami, completamente solo… pic.twitter.com/AMmYjDlnYH

— epigmenio ibarra (@epigmenioibarra) April 25, 2023

Guaidó’s treatment at the hands of Petro’s government could not contrast more starkly with the VIP treatment he received from Petro’s predecessor Ivan Duque four years ago. In early 2019, during the first few months of Guaido’s “interim presidency”, both Duque and Brazil’s then President Jair Bolsonaro lent out planes belonging to their respective presidential fleets for Guaidó’s tour of South America, which included stops in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay. On his arrival in Bogota, on February 24, Guadó was given the full red carpet treatment, including full military honours, by the Duque government:

Duque le cedió un avión de las Fuerzas Armadas a ese payaso, para que se paseara por toda Latinoamérica…

Guaidó pensó que todavía gobernaba Iván Mordisco.

pic.twitter.com/U0z35u4S7U

— Derli López (@derlilopeza) April 25, 2023

Of course, Duque was not the only head of state to give Guaidó such special treatment. For the first two years of his “interim” presidency, the governments of dozens of countries around the world — many of them the same NATO members or allies that now support sanctions on Russia as well as a broad smattering of South American nations, then under the control of US-aligned governments — recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. Ambassadors were appointed in his name, assets were seized (stolen), and military interventions were requested.

As the Argentinean journalist Bruno Sgarzini notes, the Guaidó story could have been lifted straight out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. But it is now in the final chapter.

As I reported in my November 1 post, Is Venezuela’s US-Appointed “Interim” President Juan Guaidó On His Way Out?, Guaidó and the parallel government he fronts have been an obstacle in the way of the gradual re-normalising of economic relations between the US and Venezuela and the reopening of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves — the largest oil reserves on the planet, estimated at more than 300 billion barrels, as well as 201 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of proven gas reserves — to US oil majors. That is what matters to the Biden administration right now.

That said, there are still certain factions within Washington that continue to support Guaidó despite the fact that Venezuela’s own opposition parties have discarded him. They include the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The US stands with @jguaido & the Venezuelan people as they continue struggling against dictatorship, criminality & crimes against humanity. Colombia's unfortunate decision—which came as the Maduro regime threatened Guaidó & his family—is inconsistent with our shared values. https://t.co/lQZKUQY4QM

— Senate Foreign Relations Committee (@SFRCdems) April 25, 2023

All the same, Guaidó’s expulsion from Colombia is almost certainly the final nail in his and his parallel government’s coffin. Completely abandoned by his former allies at home, without even a political party to back him up and shorn of the support of Washington, the man who once proclaimed himself president of Venezuela from a city square in downtown Caracas, with absolutely zero democratic legitimacy, has not only outlived his political usefulness but has become an embarrassment to his erstwhile handlers (primarily the US, UK and Spain).

Even the article in El País admits that Guaidó is by now completely alone. Not even the United States or the bulk of the Venezuelan opposition support his latest political stunt.

Venezuelan Assets Still in Limbo

Despite Guaidó’s fall from grace, many of Venezuela’s assets held abroad still remain in limbo,  thanks primarily to the US sanctions. Unlike the EU, the UK government continued to formally recognize Guaidó as interim president until the bitter end. Even after Venezuela’s leading opposition parties voted to oust Guaidó, the UK continues to hold on to Venezuela’s roughly $2 billion of gold deposits stored at the Bank of England, which have been frozen since 2018, as Declassified UK recently reported:

Now that Guaidó has been ousted, the legal argument for transferring the gold to the Venezuelan opposition has effectively disintegrated. Despite this, the gold remains frozen in the Bank of England, with no clear resolution in sight.

Whatever happens next, this case sets a precedent which could have far-reaching consequences: the UK’s coup weapons now include asset stripping a foreign state, and transferring those assets to political actors engaged in regime change.

This will surely serve as a warning to any state which plans to store its gold in the Bank of England.

While the then-UK Foreign Secretary (and now Chancellor of Exchequer) Jeremy Hunt was — in the words of John Bolton — “delighted” to help with the Trump administration’s destabilisation campaign in Venezuela, by, among things, “freezing Venezuelan gold deposits in the Bank of England,” the Bank of England had concerns about the potential legal ramifications. Declassified UK:

The Foreign Office worked to ease their nerves. On 25 January 2019, Alan Duncan, the minister of state for Europe and the Americas, wrote in his diary that he held a phone call with Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, about Venezuela’s gold. He wrote:

“I tell Carney that I fully appreciate that, although it’s a decision for the Bank, he needs a measure of political air cover from us. I tell him I will write him the most robust letter I can get through the FCO lawyers, and it will outline the growing doubts over Maduro’s legitimacy and explain that many countries no longer consider him to be the country’s President”.

In other words, the Bank of England required a robust legal rationale for keeping Venezuela’s gold frozen, and the Foreign Office was happy to provide it with one.

Since then, the question of who actually owns Venezuela’s gold reserves has been the focus of several high-profile court cases in the UK, with the result that both the UK government and Guaidó’s parallel government have incurred significant legal costs. The UK government refuses to disclose just how much in public funds it has spent defending the rights of Guaidó’s parallel government to Venezuela’s gold. Recently published accounts suggest that Guaidó’s team spent over $8.5m on legal fees, which, astoundingly, were paid with money originally appropriated from the Venezuelan state in the US.

Despite all the money lavished on top UK lawyers, Gauidó and his parallel government were unable to get their grubby hands on Venezuela’s gold:

In the most recent hearing, in October 2022, judge Justice Cockerill granted the Maduro board permission to appeal, declaring that the issues at stake were “effectively unprecedented”, and that “the consequences of the decision have the potential to affect all the citizens of Venezuela”.

Indeed, the freezing of Venezuela’s gold has served as a form of collective punishment.

In 2021, United Nations special rapporteur on sanctions, Alena Douhan, urged the UK “and corresponding banks to unfreeze assets of the Venezuela Central Bank to purchase medicine, vaccines, food, medical and other equipment, spare parts and other essential goods to guarantee humanitarian needs of the people of Venezuela”…

Since the dissolution of Guaidó’s interim government, in December, there is no legal basis for the UK’s freezing of Venezuela’s gold. But the UK government continues to refuse to accept the legitimacy of Maduro’s government, and Venezuela’s gold remains in limbo.

There are only two ways out of the current impasse: either the courts rule that the legal basis for the freezing of the gold has disintegrated or the UK government decides to normalise relations with the Maduro government. But as UK Disclassified notes, “this would entail an embarrassing climb-down and would have to be worked out alongside Washington.”

For the moment there are few signs of the UK doing that or of Washington making meaningful concessions on sanctions against Venezuela. After all, why should the Biden administration make concessions when the US is already receiving 100,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan oil without barely lifting a single sanction?

The only points on which the delegates at Tuesday’s conference could agree on were: free and transparent elections; that the movement toward elections goes hand in hand with the gradual lifting of sanctions; and that the negotiations between the Venezuelan government and opposition parties recommence in Mexico as soon as possible.

These points fall well short of Nicolás Maduro’s latest demands, which include the immediate lifting of all sanctions on Venezuela* and that the US government return $3.2 billion of the money seized from overseas bank accounts (according to Maduro, as much as $30 billion of overseas funds have been blocked by US sanctions). The president of Venezuela’s national assembly, Jorge Fernández, added a couple of other demands: the full repatriation of Venezuela’s gold, and the release of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab from US prison.

It is hard to see the Biden administration acceding to these demands any time soon, if ever, especially with US presidential elections looming. As such, although the tragi-farcical Juan Guaidó era may finally, thankfully, be over, the chances of Venezuela and the US restoring relations remain painfully slim.

 

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* In 2019, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) published a report alleging that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela had killed tens of thousands of people by crippling its ability to produce its number-one export commodity, oil, or import basic goods.

A more recent paper in the George Town Security Review cites reports from the Washington Office on Latin America, the UN Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures and human rights, the Fourth Freedom Forum, and the United States Government Accountability Office, all of which argue that sanctions are exacerbating pre-existing economic difficulties (in Venezuela) by lowering oil production (Venezuela’s main revenue stream), reducing access to key goods and services such as electricity, water, fuel, gas, food, and medicine and reducing the availability of foreign currency needed to import goods.