The corruption charges against Juan Guaido are undoubtedly true, but that isn't what is significant about these headlines. What is significant is that this is being reported in the western press at all!





Venezuela’s National Assembly launched an investigation Tuesday into a report of influence-peddling among nine opposition lawmakers, further undermining interim President Juan Guaido’s efforts to oust Nicolas Maduro. A committee was established to investigate lawmakers accused of lobbying for a Colombian businessman linked to Alex Saab, a Maduro ally sanctioned by the U.S. and indicted on money-laundering charges in July. The alleged links were exposed days ago in an investigation by the Venezuelan news site Armando.Info. The committee said it will present its results in two weeks. The affair is a blow to the opposition movement led by Guaido, which has failed to establish a transition government after being recognized by dozens of countries earlier this year.

Forget for a moment the bizarro world that this article is coming from, where up is down and Guaido has some sort of democratic claim to the presidency.

What is actually being said here is that the Venezuela coup plotters have lost patience and given up on Guaido.



“This comes as the opposition is already struggling to define a strategy, having exhausted every option to force regime change,” Eurasia Group analyst Risa Grais-Targow wrote this week. Guaido, vowing to stamp out corruption even among those around him, said he was suspending the named lawmakers. But several defied him by appearing at the assembly on Tuesday. “I challenge you Juan Guaido: take us out, you’re going to have to kill us first,” Luis Brito, one of the lawmakers, said at a press conference. He claimed that there’s a rebellion among opposition lawmakers although so far there is scant evidence of it. Popular Will, Guaido’s political party, said Maduro’s government has sought to bribe opposition parliamentarians ahead of a Jan. 5 vote on whether Guaido remains assembly president. Small opposition parties abandoned Guaido two months ago and began negotiating with representatives of Maduro.

It's done. It's over for Guaido and his group.

They are finished. The hundreds of millions of dollars that Washington showered on Guaido was wasted.

What will the dozens of governments do that the Trump Administration strong-armed into recognizing Guaido? What about the Venezuelan embassy in Washington?





Maduro’s colleague, Socialist party leader Diosdado Cabello, celebrated Guaido’s woes in a press conference on Monday. “This comes as no surprise, that they’re accusing each other of corruption,” he said. “Never before has the political opposition been in a worse state than today.”

The coup plotting allies in Colombia are also having unexpected troubles.

Much like the right-wing neoliberal government in Chile, the cacerolazo protest movement has caught the establishment by surprise and they've been forced to back down.

