Juan Guaidó calls for volunteers to carry stockpiled US aid over the borders of two countries on Saturday

Members of Venezuela’s opposition are gathering in Cúcuta, Colombia to shift stockpiled US aid to their homeland this weekend in defiance of their country’s embattled president Nicolás Maduro.



“Saturday will be a day that goes down in our history,” said Omar Lares, the former mayor of Campo Elías in western Venezuela, who has been living in exile in the border city for two years and is now helping coordinate Saturday’s planned delivery of aid.

Maduro government and Richard Branson to hold rival Venezuela concerts Read more

“We’re working overtime to get the food and medicine that people so desperately need,” Lares said, speaking in the lobby of the Casino Internacional hotel in Cúcuta, which has become one of the opposition’s impromptu bases of operations over the last month.

The Brazilian government said on Tuesday that it would also deliver humanitarian aid to the Venezuelan border by 23 February at the request of Juan Guaidó, the Venezuelan opposition leader.

The distribution of the food and medicine from the northern Brazilian city of Boa Vista across the border would be in Venezuelan trucks driven by Venezuelan citizens organized by Guaidó, Brazil’s presidential spokesman General Otavio Rego Barros said.

Guaidó, who has been recognised by the US and dozens more countries as Venezuela’s legitimate interim president, set a deadline of Saturday for the aid to move across the border, though representatives in Cúcuta, Caracas and Washington are yet to decide how the aid will cross.

Guaidó called for caravans of volunteers to carry the aid across at a speech before thousands of supporters in Caracas last week, though it would pit those civilians against the military – loyal to Maduro – which is under orders to block the aid.

For now, the shipments of aid sit in a warehouse next to the Tienditas bridge, connecting the two countries, which was finished in 2016 but never inaugurated. Although thousands cross the nearby Simón Bolívar bridge on foot every day, the border has been closed to most vehicles since 2015 following a string of disputes between the two countries.

In advance of the first shipment of aid to the border, Maduro had the Tienditas bridge blockaded with containers and an oil tank. The bridge had long been lightly barricaded with a wire fence, aimed at keeping out contraband smugglers.

While in part a bid to get much-needed food and medicine to Venezuela’s suffering population, Saturday’s aid mission is also, Guaidó and the Trump administration have said, intended to weaken Maduro by forcing the military to disobey their boss and allow the aid on to Venezuelan soil, which could play into Maduro’s narrative that the US is seeking to invade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Food and medical aid being unloaded from a US Air Force C-17 aircraft at Camilo Daza airport in Cúcuta. Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

“You will find no safe harbour, no easy exit and no way out. You will lose everything,” Donald Trump said in a speech in at Florida International University in Miami on Monday before large American and Venezuelan flags. “We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open.”

Many humanitarian groups have distanced themselves from the aid operation, given its overtly political nature. “Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any other objectives,” UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told reporters in New York last week.

The move comes against the backdrop of a propaganda war between Guaidó and Maduro, with rival concerts set up in support of each president’s stance over the aid.

Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, threw his clout and cash behind Guaidó’s efforts earlier this month when he announced a concert in Cúcuta to raise funds to relieve Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, and to pressure Maduro to open up his country’s borders. That concert, which will take place on Friday, is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of attendees.

“Venezuela sadly has not become the utopia that the current administration of Venezuela or the past administration were hoping for, and that has resulted in a lot of people literally dying from lack of medical help,” Branson told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from Necker, his private island in the British Virgin Islands, on Monday. “I think it will draw attention to the problem on a global basis.”

Maduro’s rival concert will take place on Saturday and Sunday, over the border from the one in Colombia organised by Branson, Venezuela’s information minister Jorge Rodríguez announced on Monday. In an apparent retort to the US aid project, Rodríguez announced that 20,000 boxes of food aid would be sent to Cúcuta.

Guaidó lambasted the move by Maduro’s government to put on a rival concert, calling it “desperate”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa Álvarez from Maracay, Venezuela has been living in Cúcuta for a month now. Photograph: Joe Parkin Daniels

“They’re debating whether the aid should come in or not ... They don’t know what to do,” Guaidó said on Monday. “They’re now making up a concert. How many concerts are they going to stage?”

Since 2015, some three million Venezuelans have fled spiralling hyperinflation and widespread shortages of food and medicine, with almost 1.5 million staying in Colombia, according to UNHCR. Many refugees and migrants cross at the Simón Bolívar bridge, the busiest of Colombia’s border crossings, just outside Cúcuta.

“Maduro says that Venezuela shouldn’t be begging for food,” said Rosa Álvarez, a Venezuelan migrant from Maracay who was queueing for a meal at a soup kitchen near the bridge. “But look at what we are having to do right now.”

A friend of hers quickly joined in.

“People are dying in our country,” said Misleidy Castaño, from Valencia in northern Venezuela. “I’m not interested in going to any concert, but it if it helps get aid into Venezuela, it can only be a good thing.”