Nicolás Maduro retains power and support from country’s military top brass but the opposition challenge is not dead

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

When Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó appeared outside one of the most important military installations in Caracas on Tuesday flanked by defecting soldiers toting assault rifles, many supporters hoped the game was finally up for Nicolás Maduro and his embattled regime.

“The time is now,” Guaidó announced in his dramatic pre-dawn declaration, calling on Venezuela’s armed forces to turn on their Chavista commander-in-chief.

But they did not.

Maduro remains in power and most of Venezuela’s military top brass has pledged loyalty to Hugo Chávez’s unpopular successor. And Guaidó’s attempt to spark a nationwide uprising appears to have flatlined – at least for now.

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“Clearly this was a failure in the sense that this left the opposition weaker than they were before,” said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert from the Washington Office on Latin America advocacy group.

Benjamin Gedan, the national security council’s Venezuela adviser during the Obama presidency, said Guaidó had envisioned mass defections from Venezuela’s intelligence services and military. ”Neither occurred,” he admitted.

But nor was Guaidó’s movement out for the count.

Anti-Maduro protests continued, with thousands taking to the streets again on Wednesday. In a sign of possible weakness, Maduro had made no attempt to permanently “knee-cap” the opposition with repression; demonstrators had not been cowed and the opposition maintained significant international support.

“Dislodging a dictatorship that controls all the territory and monopolizes the use of force is difficult … But transitions often come unexpectedly and unexpectedly fast,” Gedan said, pointing to the recent uprisings in Sudan and Algeria.

“I’m not going to predict that tomorrow the regime will fall. But I don’t see signals that Maduro is particularly confident in his hold on power,” Gedan added. “There is no evidence the government has a firm hold on the country … I’m not persuaded Maduro sleeps well at night.”

Vanessa Neumann, Guaidó’s envoy to the UK, denied the opposition had expected Maduro’s downfall would be immediate. “This is a slow boa constrictor action … We did not think it would be done and dusted within just a few hours.”

But many observers believe that is exactly what Guaidó had hoped for – and failed to achieve – when he took the streets at 4am on Tuesday with his political mentor Leopoldo López, who had escaped from house arrest.

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Smilde said he believed Guaidó had hoped his address would spark “an avalanche” of defections that would quickly topple Maduro.

Guaidó did secure one big-name defection: the director of Venezuela’s feared intelligence services, Manuel Ricardo Cristopher Figuera, who announced his defection in a public letter excoriating the “rascals and rogues” looting Venezuela while its people starved.

But from the outset, when Guaidó appeared on camera with just a handful armed supporters, Smilde said he looked set for failure.

Now, Guaidó faced possible arrest and López had fled to the Spanish embassy. “That is probably the biggest blow, because he was the symbolic hero and martyr of this movement and for now it looks like he has sort of given up fighting from within Venezuela,” Smilde said.

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Others offered a more positive prognosis of the opposition’s hopes.

Eric Farnsworth, a former US diplomat and the vice-president of the Council of the Americas, said he believed “furious discussions” were now underway with senior military leaders in an attempt to convince them to switch sides.

Farnsworth said Brazil – which developed closed ties with Venezuela’s military during the leftwing governments of Hugo Chávez and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – and Colombia could play a key role in brokering such talks.

“What the opposition really needs is somebody with command of troops – probably in a region outside of Caracas – who can say: ‘Enough, we are no longer following Maduro’s orders.”

On Wednesday, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, claimed Brazilian intelligence believed a fracture was now opening up near the top of Venezuela’s military. “It is possible the government will collapse because some of those at the top switch sides,” he told reporters.

“The regime did not fall yesterday,” Farnsworth said. “But I don’t think the final chapter has yet been written.”