The Making of Juan Guaidó: US Regime-Change Laboratory Created Venezuelas
Coup Leader
January 29, 2019
Juan Guaidó has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of
destabilization, write Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal of Grayzone.
By Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal
Grayzone
Before the fateful date of Jan. 22, fewer than 1-in-5 Venezuelans had heard
of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure
character in a politically marginal far-right group closely associated with
gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own party, Guaidó had been a
mid-level figure in the opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now
held under contempt according to Venezuelas constitution.
But after a single phone call from from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence,
Guaidó proclaimed himself as president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader
of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom dweller
was vaulted onto the international stage as the U.S.-selected leader of the
nation with the worlds largest oil reserves.
Echoing the Washington consensus, The New York Times editorial board hailed
Guaidó as a credible rival to President Nicolás Maduro with a refreshing
style and vision of taking the country forward. The Bloomberg News
editorial board applauded him for seeking restoration of democracy and The
Wall Street Journal declared him a new democratic leader. Meanwhile,
Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin
American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaidó as the
legitimate leader of Venezuela.
While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact,
the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by the U.S.
governments elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing
student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to undermine Venezuelas
socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country and one day seize
power. Though he has been a minor figure in Venezuelan politics, he had
spent years quietly demonstrating his worthiness in Washingtons halls of
power.
Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,
Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading chronicler of
Venezuelan politics, told the Grayzone. Its the logic of a laboratory
Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in
all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.
Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative
outlet, Mision Verdad, agreed: Guaidó is more popular outside Venezuela
than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles,
Sequera remarked to the Grayzone. Hes a known character there, is
predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program.
While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent
his career in the most violent faction of Venezuelas most radical
opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one
destabilization campaign after another. His party has been widely
discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting
a badly weakened opposition.
These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,
wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuelas leading pollster. According to Leon,
Guaidós party remains isolated because the majority of the population does
not want war. What they want is a solution.
But this is precisely why Guaidó was selected by Washington: he is not
expected to lead Venezuela towards democracy, but to collapse a country that
for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to U.S. hegemony.
His unlikely rise signals the culmination of a two decades-long project to
destroy a robust socialist experiment.
Targeting Troika of Tyranny
Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, the United States has fought to
restore control over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves. Chavezs socialist
programs may have redistributed the countrys wealth and helped lift
millions out of poverty, but they also earned him a target on his back. In
2002, Venezuelas right-wing opposition briefly ousted him with U.S. support
and recognition, before the military restored his presidency following a
mass popular mobilization. Throughout the administrations of U.S. Presidents
George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Chavez survived numerous assassination
plots before succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolás Maduro,
has survived three attempts on his life.
Maduro is shown as a puppet of Fidel Castro in anti-government protest in
March 2014. (Wikimedia)
Maduro is shown as a puppet of Fidel Castro in anti-government protest in
March 2014. (Wikimedia)
The Trump administration immediately elevated Venezuela to the top of
Washingtons regime change target list, branding it the leader of a troika
of tyranny. Last year, Trumps national security team attempted to recruit
members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort
failed. According to the Venezuelan government, the U.S. was also involved
in a plot codenamed Operation Constitution to capture Maduro at the
Miraflores presidential palace, and another called Operation Armageddon to
assassinate him at a military parade in July 2017. Just over a year later,
exiled opposition leaders tried and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs
during a military parade in Caracas.
More than a decade before these intrigues, a group of right-wing opposition
students were hand selected and groomed by an elite, U.S.-funded regime
change training academy to topple Venezuelas government and restore the
neoliberal order.
Training for Insurrection
On Oct. 5, 2005, with Chavezs popularity at its peak and his government
planning sweeping socialist programs, five Venezuelan student leaders
arrived in Belgrade, Serbia to begin training for an insurrection.
The students had arrived from Venezuela courtesy of the Center for Applied
Non-Violent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This group is funded largely
through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions
as the U.S. governments main arm of promoting regime change; and offshoots
like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs. According to leaked internal emails
from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the shadow CIA, [CANVAS] may
have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000
anti-Milosevic struggle.
CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja
Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means
resistance in Serbian, was the student group that gained international
fame and Hollywood-level promotion by mobilizing the protests that
eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic. This small cell of regime change
specialists was operating according to the theories of the late Gene Sharp,
the Clausewitz of non-violent struggle. Sharp had worked with a former
Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Col. Robert Helvey, to conceive a
strategic blueprint that weaponized protest as a form of hybrid warfare,
aiming it at states that resisted Washingtons unipolar domination.
Otpor at the 1998 MTV Europe Music Awards. (Brian Rasic)
Otpor at the 1998 MTV Europe Music Awards. (Brian Rasic)
Otpor was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID and
Sharps Albert Einstein Institute. Sinisa Sikman, one of Otpors main
trainers, once said the group even received direct CIA funding. According to
a leaked email from a Stratfor staffer, after running Milosevic out of
power, the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS
or in
other words an export-a-revolution group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER
of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically
go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments
(ones that U.S. does not like).
Stratfor revealed that CANVAS turned its attention to Venezuela in 2005
after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change
operations across Eastern Europe.
While monitoring the CANVAS training program, Stratfor outlined its
insurrectionist agenda in strikingly blunt language: Success is by no means
guaranteed, and student movements are only at the beginning of what could be
a years-long effort to trigger a revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers
themselves are the people who cut their teeth on the Butcher of the
Balkans. Theyve got mad skills. When you see students at five Venezuelan
universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the
training is over and the real work has begun.
Generation 2007
The real work began two years later, in 2007, when Guaidó graduated from
Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved to Washington, D.C.,
to enroll in the governance and political management program at George
Washington University under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis
Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists.
Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary
Fund who spent more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector
under the oligarchic old regime that was ousted by Chavez.
That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan
government declined to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV).
This privately-owned station played a leading role in the 2002 coup against
Hugo Chavez. RCTV helped mobilize anti-government demonstrators, falsified
information blaming government supporters for acts of violence carried out
by opposition members, and banned pro-government reporting amid the coup.
The role of RCTV and other oligarch-owned stations in driving the failed
coup attempt was chronicled in the acclaimed documentary, The Revolution
Will Not Be Televised.
That same year, the students claimed credit for stymying Chavezs
constitutional referendum for a 21st century socialism that promised to
set the legal framework for the political and social reorganization of the
country, giving direct power to organized communities as a prerequisite for
the development of a new economic system.
From the protests around RCTV and the referendum, a specialized cadre of
U.S.-backed class of regime change activists was born. They called
themselves Generation 2007.
Yon Goicoechea wins 2008 Cato Institutes Milton Friedman Prize for
Advancing Liberty.
The Stratfor and CANVAS trainers of this cell identified Guaidós ally a
street organizer named Yon Goicoechea as a key factor in defeating the
constitutional referendum. The following year, Goicochea was rewarded for
his efforts with the Cato Institutes Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing
Liberty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly invested into
building his own Liberty First (Primero Justicia) political network.
Friedman, of course, was the godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago
Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial junta leader Augusto
Pinochet to implement policies of radical shock doctrine-style fiscal
austerity. And the Cato Institute is the libertarian Washington, D.C.-based
think tank founded by the Koch brothers, two top Republican Party donors who
have become aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin America.
WikiLeaks published a 2007 email that American ambassador to Venezuela
William Brownfield sent to the State Department, National Security Council
and Department of Defense Southern Command praising Generation of 07 for
having forced the Venezuelan president, accustomed to setting the political
agenda, to (over)react. Among the emerging leaders Brownfield identified
were Freddy Guevara and Yon Goicoechea. He applauded the latter figure as
one of the students most articulate defenders of civil liberties.
Flush with cash from libertarian oligarchs and U.S. government soft power
outfits, the radical Venezuelan cadre took their Otpor tactics to the
streets, along with a version of the groups logo, as seen below:
Spinning Anti-Chavez Unrest
In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists staged their most provocative
demonstration yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the
outrageous guerrilla theater tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime
change manuals. The protesters had mobilized against the arrest of an ally
from another newfangled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group
gathered funds from a variety of U.S. government sources, which allowed it
to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street
movements, according to academic George Ciccariello-Mahers book, Building
the Commune.
While video of the protest is not available, many Venezuelans have
identified Guaidó as one of its key participants. While the allegation is
unconfirmed, it is certainly plausible; the bare-buttocks protesters were
members of the Generation 2007 inner core that Guaidó belonged to, and were
clad in their trademark Resistencia! Venezuela t-shirts, as seen below:
That year, Guaidó exposed himself to the public in another way, founding a
political party to capture the anti-Chavez energy his Generation 2007 had
cultivated. Called Popular Will, it was led by Leopoldo López, a
Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand heavily involved in National
Endowment for Democracy programs and elected as the mayor of a district in
Caracas that was one of the wealthiest in the country. Lopez was a portrait
of Venezuelan aristocracy, directly descended from his countrys first
president. He was also the first cousin of Thor Halvorssen, founder of the
U.S.-based Human Rights Foundation that functions as a de facto publicity
shop for U.S.-backed anti-government activists in countries targeted by
Washington for regime change.
Though Lopezs interests aligned neatly with Washingtons, U.S. diplomatic
cables published by WikiLeaks highlighted the fanatical tendencies that
would ultimately lead to Popular Wills marginalization. One cable
identified Lopez as a divisive figure within the opposition
often
described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry. Others highlighted his
obsession with street confrontations and his uncompromising approach as a
source of tension with other opposition leaders who prioritized unity and
participation in the countrys democratic institutions.
Popular Will founder Leopoldo Lopez cruising with his wife, Lilian Tintori
Popular Will founder Leopoldo Lopez and wife, Lilian Tinter.
By 2010, Popular Will and its foreign backers moved to exploit the worst
drought to hit Venezuela in decades. Massive electricity shortages had
struck the country due the dearth of water, which was needed to power
hydroelectric plants. A global economic recession and declining oil prices
compounded the crisis, driving public discontentment.
Stratfor and CANVAS key advisors of Guaidó and his anti-government cadre
devised a shockingly cynical plan to drive a dagger through the heart of the
Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70 percent collapse of the
countrys electrical system by as early as April 2010.
This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to
protect the poor from the failure of that system, the Stratfor internal
memo declared. This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public
unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate. At
that point in time, an opposition group would be best served to take
advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their
needs.
By this point, the Venezuelan opposition was receiving a staggering $40-50
million a year from U.S. government organizations like USAID and the
National Endowment for Democracy, according to a report by the Spanish think
tank, the FRIDE Institute. It also had massive wealth to draw on from its
own accounts, which were mostly outside the country.
While the scenario envisioned by Statfor did not come to fruition, the
Popular Will party activists and their allies cast aside any pretense of
non-violence and joined a radical plan to destabilize the country.
Violent Destabilization
In November 2010, according to emails obtained by Venezuelan security
services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres,
Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several other student activists attended a secret
five-day training at the Fiesta Mexicana hotel in Mexico City. The sessions
were run by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the
U.S. government. The meeting had reportedly received the blessing of Otto
Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bushs
Department of State, and the right-wing former Colombian President Alvaro
Uribe.
At the Fiesta Mexicana hotel, the emails stated, Guaidó and his fellow
activists hatched a plan to overthrow President Hugo Chavez by generating
chaos through protracted spasms of street violence.
Three petroleum industry figureheads Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and
Pedro Burelli allegedly covered the $52,000 tab to hold the meeting.
Torrar is a self-described human rights activist and intellectual whose
younger brother Reynaldo Tovar Arroyo is the representative in Venezuela of
the private Mexican oil and gas company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds
a contract with the Venezuelan state.
Cedeño, for his part, is a fugitive Venezuelan businessman who claimed
asylum in the United States, and Pedro Burelli a former JP Morgan executive
and the former director of Venezuelas national oil company, Petroleum of
Venezuela (PDVSA). He left PDVSA in 1998 as Hugo Chavez took power and is on
the advisory committee of Georgetown Universitys Latin America leadership
program.
Burelli insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been
fabricated and even hired a private investigator to prove it. The
investigator declared that Googles records showed the emails alleged to be
his were never transmitted.
Yet today Burelli makes no secret of his desire to see Venezuelas current
president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed and even dragged through the streets
and sodomized with a bayonet, as Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was by
NATO-backed militiamen.
The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan
revealed in a series of documents produced by the Venezuelan government. In
May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an assassination plot against
President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks identified the Miami-based Maria Corina
Machado as a leader of the scheme. A hardliner with a penchant for extreme
rhetoric, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the
opposition, visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.
Machado and George W. Bush, 2005.
Machado and George W. Bush, 2005.
I think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain
financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall apart, Machado wrote
in an email to former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria in 2014.
In another email, Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing of
U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. I have already made up my mind
and this fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver
to our friends in the world. If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself
before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his
support and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than
the regimes to break the international security ring.
Guaidó Heads to Barricades
That February, student demonstrators acting as shock troops for the exiled
oligarchy erected violent barricades across the country, turning
opposition-controlled quarters into violent fortresses known as guarimbas.
While international media portrayed the upheaval as a spontaneous protest
against Maduros iron-fisted rule, there was ample evidence that Popular
Will was orchestrating the show.
None of the protesters at the universities wore their university t-shirts,
they all wore Popular Will or Justice First t-shirts, a guarimba
participant said at the time. They might have been student groups, but the
student councils are affiliated to the political opposition parties and they
are accountable to them.
Asked who the ringleaders were, the guarimba participant said, Well if I am
totally honest, those guys are legislators now.
Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas. Three years later, they
erupted again, causing mass destruction of public infrastructure, the murder
of government supporters, and the deaths of 126 people, many of whom were
Chavistas. In several cases, supporters of the government were burned alive
by armed gangs.
Guaidó was directly involved in the 2014 guarimbas. In fact, he tweeted
video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas mask, surrounded by masked
and armed elements that had shut down a highway that were engaging in a
violent clash with the police. Alluding to his participation in Generation
2007, he proclaimed, I remember in 2007, we proclaimed, Students! Now, we
shout, Resistance! Resistance!
Guaidó has deleted the tweet, demonstrating apparent concern for his image
as a champion of democracy.
On Feb. 12, 2014, during the height of that years guarimbas, Guaidó joined
Lopez on stage at a rally of Popular Will and Justice First. During a
lengthy diatribe against the government, Lopez urged the crowd to march to
the office of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Soon after, Diazs office
came under attack by armed gangs who attempted to burn it to the ground. She
denounced what she called planned and premeditated violence.
Guaidó alongside Lopez at the fateful Feb. 12, 2014 rally.
Guaidó alongside Lopez at fateful Feb. 12, 2014 rally.
In a televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó dismissed deaths resulting from
guayas a guarimba tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway
in order to injure or kill motorcyclists as a myth. His comments
whitewashed a deadly tactic that had killed unarmed civilians like Santiago
Pedroza and decapitated a man named Elvis Durán, among many others.
This callous disregard for human life would define his Popular Will party in
the eyes of much of the public, including many opponents of Maduro.
Cracking Down on Popular Will
As violence and political polarization escalated across the country, the
government began to act against the Popular Will leaders who helped stoke
it.
Freddy Guevara, the National Assembly vice-president and second in command
of Popular Will, was a principal leader in the 2017 street riots. Facing a
trial for his role in the violence, Guevara took shelter in the Chilean
embassy, where he remains.
Lester Toledo, a Popular Will legislator from the state of Zulia, was wanted
by the Venezuelan government in September 2016 on charges of financing
terrorism and plotting assassinations. The plans were said to be made with
former Colombian President Álavaro Uribe. Toledo escaped Venezuela and went
on several speaking tours with Human Rights Watch, the U.S.
government-backed Freedom House, the Spanish Congress and European
Parliament.
Carlos Graffe, another Otpor-trained Generation 2007 member who led Popular
Will, was arrested in July 2017. According to police, he was in possession
of a bag filled with nails, C4 explosives and a detonator. He was released
on Dec. 27, 2017.
Leopoldo Lopez, the longtime Popular Will leader, is today under house
arrest, accused of a key role in the deaths of 13 people during the
guarimbas in 2014. Amnesty International lauded Lopez as a prisoner of
conscience and slammed his transfer from prison to house as not good
enough. Meanwhile, family members of guarimba victims introduced a petition
for more charges against Lopez.
Goicoechea, the Koch Brothers poster boy and U.S.-backed founder of Justice
First, was arrested in 2016 by security forces who claimed they found found
a kilo of explosives in his vehicle. In a New York Times op-ed, Goicoechea
protested the charges as trumped-up and claimed he had been imprisoned
simply for his dream of a democratic society, free of Communism. He was
freed in November 2017.
David Smolansky, also a member of the original Otpor-trained Generation
2007, became Venezuelas youngest-ever mayor when he was elected in 2013 in
the affluent suburb of El Hatillo. But he was stripped of his position and
sentenced to 15 months in prison by the Supreme Court after it found him
culpable of stirring the violent guarimbas.
Facing arrest, Smolansky shaved his beard, donned sunglasses and slipped
into Brazil disguised as a priest with a Bible in hand and rosary around his
neck. He now lives in Washington, D.C., where he was hand picked by
Secretary of the Organization of American States Luis Almagro to lead the
working group on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis.
This July 26, Smolansky held what he called a cordial reunion with Elliot
Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra felon installed by Trump as special U.S.
envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is notorious for overseeing the U.S. covert
policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980s in Nicaragua, El
Salvador and Guatemala. His lead role in the Venezuelan coup has stoked
fears that another blood-drenched proxy war might be on the way.
Four days earlier, Machado rumbled another violent threat against Maduro,
declaring that if he wants to save his life, he should understand that his
time is up.
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 Venezuelas
least populous states, Guaidó came in second place during the 2015
parliamentary elections, winning just 26 percent 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 Assemblys Democratic Unity Table had decided to
establish a rotating presidency. Popular Wills 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 for reasons that are only now clear,
Juan Guaido was selected.
There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidós 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 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
Maduros 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 Jan. 10,
according to The Wall Street Journal. However, Pompeo could not pronounce
Guaidós name when he mentioned him in a press briefing on Jan. 25,
referring to him as Juan Guido.
By Jan. 11, Guaidós 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 Washingtons regime change ambitions. In the end, editorial
oversight of his page was handed over to Wikipedias 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 Washingtons needs. That internal piece was
missing, a Trump administration official 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 Guaidós 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 Jan. 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidós wife delivered
a video address calling on the military to rise up against Maduro. Her
performance was wooden and uninspiring, underscoring her husbands limited
political prospects.
At a press conference before supporters four days later, Guaidó announced
his solution to the crisis: Authorize a humanitarian intervention!
While he waits on direct assistance, Guaidó remains what he has always been
a pet project of cynical outside forces. It doesnt matter if he crashes
and burns after all these misadventures, Sequera said of the coup
figurehead. To the Americans, he is expendable.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several
books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty
One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print
articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several
documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in
2015 to shine a journalistic light on Americas state of perpetual war and
its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed
video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a
correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000. See his website for
more information.