US President Donald Trump has warned members of the Venezuelan military who continue to support the regime of Nicolás Maduro that they are risking their lives and their future, and urged them to let desperately needed humanitarian aid into the country.
Speaking in Miami to a cheering crowd of mostly Venezuelan and Cuban émigrés, Mr Trump said army officers who continued to “follow the path” of supporting Mr Maduro “will find no safe harbour . . . You will lose everything.” He said the US sought a peaceful transition of power but that all options remained open.
In a preview of the rhetorical attacks that Mr Trump may use in his re-election campaign, he was fiercely critical of socialist regimes elsewhere, especially in Cuba and Nicaragua. Florida is a crucial swing state where the Hispanic vote, including Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates, forms a key bloc.
“For those who would seek to impose socialism in the USA, we have a simple message: the USA will never be a socialist country,” Mr Trump said to wild cheers. Describing Venezuelans as victims of a totalitarian ideology that has failed globally, he added: “Maduro is not a Venezuelan patriot, he’s a Cuban puppet.”
Cuba has long provided Mr Maduro with intelligence and medical services in return for subsidised oil. Mr Trump said those days were ending. “A new day is coming in Latin America,” he said. Washington is considering ways to toughen the longstanding US embargo against Havana.
Venezuela, however, was the main item on Mr Trump’s agenda. Last month, the US and more than 30 other countries recognised opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate interim president, on the basis that Mr Maduro’s 2018 re-election was fraudulent.
Yet despite international support and mass opposition protests domestically, the military has so far stood by Mr Maduro, thwarting opposition plans to instate free elections.
Mr Guaidó also addressed the crowd at Florida International University by video link, and has offered an amnesty to those in the military who switch sides.
In an interview in Caracas late last week, Mr Guaidó told the Financial Times that the vast majority of the army and their families — he estimated “around 80 per cent” — were opposed to Mr Maduro, but that they obeyed orders because there was “an important factor at work: persecution”.
Mr Guaidó cited 27 guardsmen who rebelled last month “and were all tortured . . . That is undoubtedly one of the issues playing out at the moment in the heart of the armed forces.” He said he hoped that amnesties and the vital role the military would play in the rebuilding of the country would soon draw them across.
But the power struggle between the opposition and Mr Maduro’s forces may come to a violent head on Saturday when the opposition, helped by Colombia and the US, plans to bring aid, via trucks, into Venezuela from the Colombian border town of Cúcuta.
Garrett Marquis, a spokesman for National Security Adviser John Bolton, posted on Twitter at the weekend that the US had pre-positioned almost 200 tonnes of aid. The international community, including Canada, Germany and the UK, has pledged about $100 million in support of the emergency response.
But the border bridge is blocked, and Mr Maduro has called the aid delivery a pretext for invasion that would be like a “second Vietnam”. In a political counter, Mr Maduro has also said his government would distribute aid to Colombia, without specifying how, and on Monday called Mr Trump’s speech “almost Nazi . . . He wants to impose white supremacist thought”.
Mr Trump urged the Venezuelan military to accept Mr Guaidó’s offer of amnesty and refrain from violence against those who oppose the Maduro government. He also praised the Venezuelan opposition, saying: “They are turning the page on dictatorship and there will be no going back.”
As well as rounding on Mr Maduro, Mr Trump took the opportunity to reprise his State of the Union address, during which he held up a crisis-wracked Venezuela as an example of the perils of socialism globally and suggested that liberal Democrats in the US could similarly threaten the American way of life.
Returning to the theme on Monday, he declared that “socialists have done in Venezuela all the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done anywhere that they have had a chance to rule”.
Ironically, the Venezuelan opposition spans a wide array of political tendencies, from arch conservatives to leftist socialists.
“It is a pity that President Trump chose to turn an address on the crisis in Venezuela into a partisan political event,” Phil Gunson, Carcas-based analyst for the Crisis Group, a think-tank, said.
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