Next year it will be a quarter of a century that Chavismo has been in power in Venezuela. And in March it was ten years since the death of Hugo Chávez and the arrival in the presidency of Nicolás Maduro, with whom authoritarianism and the persecution of the opposition accelerated. All this time, the recurrent international attempts to negotiate between the Government and anti-Chavism have been unsuccessful and have ended up strengthening Maduro. The experiment of the presidency in charge of Juan Guaidó ended in fiasco. Neither Norway’s mediation nor Trump’s heavy-handedness achieved anything.
But now there is a new element that opens a path of hope for the seven million Venezuelans who have been forced to leave the country due to the economic and political situation. In fact, there are two new factors: the main one is the coming to power of the left in neighboring Colombia, for the first time in history, with Gustavo Petro. The second is the war in Ukraine, which has led Washington to approach Maduro, who is interested in Venezuela’s oil reserves.
Petro is determined to use his past as an ex-guerrilla to influence Maduro, with whom he has already met six times since coming to power. The Colombian president aims to get a real commitment from the Chavista leader so that next year’s elections will be truly democratic. In exchange for what?
The President of the USA, Joe Biden, last week at the White House received Petro, who today will preside in Bogota at a summit of twenty countries – including Spain – to seek, first of all, for the Government and the opposition to return to the interrupted Mexico’s negotiating table. Biden’s top adviser for Latin America, Juan González, and the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, will also attend.
In Washington, Petro spoke of a process on “two rails” to summarize his plan: “a Venezuelan electoral schedule with guarantees”, in exchange for the “gradual and progressive deactivation of sanctions”. Biden told him that he would be willing to relax the sanctions as long as Chavismo takes concrete steps towards democratization.
Something is moving because Petro had dinner in Bogotá on Saturday with the delegates of the Unitary Platform, an organization that brings together the Venezuelan opposition, and on Sunday Biden thanked the Colombian for his mediation with this tweet: “Thank you, President Petro, for your commitment to promote democratic values ​​in the Americas. When Colombia and the United States come together, there is nothing we cannot achieve.”
In this context, Juan Guaidó yesterday claimed his lost prominence when he announced on Twitter that he had crossed the border between Venezuela and Colombia “on foot” to go to Bogotá and try to interview the foreign delegations that will attend the summit, although it is not part of the Unitary Platform delegates. The opposition leader was ambiguous and did not clarify whether he plans to return to Venezuela or go into exile, after the repeated threats of arrest by the Caracas regime.
Some media claimed yesterday that Guaidó’s intention was to settle in the US, although this would make it difficult for him to participate in the opposition primaries on October 22, as leader of Voluntat Popular.
While attempts are being made to restore dialogue, the Unitary Platform already called the primaries last year to elect a single candidate who can compete against Maduro, if there are finally guarantees for the elections. In addition to Guaidó, the main opposition leaders who never left Venezuela, such as Henrique Capriles, Manuel Rosales or MarÃa Corina Machado, are among the candidates in the primaries. Even so, the opposition continues to demonstrate the disunity that has characterized it during the 24 years of Chavismo.
There is no opposition leader who garners significant support on his own, even if Maduro has barely 22% approval. According to the reliable pollster Datanálisis, the only Venezuelan politician who would win an election with an absolute majority today is dead: Hugo Chávez still commands 56% of sympathy.
In any case, for now, the protagonist is Petro.
