Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team has developed a plan for Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to relinquish power ahead of an election that would pit the remnants of the regime against top opposition lawmaker and interim president Juan Guaido.
“The United States will recognize the results of a free and fair election no matter which party wins,” Special Envoy Elliot Abrams, the State Department’s lead negotiator for the Venezuela crisis, told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “What we oppose is the abuse of state power that enables one party to rule indefinitely.”
Maduro has remained in power for more than a year in defiance of a U.S-led pressure campaign President Trump’s administration once hoped would set the stage for Guaido to oversee free elections under the Venezuelan Constitution. The new proposal seeks to break the logjam by allowing both sides to participate in forming a council of state, after the withdrawal of the Russian and Cuban security services that have protected Maduro. The council would then oversee free elections.
“We must get this democracy started,” Pompeo said earlier Tuesday. “We’ve made clear all along that Nicolas Maduro will never again govern Venezuela, and that hasn’t changed.”
Abrams said he regards Guaido as the favorite in any fair election. “All the polls we’ve seen show that Guaido is the single most popular political figure in Venezuela,” he said. “The level of support for Nicolas Maduro is something like 12% or 15%. One of the reasons I suppose he doesn’t want a free election is that he reads the same polls. There’s no possible way that Nicolas Maduro remains in power if Venezuelans get to choose their own fate and get to elect their own leaders.”
Maduro dismissed the proposal immediately, but Abrams said that was only to be expected. “It’s obvious that Maduro is going to resist any plan that causes him to leave power,” he said during a Tuesday teleconference. “But the framework that we’ve proposed, we think, protects the legitimate rights of the Chavista party to contest elections and to be treated absolutely fairly in a transitional government. We think it protects the interests of the military. We think it protects a lot of people even within the regime.”
The framework, unveiled just days after Justice Department officials indicted Maduro and some of his closest associates on narcoterrorism charges, includes an offer to lift sanctions on regime loyalists who are being punished on account of their role in undermining the Venezuelan political system. “The plan is not so much an effort to change Nicolas Maduro’s mind as it is to appeal to everyone else in Venezuela to change his mind for him,” Abrams said.
Measures targeting human rights abusers and other corrupt actors will remain in place, he added.
Trump’s team has been trying to fracture the unity of the regime from the earliest days of the pressure campaign, but Maduro has retained control of the military despite a dramatic Guaido-led uprising that U.S. officials maintain was only narrowly thwarted.
“We think there will be a lot of people in the regime and in the military and in the party who will look at this plan and say, ‘You know, I’m OK here. We do pretty decently, here. I mean, Maduro doesn’t, but we do,’” Abrams said.
