U.S. officials are pressing Russia to ensure that Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro doesn’t harm his nemesis Juan Guaido, who major Western powers recognize as the country’s interim president.
“We are discussing the urgent issues affecting Venezuela with many countries, including Russia,” a representative for the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs told the Washington Examiner. “We hold Nicolas Maduro and those who surround him fully responsible for the safety and welfare of Interim President Guaido and his family.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Saturday, as Guaido prepared to return home from meetings around the region. That trip, which began in Colombia with a Feb. 23 effort to deliver humanitarian aid over the objections of the regime, flouted a travel ban imposed on him by the Maduro-aligned Supreme Court. Maduro pledged that Guaido would “have to face justice” upon his return, but Russia came under pressure to make the Maduro regime stand down.
“An arrest of Juan Guaido,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner, “would essentially ensure that the doors would be shut on Russia throughout the Americas for a generation.”
That message was delivered with increased urgency in light of “serious and credible threats [against Guaido] and his family, which have recently intensified,” as the Colombian Foreign Ministry described it on Sunday. Pompeo’s call with Lavrov coincided with a warning from the European Union that an attack on Guaido “would represent a major escalation of tensions.”
Brazil, another regional heavyweight supporting Guaido, also demanded Saturday that “those still in control of the regime’s repressive apparatus” prevent him from coming to harm.
Those warnings were heard, raising U.S. hopes that the regime’s grip on power is slipping, given the non-enforcement of the travel ban.
“There was essentially a breakdown somewhere,” the senior administration official said. “There was some type of sober thinking, somewhere. And then, obviously, we want to take advantage of that, because that means people are digesting the fact that indeed Juan Guaido is the interim president.”
Lavrov said Russia is willing “to hold bilateral consultations” with Pompeo about the crisis but reiterated the charge that President Trump’s administration is meddling in Venezuelan affairs. That consistent Russian charge is designed to reinforce the argument that Maduro makes to justify clinging to power.
Lavrov returned to that theme on Monday, when he accused White House national security adviser John Bolton of “insulting all of Latin America” through an invocation of the Monroe Doctrine — the historic U.S. policy that nations of the Western Hemisphere “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”
The Monroe Doctrine has been reviled in Latin America as a patronizing assertion of U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, the Trump administration believes Russia’s high-profile support for “the least popular figure not only in Venezuela, but throughout the Americas” has helped redirect that antipathy towards Moscow.
“It’s the Russians which seem to be the exception here,” the senior administration official said. “That’s damaging its reputation and damaging, frankly, its future standing in Venezuela.”
