President Trump is allegedly losing confidence that Juan Guaido, Venezuela’s legitimate leader, can ever topple socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro, and Trump is weighing stronger options to achieve this goal. It’s been almost one year since Guaido took office as interim president of Venezuela and since America started one of its fastest and strongest sanction campaigns to topple a dictator.
Yet Maduro still holds nearly 30 million of my fellow Venezuelans hostage. The socialist system, while recently relaxed, continues to kill innocent people every day. The only path forward is for Venezuelans to replace Guaido with someone who is willing to work in transparent terms with America and our close allies in the region, Colombia and Brazil.
Trump is right and has options to end Maduro’s regime and the threat it represents to America. However, this won’t be easy and will require Trump and his team to use both America’s soft and hard power.
Sadly, there are more reasons to be hopeless than hopeful about Venezuela’s future. The most likely outcome is a consolidation of a second Cuba-style dictatorship, but unlike Cuba, this one has access to effectively unlimited oil reserves and natural resources, including gold, coltan, and uranium. Maduro isn’t just a dictator, he’s the leader of a group of drug dealers and international terrorists. He is supported by powerful, well-funded, and evil interests such as Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China. More importantly, narcoterrorist groups such as FARC, ELN, and even the Mexican cartels and Hezbollah operate freely in a territory larger than Texas to export cocaine into the United States.
This hopelessness might be surprising to most of you since earlier this year, everybody declared Maduro’s regime was about to fall. But not to me, a Venezuelan who has learned what Maduro can and cannot do and what keeps him in power. I’ve been saying since Guaido took office in January that recognition and sanctions were positive but insufficient steps to end Maduro’s dictatorship and that Guaido had to be ready to call for international military support. In May, I said that some form of international military action was the only way left to restore democracy and save the lives of millions of Venezuelans.
But Guaido didn’t follow that advice. Instead, he broke his promise not to participate in fake dialogues by participating in two such talks with Maduro, giving Maduro more time to organize and cooling anti-Maduro protests. This isn’t new: Maduro and Chavez before him used dialogue as a tool to end opposition momentum for the last two decades. Guaido also never requested military support from our allies, sometimes saying he would consider it “if offered” and other times saying he doesn’t want it, or even mocking it in public town halls.
If that wasn’t enough, Guaido has corrupt crooks and Maduro collaborators within his ranks. This last point was proven two weeks ago when it was revealed that some congressmen of Guaido’s coalition used public money to pay for prostitutes in Colombia. Then, Guaido’s ambassador to Colombia broke ranks with him and revealed that officials in Guaido’s government lobbied the international community to lift sanctions on a corrupt friend and Maduro ally.
All of this didn’t cause Guaido to lose just Trump’s confidence, he also lost Venezuela’s. His approval rating completely reversed since January, going from nearly 90% of us behind him earlier this year to a 90% disapproval of his administration — just as bad as Maduro’s unpopularity.
Here’s where America can help with two concrete actions. First, the U.S. envoy for Venezuela or Trump himself should call Guaido and ask him to step down and then publicly or privately call on the members of Venezuela’s congress to install a leader that isn’t corrupt and who’s committed to strong actions against Maduro hand in hand with America and our closest allies. Second, American policymakers need to understand that Maduro can only be toppled by force — not a war, but force. This includes, but isn’t limited to, indicting and capturing regime leaders in and out of Venezuela to use them as bargaining chips, using cyber warfare, and collaborating with a transparent future interim government on intelligence sharing.
Guaido failed to deliver and is rightfully losing the trust of Venezuela. Replacing him and using force against Maduro is risky, but doing nothing is a riskier and sure path to defeat. Trump knows this, and it’s time to do something about it.
Daniel Di Martino (@DanielDiMartino) is the U.S. spokesman for Vente Venezuela and a Venezuelan expatriate since 2016.
