HOW TO THINK ABOUT IT
A failed gamble. Guaidó appeared to suffer a serious setback Tuesday when members of the military refused to heed his call outside an air base in Caracas to abandon the government en masse. Instead, they fired tear gas at protesters and the few rank-and-file soldiers who defected, sparking clashes that ultimately left four dead and dozens injured. Rumors had been swirling that military support for Maduro was waning — until, that is, the embattled president and uniformed loyalists denounced the attempted coup on television. Now, analysts are wondering whether Guaidó has exhausted his options to further galvanize his popular movement. “You only get to play this card once,” Fernando Cutz, the former Venezuela policy chief at the U.S. National Security Council, told the Associated Press.
Shadow war. Central to the chaos were claims by Bolton that three key members of the regime — Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno and Iván Rafael Hernández, commander of Maduro’s presidential guard — had promised to back Guaidó. Padrino and other top figures doubled down on their support of Maduro, and the fact that Bolton spoke out appeared to be a tacit acknowledgment that any opposition plans had failed. A Spanish newspaper, meanwhile, reported that Guaidó and his mentor, former political prisoner Leopoldo López, acted too quickly because they believed that they’d been sniffed out by Maduro’s spies. Ex-intelligence chief General Manuel Christopher Figuera, the only regime insider to publicly denounce Maduro’s government, seemed to confirm Bolton’s claim by writing to the president that “many people you trust are negotiating behind your back.”
Playing carefully. If Maduro’s military allies are “like chess pieces,” as Colombia’s ambassador to the U.S. describes them, they’re still very much in play. But a key question is how Bolton’s public commentary could affect decision making by other potential defectors. After witnessing how a top U.S. official outed alleged conspirators, it’s unclear how motivated they’d be to leave Maduro’s side. For whoever does decide to defect, it’s equally unclear what awaits them on the other side: Many of these regime allies, who’ve allegedly enriched themselves through drug trafficking and other illicit activities, aren’t necessarily buying the opposition’s promises of amnesty if they turn on Maduro. For his part, Maduro is playing it safe by not arresting Guaidó, which could empower the young leader's supporters as well as invite further Western punishment. Casting his chief opponent as a capitalist puppet is far more effective.
Patience is a virtue. While Guaidó and his supporters have shown gumption with their high-profile attempts to pressure the regime — don’t forget the February plans to deliver humanitarian aid — some experts are wondering whether Washington has what it takes to stand by his side in the long term. Sure, the U.S. has slapped oil sanctions on Caracas in a bid to cut crucial revenue streams and force Maduro’s hand, and Washington refuses to rule out military intervention. But the problem, writes one Miami-based journalist, is that D.C. policymakers see Guaidó’s revolution “as a swashbuckling, one-fell-swoop act of Monroe Doctrine heroism,” and not a slow, steady game that requires careful exploitation of smaller cracks in the system. Still, despite the saber-rattling, most experts agree Washington isn’t prepared to bog itself down in what would promise to be another costly foreign military intervention.
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