Juan Guaidó

Juan Guaidó (born July 28, 1983, La Guaira, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan politician and leader of the National Assembly (2019–21) who declared himself the interim president of Venezuela on January 23, 2019, claiming that the constitution justified his action because the allegedly fraudulent 2018 election of Nicolás Maduro had left the country without a president. In December 2022 the National Assembly removed Guaidó from office and effectively replaced him with Dinorah Figuera.

Early life and career

Guaidó was born and bred in La Guaira, a small but important port city in a densely populated urban strip on the Caribbean coast, some 20 miles (30 km) northwest of Caracas, where poverty was historically widespread. He grew up in a middle-class Roman Catholic family. His father, a commercial pilot, and mother, a preschool teacher and homemaker, divorced and each remarried. In December 1999 Guaidó, as a teenager, and his family were victims of the devastating mudslides that took more than 10,000 lives in the state of Vargas and other areas in the northern part of the country.

Guaidó attended Los Corales Institute, a private school near his home, before matriculating at the Jesuit-administered Andrés Bello Catholic University (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; UCAB) in Caracas, where he earned a degree in industrial engineering (2007). At UCAB he founded and served as the general secretary of the General Council of Student Representatives and had a role in the management of the Engineering Student Center. Later he participated in a graduate-level non-degree program in Political Management and Governability that UCAB had established in partnership with George Washington University. He also studied public administration at the Institute of Advanced Management Studies (Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración; IESA) in Caracas.

Opposition to Chávez and Maduro

When Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez accused the popular private network Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) of violating broadcast laws, refused to renew its license, and replaced it with a state-run broadcaster in 2007, Guaidó became one of the organizers of the student protest movement that sprang up in response to this censorship of the press. As part of the so-called Generation of 2007, he was a founding member and the national executive secretary of the Youth for Social Democracy. He also was a founder of the pacifist organization Quiero Paz, and in 2009 he helped establish the Popular Will (Voluntad Popular) party, which pledged to “build a more secure, united and prosperous country where everyone will be entitled to all rights.” In the process, he grew close to the charismatic Leopoldo López, who would become one of the most prominent leaders of the opposition and who would be sentenced in 2015 to nearly 14 years in prison for having led street protests against the ruling regime the previous year.

In 2011, the year that Popular Will became an officially recognized party, Guaidó began his tenure (2011–15) as an alternate representative for Vargas state in the National Assembly. In 2015 he joined several other lawmakers in a hunger strike aimed at prompting new legislative elections. The next year, he became a full-fledged representative for Vargas in the Assembly. Opposition had swelled toward the increasingly autocratic rule of Maduro, who had become president upon the death of Chávez in 2013. Attempts to remove Maduro from office by referendum were stonewalled by Maduro loyalists in the judiciary and on the election commission. Moreover, to circumvent the checks applied to Maduro’s power by the opposition-dominated National Assembly, a constituent assembly was created as an alternative legislature that acted as a rubber stamp for the Maduro government. In the meantime, largely as a result of declining world oil prices, the Venezuelan economy went into free fall, inflation soared into the stratosphere, and shortages of food and medicine became endemic, resulting in a nationwide humanitarian crisis.

Guaidó was repeatedly on the front lines of street protests against Maduro. In 2017 he received a neck wound from rubber bullets and had his hand broken as a result of clashes with the police. That July the opposition held an unofficial plebiscite in which some 98 percent of participating voters rejected the constituent assembly. The opposition urged Venezuelans to boycott the May 2018 presidential election, and only 46 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. Although 68 percent of those who voted supported Maduro, handing him a second term, the governments of the United States, Canada, and more than a dozen Latin American countries declared the results of the election to be fraudulent.

In December 2018, during the run-up to Maduro’s inauguration, the National Assembly elected the 35-year-old Guaidó as its new leader, despite the fact that Popular Will held only 14 of the body’s 167 seats. On January 5, Guaidó took office as the president of the Assembly. Immediately he brought a renewed sense of unity and purpose to the long-divided opposition, imbuing it with the militant resistance to Maduro’s rule that his party had consistently expressed. Condemning the election and branding Maduro’s imminent second term as illegitimate, Guaidó began calling on the Venezuelan military and foreign governments to recognize him as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. On January 13, 2019, he was seized by members of the intelligence service and detained for some 45 minutes, though he was unharmed. The incident served only to enhance his stature. In its wake, Guaidó went from 100,000 followers on Twitter to more than 330,000, and Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new right-wing president, and Luis Almagro, the head of the Organization of American States, all but recognized him as Venezuela’s acting president.

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Acting presidency and attempts to displace Maduro

On the anniversary of the 1958 ouster of military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, January 23, not quite two weeks after Maduro’s inauguration, Guaidó, surrounded by a sea of supporters in a square in downtown Caracas, declared himself Venezuela’s acting president. Claiming that the allegedly fraudulent election had left the country without a president, Guaidó said that the constitution empowered him as president of the National Assembly to assume the powers of the executive branch. Maduro denounced the declaration and branded it a coup that had been conspiratorially hatched with the United States. Almost immediately the United States recognized Guaidó’s claim to the presidency, and U.S. Pres. Donald Trump was quick to make bellicose statements of support. By the second week of February some 50 countries had officially recognized Guaidó as the leader of Venezuela, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, Israel, Paraguay, Peru, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Maduro received the support of Bolivia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia, and Turkey. As tensions mounted, the balance of power rested with the Venezuelan military, which initially maintained its support of Maduro.

Later in the month, Guaidó defied a government travel ban and went to Colombia, where he met with the presidents of Colombia, Chile, and Paraguay. Meanwhile, international aid in the form of food and medicine, much of it provided by the United States, was being stockpiled across the Venezuelan border in Colombia and Brazil. Claiming that the aid was a Trojan horse masking a coup attempt, Maduro ordered already-closed border crossings to be blocked by large trucks and containers. Guaidó announced that he and supporters would peacefully escort aid-carrying trucks across the border, in the hope that breaking the blockade would prompt the military to choose between allowing the much-needed aid in or continuing to support Maduro. On February 22, the day before the scheduled crossing, a pop music concert in support of the relief effort was staged by British entrepreneur Richard Branson on the Colombia side of the border while the Maduro government held its own concert on the Venezuela side.

The following day the crossing from Cúcuta, Colombia, began peacefully and was greeted by the desertion of dozens of Venezuelan national guardsmen, but it quickly turned violent as the advance of the supply trucks and demonstrators was halted by Venezuelan security forces firing rubber bullets and discharging tear gas. Although a smattering of supplies made it across the border, the relief effort was turned back, and the military largely remained loyal to Maduro, as it did in a similarly violent response to the opposition’s attempt to enter Venezuela from Brazil with supplies. In the wake of the failed relief effort, it was not clear whether Guaidó, who met with U.S. Vice Pres. Mike Pence on February 25, would be permitted to return to Venezuela. There was speculation that he might try to sneak back across the border through a remote area. Instead, on March 4 he defiantly reentered Venezuela through the front door, flying into Caracas’s international airport, where he was welcomed by diplomats from the United States and member countries of the European Union before addressing a large supportive crowd in the city.

Early in the morning of April 30 a video of Guaidó was issued in which he appeared at a military base, surrounded by supportive soldiers and accompanied by Leopoldo López, who claimed that he had been freed from house arrest. Guaidó announced that the “final phase” of the efforts to remove Maduro from office was underway. He declared that important contingents of the country’s security forces had come over to the opposition, and he called upon his supporters to take to the streets in nonviolent demonstrations to speed Maduro’s departure.

As events unfolded, however, it became clear that, though the head of the government’s intelligence apparatus had switched sides, few other military officers and security officials had joined him. Despite cheerleading by the Trump administration—which claimed that Maduro had been in a plane ready to flee but was dissuaded from doing so by Russian diplomats—the insurrection fizzled out almost as quickly as it had begun. Guaidó appeared in public the next day to put a positive spin on the failed coup and encourage continued resistance, but López was forced to seek asylum at the Spanish embassy in Caracas (from which he fled to exile in Spain in October).

In May 2019, talks brokered by Norway began between the Maduro government and Guaidó, but by August they had stalled. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis had only deepened. Food and medicine became increasingly scarce, and more and more people became dependent on government-provided survival packages. Guaidó’s failure to dispatch Maduro from power in the ensuing months contributed to a dramatic drop in the opposition leader’s popularity. Nevertheless, he led a boycott of the December 2020 elections for the National Assembly, and most opposition parties refused to participate in the elections, but some did take part. Still, only about 31 percent of eligible voters went to the polls. As a result, Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela; PSUV) took nearly 68 percent of the vote, whereas the opposition parties that chose to participate took less than 18 percent. International organizations and observers were quick to label the elections a sham.

Significantly, Guaidó’s boycott of the elections meant that he would not have a seat in the new Assembly. Hence, as of January 5, 2021, he would no longer be its speaker, which would call into question the legitimacy of his status as the interim president. In an attempt to recharge his support from both Venezuelans and foreign governments, Guaidó went on a diplomatic offensive in December and January that took him to meetings with the leaders of several large Western democracies and to the speaker’s podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In February he was a prominent guest of Trump when the U.S. president delivered his State of the Union message.

Because its health care system was already a shambles, Venezuela was hardly prepared to combat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic; the virus was first reported in China in late 2019 and began sweeping the globe in early 2020. In June 2021, with the country still in the throes of the pandemic, Guaidó called upon Maduro to restart talks. Surprisingly, the government appeared willing to do so, though its motivation was less than clear.

Having gained control of significant Venezuelan financial assets abroad—most notably a Federal Reserve Bank of New York account that held $342 million—Guaidó’s parallel government spent at least $130 million in 2020 and 2021, some $70 million of which was dedicated to various social programs, including about $19 million in payments to health care workers. Nonetheless, Guaidó was criticized in some quarters for a lack of transparency in his governance, and he largely failed in his efforts to unite the opposition as it began to prepare for the 2024 national elections. In December 2022 the National Assembly, which continued to function despite the expiration of its official term, voted 72–29 (with 8 abstentions) to remove Guaidó from office. The Assembly also voted to dissolve his government and replace it with a three-member all-women leadership team led by Dinorah Figuera, a surgeon living in exile in Spain.