One Country, Two Presidents

Juan Guaido raises his right hand. Before him, a crowd stretches through the streets of Caracas. Venezuelan flags move above people's heads. Phones are held in the air, recording a moment that only weeks earlier would have seemed almost unimaginable. Today, January 23, 2019.

In my condition de Presidente de la Assemblée Nacional.

In my condition as President of the National Assembly.

Invocando los articles.

Guaido's 35 years old. And he's been president of Venezuela's National Assembly for less than three weeks. Now, invoking the Constitution, he swears to assume the powers of the Presidency of the Republic. It's January 23, 2019, the anniversary of the uprising that brought down the military dictator Marcos Pérez Jimenez in 1958.

Venezuelans have returned to the streets with the hope that another dictatorship might finally be ending. Within hours, the United States has recognized Guaidó as interim president. Other governments follow. Across the city, Nicolas Maduro remains inside the presidential palace. He has no intention of leaving.

For more than a year, Venezuela has lived with two competing assemblies. Now it has two men claiming the presidency, supported by rival institutions and competing international alliances. But there's still only one Venezuelan state, one military establishment, one apparatus with the power to open a border, occupy a building, or put someone in prison.

The question is whether any of it will turn on Maluru and follow Juan Guaidó. To understand what happened that January, we need to go back to the election Maduro had held the year before. In May 2018, the regime organized a rigged presidential election. Leading opponents were excluded, major parties refused to participate, and the institutions administering the election were completely controlled by the dictatorship.

Maduro was declared the winner. He celebrated at Miraflores Palace. That created a problem because Maduro's existing term expired on January 10, 2019. On that day, Maduro went to the Supreme Court and took the oath for another six years. Technically, he was usurping the office. The opposition's constitutional argument drew on Article 233 of the Constitution, which places the President of the National Assembly in charge when a president-elect is permanently unavailable before taking office.

Applied to the absence of a legitimately elected successor, that provision supplied the basis for an interim presidency. The duty to restore the Constitution and the right to resist an abusive regime supported the broader argument. And let me be clear, this was a legal interpretation of how to restore a constitutional government.

And it brought the presidency of the National Assembly back to the center of Venezuelan politics. Juan Guaidó had assumed the leadership of the legislature on January 5th. When the opposition won its parliamentary majority in 2015, the main parties agreed to take turns presiding over it. In 2019, it was Voluntad Popular's turn.

The party's leader, Leopoldo Lopez, remained a political prisoner, by then under house arrest. Guaidó belonged to a younger generation that had grown within the party around him. He was an elected deputy, but he had never led a national presidential campaign or established the public recognition of figures like Leopoldo López or Enrique Capriles.

He's only 35 years old, but for those who dream of seeing President Nicolás Maduro go, Guaidó is the yes we can man.

That unfamiliarity gave him room to become something the opposition badly needed: a face onto which Venezuelans could project the possibility of a fresh start. Those who remained had lived through repeated promises that change was close, followed by the same humiliating discovery that Maduro was still there.

Residents came out in support. But the rebellion was quickly suppressed, and the soldiers were detained. No general uprising followed. But the incident gave the mounting tension a visible form. Even within the armed forces, there were people willing to break with Maduro. Two days later, crowds assembled across the country, and Guaidó took his oath.

The opposition's program could be expressed in three simple demands. First, an end to the usurpation. Second, a transitional government, and third, free elections. Guaidó's authority rested on his position within the National Assembly, and the constitutional argument for an interim government. His purpose was to open the way for a presidential election Venezuelans could actually choose in.

Maduro immediately portrayed him as an unelected puppet installed by Washington. But that explanation ignored everything that had led up to the confrontation. The government's decision to refuse the opposition's parliamentary victory in 2015, the destruction of electoral guarantees, and the imposition of a new presidential term without a legitimate election.

Guaidó's claim arose from the last national institution that the regime had failed to replace with one of its own. It was a drastic escalation of the struggle over legitimacy that had divided the country since 2017. The United States, Colombia, Brazil, Canada, Peru, and other governments recognize Guaidó.

In the weeks that followed, many European governments joined them.

Nine European nations have joined the United States and several other countries in recognizing the opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's interim president.

Eventually, more than 50 countries would recognize his interim presidency. For Venezuelans watching, the speed of those announcements created momentum. The isolation and exhaustion of the previous year seemed to be giving way to something much larger. World leaders spoke Guaido's name. Foreign capitals treated Maduro as a man whose authority was coming to an end.

People who had stopped believing that anything could change began making plans around the possibility that it might. But recognition alone couldn't transfer power. The opposition's strategy depended on a further step. As pressure accumulated, a decisive part of the military would have to abandon Maduro.

The National Assembly offered amnesty to military and civilian officials who helped restore constitutional government. Demonstrators appealed directly to soldiers. Foreign governments told regime insiders that their future didn't have to remain tied to the man in Miraflores. The aim was to create a point in which obeying Maduro looked more dangerous than breaking with him.

That was the wager at the center of the interim presidency. And the first Trump administration was essential to it. Opposition leaders had been discussing their plans with U.S. officials before Guaido's proclamation. On the eve of the January 23rd demonstrations, Vice President Mike Pence spoke with him and conveyed Washington's support.

For many Venezuelans, that backing carried an enormous weight. These measures went much further than the financial restrictions introduced in 2017. They blocked PDVSA's property under U.S. jurisdiction and sharply restricted the commercial relationship with the country that had been a crucial buyer of Venezuelan oil.

Washington also took steps to put certain Venezuelan assets abroad under the authority of Guaido's representatives. The pressure was intended to cut Maduro off from revenue, strengthen the interim government, and tell the people around him that the system supporting their privileges could no longer be taken for granted.

But the oil industry also sustained the wider economy. The risks extended to people who had no influence over the military and no access to the regime's fortunes. The strategy depended on producing change quickly. If Maduro survived, Venezuelans would face an already shattered economy under additional pressure.

Meanwhile, Trump left open the possibility of military force.

When the US President says that all options remain on the table, that means just one thing: that the possibility of a military intervention by the United States in Venezuela is not entirely discarded.

His national security advisor, John Bolton, appeared before cameras holding a notepad with a line written on it that said, 5,000 troops to Colombia. Was an intervention being prepared? Was the note a threat deliberately placed by the cameras? The uncertainty itself increased the pressure, but a suggestion of force was not a commitment to use it.

And Maduro had allies of his own, including Russia and Cuba. He still controlled the armed institutions inside Venezuela. His survival would be determined by what those institutions did when challenged. Guaido's next move focused on the regime's refusal to confront the humanitarian emergency. In the previous episode, we saw how Venezuelans had been forced to organize their lives around hunger.

Wages bought less and less, hospitals lacked basic supplies, families survived on whatever food they could find. Maduro's denial of that catastrophe was one of the most indefensible parts of his rule. Soldiers knew that the hunger was real. Their relatives lived in the same country. They had seen people grow thinner and die in hospitals.

The opposition wanted to turn that crisis into a decision. Guaidó announced an effort to bring humanitarian assistance into Venezuela through neighboring countries. Food and medical supplies began arriving in Cúcuta, on the Colombian side of the border. Other routes were planned through Brazil and the Caribbean.

The United States backed the operation. The cargo would be presented to the Venezuelan Armed Forces as a choice. They could either allow the desperately needed supplies through, accepting an initiative led by Guaidó, or enforce Maduro's orders and keep the aid outside. For the opposition, the operation offered a way to transform a dispute over constitutional authority into an immediate confrontation at the border.

Venezuela Aid Live had been organized with the backing of British businessman Richard Branson. Well-known Latin American performers took the stage, and the event was broadcast to an international audience. Maduro's government organized a rival concert across the border. Two men claimed the presidency.

Two concerts confronted each other across the border, and between the spectacle and the political declarations, trucks waited to carry food into a country whose rulers denied the scale of its hunger. Then Guaidó appeared on the Colombian side of the border. The Supreme Court had banned him from leaving Venezuela.

Yet there he was, at the concert, alongside the presidents of Colombia, Chile, and Paraguay. He had crossed the border without being stopped. The sight fed the expectation that the regime's grip was beginning to loosen. If Guaidó could defy Maduro's institutions and appear before the world, perhaps the soldiers would also let the aid through.

Perhaps this time the pressure would be enough. Images of the burning cargo spread across the world. Officials in Washington and opposition leaders blamed Maduro's forces. Later video analysis pointed instead to a Molotov cocktail thrown by an anti-government protester being the likely cause of one of the truck's fires.

But the regime had blocked the crossing and violently resisted the operation. Along the Brazilian border, the confrontation was deadly. Indigenous Bemon communities and other residents faced violence as they tried to facilitate the aid's entry. By the end of the day, the operation had failed to bring the main convoys into Venezuela or force the military to break the way that the opposition had hoped.

Some members of the security forces did abandon Maduro, though. In the following days, hundreds of soldiers crossed into Colombia. But desertion was different from turning a military unit against their regime. The men crossing the border could escape, they could ask for protection. Their departure didn't transfer their weapons, a command structure, or control the state to Guaido, though.

The military establishment remained intact. In our previous episode, Why Maduro Survived, we explored the arrangements that helped keep the armed forces loyal: corruption at the top, surveillance and repression against potential dissent, and a system designed to make organizing a challenge extraordinarily dangerous.

Those arrangements had survived another test. A soldier could know that his family was hungry and still feared disobeying an order. The possibility that other units might rebel offered little protection if his own unit moved first and was left alone. Waio's strategy required a coordinated rupture inside institutions that the regime had spent years preventing from coordinating against it.

At the border, the moral force of the opposition's appeal had collided with that machinery. Maduro could now point to an outcome. The man recognized abroad as Venezuela's interim president had promised to get the aid in, and the security forces had prevented him. The challenge was far from over, but the expectation of an imminent collapse had suffered its first major blow.

Two days later, there was a tense exchange inside Miraflores Palace. Maduro had been giving interviews to international journalists, presenting himself as a defender of Venezuela against an American plot to overthrow his government. It was a story built on a history that gave it real emotional force.

The U.S. had intervened repeatedly in Latin America. Trump's threats made it easy for Maduro to describe the confrontation in those terms. The story also served a very practical purpose. It moved attention away from the government's responsibility for the country people were fleeing. Foreign governments could withdraw recognition, Venezuelans could fill the streets.

He still had the men who would carry out his orders, though. Guaidó had revived a possibility that many Venezuelans had begun to abandon. Their recognition was real. So was the hope that families might be reunited, and that leaving the country would finally become a choice, not a necessity. But the first great test of his strategy had left the essential distribution of power intact.

The interim president could ask for the border to open. Maduro could order it closed. And between those competing claims lived the people for whom another week of waiting meant another week without enough food. Another search for medicine. Another farewell. Maduro had been able to walk away from the images Jorge Ramos showed him.

But the people inside those images, they couldn't walk away from the country he still controlled.

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