Will Guaidó’s Gamble Pay Off?

Venezuela’s opposition leader has failed to gain enough military support to oust Nicolás Maduro, and Washington’s policies aren’t helping him.

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  • Christopher Sabatini

    Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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It started with a surprise but ended like so many other protests against Venezuela’s autocratic government. And predictably, the Trump administration blamed it all on the Cubans and the Russians.

On Tuesday morning, Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader sworn in by the National Assembly as president in January and now recognized in favor of embattled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by much of the international community, surprised his fellow citizens and the world when he appeared at dawn alongside the well-known opposition leader Leopoldo López and members of the military, calling for the armed forces to join his seemingly spontaneous popular protest. Flanked by military officers and civilians outside the La Carlota Air Base, in a video released at the start of the protest, Guaidó declared that Maduro’s “usurpation” of power must end and called supporters and the military to join him in the “final phase,” saying defiantly that “the moment is now.”

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