wsj.com
Venezuela’s Opposition Came Close to Ousting the President—but the Plan Fell Apart
Juan Forero, José de Córdoba and Kejal Vyas
8-10 minutes
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—Venezuela’s opposition came tantalizingly close to removing President Nicolás Maduro from power this week, according to more than a dozen people involved in talks to oust him.
But in the end, it all went wrong.
For the past two months, key opposition figures, led by Juan Guaidó, the young head of the National Assembly,
had met with highly placed figuresin Mr. Maduro’s government, including military officers accused of rights abuses, trying to cut a deal for a peaceful transfer of power.
Meetings took place in Panama and the Dominican Republic, as well as here in Colombia’s capital, according to interviews with more than a dozen people with knowledge of the talks.
While both sides were far apart at first, they came to agree on one thing: Mr. Maduro had to go.
Residents protesting at a rally against the government of President Nicolás Maduro on Friday Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Edilzon Gamez/Getty Images
Crucially, they decided, it was to be done not through a military coup, unpalatable to many in Venezuela and abroad, but rather through a court ruling that would permit the military to step away from Mr. Maduro and put the country on a path back to democracy.
Under the plan, the country’s top court, the Supreme Justice Tribunal, was to recognize the opposition-controlled National Assembly, the last democratically elected body in Venezuela, as the legitimate representative of the Venezuelan people.
The armed forces would then have legal grounds to abandon Mr. Maduro. The defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, and others who were negotiating with the opposition, would join the new government.
“Padrino was to say, ‘Okay, this a ruling, we have to listen, we have to comply, this is the judicial power speaking,’” said one person with knowledge of the negotiations. “The armed forces commit themselves to make good with this institutional approach.”
The deal, however, unraveled on Tuesday for reasons that couldn’t be determined, leading to street clashes that led to the deaths of five people and a hunt for opposition figures by the regime.
Some of those familiar with the events say the surprise, predawn appearance that day of a well-known opposition leader, Leopoldo López, alongside Mr. Guaidó—with both calling for an uprising—prompted those in the regime who had been negotiating to withdraw their support for the pact.
Mr. López said the intelligence police, the Sebin, who had been guarding his home where he was under house arrest had released him. The head of the Sebin, Gen. Manuel Figuera, issued a statement that night announcing his break with Mr. Maduro.
But the appearance of Mr. López, head of the Popular Will party of which Mr. Guaidó is a member, outside an air base hadn’t been part of the script laid out in the talks between the regime conspirators and opposition negotiators.
Those close to the talks said the two men’s call for an uprising broke confidence with the regime negotiators, who then pulled out of the pact.
“Leopoldo pulled the trigger quickly and we lost a golden opportunity to convince the Venezuelan military to oust Maduro,” said an opposition figure in Washington who is in close contact with leading Maduro foes in Venezuela.
Mr. López, who fled into diplomatic exile at the Spanish Embassy Tuesday, couldn’t be reached for comment. He emerged on Thursday, telling reporters there had been “no intent at a coup d’état” on Tuesday.
Many others in the opposition defend Mr. López and say he and Mr. Guaidó acted on Tuesday only after their interlocutors in the regime began to back out of the agreement. It isn’t known whether they did so because counterintelligence agents had discovered the plot or because key actors on the government side never had any intention of pulling their support for Mr. Maduro.
Some suspect that latter scenario in the case of the defense minister, Mr. Padrino. Some people familiar with the events of the last few days say he was using the negotiations to smoke out traitors and detect anti-Maduro plotting.
“It was naiveté to confide in these operators who are compromised with the government mafias of Maduro and Diosdado,” one opposition figure said, referring to the president and the government’s No. 2, Diosdado Cabello.
In January, a senior Trump administration official told The Wall Street Journal that efforts to negotiate with Mr. Padrino had failed. “It became absolutely clear that he was completely subjected to the regime,” the official said.
To be sure,
some members of the armed forces, while supportive of the negotiations to remove Mr. Maduro, were aware that the talks could be used to detect dissidents. An audio recording provided to the Journal by a top opposition figure features purported military officers discussing that prospect.
“We are worried this is a trap,” one unidentified officer can be heard saying, speaking on Tuesday after Mr. Guaidó called on the military to rise up. “We have units that are ready to go out, with difficulty, because the operation wasn’t planned for today. But the problem is that if we don’t have enough force, the movement will collapse.”
Despite the plot’s ultimate failure, those who pursued the negotiations say they were on the cusp of putting Venezuela on track toward ending authoritarian rule. Mr. Guaidó’s political party had even negotiated that a 20-second advertisement calling Venezuelans to May 1 antigovernment protests was aired on three major television networks and on radio stations that had long succumbed to government censorship and stripped critical programming.
To ensure the support of key high-ranking officials, a 15-page document permitted people such as Mr. Padrino and Maikel Moreno, the head of the Supreme Justice Tribunal, to remain in their posts. Concerns about rights abuses committed by some of those people involved would have also been addressed, said a person who has been close to those in power in Venezuela and had knowledge of the plans. Gen. Figuera, the head of the secret police, was among those “proposing everything for a transition,” the person said.
Mr. Figuera has since fled the country, people familiar with his situation said. And those government officials who had been identified as having been part of the conspiracy against Mr. Maduro came out publicly in nationally staged events to show their support for the president. They included Mr. Padrino, the defense minister; Gen. Ivan Hernández, head of military counterintelligence; and Gen. Jésus Suárez Chourio, head of the army. All appeared with Mr. Maduro on Thursday as he gave a speech to troops at Fort Tiuna, a base in Caracas.
Judge Moreno, in a phone call to state television on Tuesday, rejected the attempt to remove Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Padrino acknowledged that people had reached out to him to get him to turn against the government he serves.
“They’re trying to buy us off as if we were some kind of mercenaries,” he said, standing next to Mr. Maduro. “Those who have fallen for that, fallen into selling their soldier spirit, cease being soldiers and, of course, can’t be among us.”
—Maolis Castro and Ginette González in Caracas and Vivian Salama in Washington contributed to this article.
Write to Juan Forero at
Juan.Forero@wsj.com, José de Córdoba at
jose.decordoba@wsj.comand Kejal Vyas at
kejal.vyas@wsj.com
Bruh. ... even the military got cold feet...Maduro is on the clock
@88m3 @dtownreppin214
How can anyone view this as a win for Maduro? This isn't confidence, this is cowardice
Even the CIA was saying Maduro had the jet gassed up ready to go to Havana
