Juan Guaidó has fled Venezuela after four years and more than three months of defiance of Nicolás Maduro. He has just announced it on his social networks: “I have just arrived in Colombia, in the same way that millions of Venezuelans have done before me, on foot.”
In the last few hours, rumors spread that Guaidó had taken refuge in the French Embassy in Caracas. They had already been on red alert for several weeks, after learning information that the ruling party was preparing his arrest. In this time he has remained in hiding, a security measure employed on several occasions.
“The regime has once again raised the threats against me and its objective is to silence my voice. I am not going to allow that to Maduro,” stressed Guaidó, who assures that he has traveled “within the framework of the summit called by President Petro.” and that he will request meetings with the international delegations.
The opposition leader has endured the political pulse against the all-powerful Bolivarian revolution, including attacks, persecutions, constant threats and espionage at all hours, since he was voted by majority to head the National Assembly at the beginning of 2019. Weeks later, he assumed the Presidency in charge of a historic political move, in which he had the support of more than 60 countries, especially the United States, the region’s allies (Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru and others) and the Europeans, with Spain in the lead. Never before had the Chavista regime suffered such internal and international pressure.
Chavismo’s harassment has increased since the opposition majority in the 2015 National Assembly forced the end of the Presidency in charge at the end of last December. The end of international support, with the exception of the US, which has always been close to his fight, multiplied the risk for the former president of the democratic Parliament.
Guaidó himself learned weeks ago that his arrest was being considered at the Miraflores Palace with the excuse of the anti-corruption purge launched within the revolution. From radical sectors it was demanded that the opposition leader also be presented to the country as another corrupt man in the operation that has put Chavista officials, the military, Boliburgo businessmen and judges in jail.
Persecution in recent days had prevented him from accelerating his campaign momentum for the opposition primary elections in October. At the moment the polls did not place him among the main favorites, the conservative María Corina Machado and the former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, but he was in a second group, after the comedian El Conde del Guácharo, the outsider of this contest. Like Capriles, Guaidó is disqualified from holding public office by decision of Chavismo.
Guaidó already managed to leave through the Colombian border in February 2019 to participate in the Venezuela Aid Live concert and in the failed attempt to enter humanitarian aid. At that time, she was at the height of her popularity, which she took advantage of to visit several countries in the region and in Europe, Spain included. A year later, the leader of Voluntad Popular (VP), the party of former political prisoner Leopoldo López, left his country again to travel to Washington, where he participated, as a special guest, in the State of the Union speech.
Asked by EL MUNDO weeks ago about a possible arrest by Chavista agents, Guaidó replied that “on this path there have always been risks. And I’m not just talking about the last four years, unfortunately I have spent the last 10 years going to the courts where leaders are tried politicians, going to the funerals of young people murdered by the dictatorship, many of them my friends. I have had to carry the urn of Fernando Albán (councilman murdered by the political police), of Edmundo Rada… It is always a risk to face the dictatorship “.
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