The Daily - One Country, Two Presidents: The Crisis in Venezuela

Episode Date: January 25, 2019

A remarkable battle for power is playing out in Venezuela, with dueling claims to the presidency. We look at what’s happening in the country and why the situation is coming to a head. Guest: Nicholas Casey, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a remarkable battle for power is playing out in Venezuela with dueling claims to the presidency and talk of a coup. Nick Casey on the crisis in Caracas. Nick Casey on the crisis in Caracas. It's Friday, January 25th. So on January 10th in Caracas, Venezuela,

Nicolas Maduro put his hand on a book and swore himself in as president for another six-year term. Then two weeks later, in another part of Caracas, on a sunny day, a little-known lawmaker named Juan Guaidó stood before a group of people and held a kind of citizens' swearing-in ceremony where he said he was the president of Venezuela. And he was prepared to lead the country himself. Juro! So, two men are declaring themselves the president of Venezuela.

One country, two presidents. As the president in charge of Venezuela. country, two presidents. And Nick, how is that possible? What has been going on in Venezuela that leads these two men at the exact same time to declare themselves the rightful leader of the country? Well, you have to turn the clock back to last year, just before the summer. Official campaigning for Venezuela's presidential election has kicked off with huge rallies by the candidates. When Maduro was running for re-election. Now remember, he'd been president of this country during this massive disaster in Venezuela. At the beginning of the summer, the currency was collapsing. People were losing even more of their savings

than they ever had. Hospitals were completely out of supplies. And they had been for years. I was there during that time. I got sick. I got dengue. And they weren't able to do anything about it. Wow.

This was the state of the country that has the world's largest proven reserves of oil. It was at an all-time low. And Nicolas Maduro was asking them to give him another six years as the president. And that would seem quite counterintuitive. What was his standing at that moment? How many people blamed him for the situation? Everybody blamed him. You would go

around in the neighborhoods in Caracas and they would point at how skinny they were and say this is the consequence of the Maduro diet. The Maduro diet named after the current president, Nicolas Maduro. That's what it's called there when people have lost a bunch of weight. Well, over the past year, 74% of Venezuelans lost an average of 8.7 kilos in weight. He's even laughed about that. He says he thinks it's funny. This is a man who's shown very little sympathy for this massive crisis that the country is going through. So you would think under normal circumstances that it would be impossible that this person would be reelected by the country that had been so brought down

during his first term as president. So then here comes the night of the election and the results come in and Maduro's won. Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, has been declared winner of Sunday's election. We won again. We were triumphant again. We've overcome all obstacles. We are the strength of history transformed into a popular victory. Permanent popular victory.

He's going to be president for another six years. And to many Venezuelans, they found that terribly shocking. Today, the world has the eyes here in Venezuela. What Venezuelans have at stake today is their own survival as a democratic nation. Venezuela is a dictatorship. The world can no longer turn a blind eye to that reality. under a big cloud, and immediately you see countries outside of Venezuela condemning what had happened, saying that the election may have been rigged, that they're not going to recognize Nicolas Maduro. ...are denouncing his win as a sham. Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, and the U.S. mission to the U.N. said they won't recognize the

results of the election. President Trump signing a new executive order this afternoon following the results of that controversial Venezuelan election. The executive order is designed to try and prevent the Venezuelan government from selling off its assets. And yet, if you're in Venezuela, it looks like you're going to have Maduro as your president for another six years. They said that you were obliged to vote. They said that people were coerced. It's a lack of respect.

So months passed. People are generally depressed about where things are going to go. And throughout this process, people are asking, well, where's the opposition here? Why are they not protesting? Why are they not trying to stand up to what's going on or offer any alternative? He cracked down on dissenting voices. Prominent opposition leaders were arrested or put under house arrest.

There was getting to be very little of the opposition left. The regime was going through and picking off leader after leader, often issuing orders of arrest for them. And they'd disappear. You'd find them in Colombia. You'd find them in Chile, you'd find them in Chile. Dragged from a car and briefly detained. This is believed to be the moment security agents in Venezuela arrested the country's opposition leader. Juan Guaido, the leader of the National

Assembly, was on his way. The opposition was getting thinner and thinner at this point, to the point that either you had an arrest warrant against you, or you thought there might be one soon. And you had just many, many people, both politicians and supporters of the opposition, leaving the country. Because after an election like that, kind of what hope did you have to try to challenge this guy? Then what happened? Well, Maduro continued on, and he had his re-inauguration, which was January the 10th. I think he thought everything was going to go very smoothly.

He had a big ceremony. Many of the people in his government attended, and he said, we're starting another six-year term. And it's then the opposition starts to leap into action. Although parliament is now largely toothless, its leader, Juan Guaido, has vowed to fight back. We reaffirm the illegitimacy of Nicolas Maduro. The opposition had a card up its sleeve, which was the Venezuelan constitution. There are articles that they can use if a president has seized power illegally.

And they say that this inauguration that he's done for himself was a seizing of power because he didn't win that election back last year. In this case, this triggers a mechanism in Venezuela whereby the legislature gets to take control of the country and decide who's going to be running it, in which case it gets to be the president of the National Assembly, who was Juan Guaido, the 35-year-old young lawmaker who no one had ever heard of, one of the last remaining men standing. You are going to be happy in your land. You are going to be double. Let's go forward. God bless us.

We can or we can't. We are going to be happy in our land. We are going to rebuild Venezuela. The hope is back. Venezuela is back. We are counting on you. He did something that no one in the opposition had been willing to do, which was to take Maduro on by saying that he was actually the president of Venezuela, which was an extremely audacious move.

It's really hard to underestimate how much risk is involved in taking on Maduro this way. haber habido elección el 20 de mayo. Que a partir del 10 de enero estará usurpando la presidencia de la república. Que en consecuencia, esta asamblea nacional como único poder legítimo en esto por los venezolanos... So beyond invoking obscure rules from the Constitution, what is Guaido's plan for how to execute this and knock out Maduro? Well, I think you saw some of it the day that he inaugurated himself. And this was a really surprising day for everybody that was covering this. Because he went out, he had this big ceremony, and just within minutes of him declaring himself the president of Venezuela, you had an announcement from the U.S. that they were going to recognize him. Hola. I'm Mike Pence, the vice president of

the United States. And on behalf of President Donald Trump and all the American people, let me express the unwavering support of the United States as you, the people of Venezuela, raise your voices in a call for freedom. Nicolas Maduro is a dictator with no legitimate claim to power. He's never won the presidency in a free and fair election. And he's maintained his grip of power by imprisoning anyone who dares to oppose him. The United States

And then you had an announcement from Canada that they were going to recognize him. So let me say on behalf of Canada that we recognize and express our full support for the interim presidency of Venezuela, assumed by the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó. And then it just became sort of like dominoes. You had Costa Rica and Paraguay and Argentina. Peru and Brazil. Colombia. He knows Juan Guaidó as the president of Venezuela and accompanies this process of transition to democracy so that the Venezuelan people can free themselves from the dictatorship. All of these countries suddenly said,

now we no longer recognize Maduro. It's Guaidó who's the president of Venezuela now. So what you could see was there must have been another part of this plan here, which wasn't just to make this crazy statement that he was the president, but also potentially a back channel in which they had a lot of other countries lined up to go along with this plan when he did it on Wednesday. I have to say that I'm struck that all these major democracies are backing Guaido, who is not democratically elected as the leader of Venezuela.

Why exactly are they doing that? Yeah, well, I'm surprised too, frankly, covering this. You know, he wasn't elected and people didn't really know who he was. I think people are still trying to look under the hood of who this man is. So what does it show? It shows that the international community has gotten pretty desperate at this point in finding any alternative to Maduro, who's become a dictator. So I think when the international countries, when Venezuela's

neighbors, when the U.S. finally saw that there was someone who was finally willing to take him on face to face, they seized the opportunity. And it's a big gamble because they're gambling on someone that doesn't really have a long track record, a long history in Venezuela, frankly, is just beginning to know. So countries like the U.S. are not so much supporting Guaido as they are supporting the removal and the substitution of Maduro. If Maduro's gone, someone's got to be in charge. So if your goal is to get rid of Maduro, your goal also has to be to say who would be the president then. And I think that's largely the reason

why Guaido has so much backing right now, is because he's not Maduro. The United States joins with all freedom-loving nations in recognizing the National Assembly as the last vestige of democracy in your country, for it's the only body elected by you, the people. As such, the United States supports the courageous decision by Juan Guaido, the president of your National Assembly,

to assert that body's constitutional powers, declare Maduro a usurper, and call for the establishment of a transitional government. On behalf of the American people, we say to all the good people of Venezuela, Estamos con ustedes. We are with you. We stand with you. And we will stay with you until democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of libertad.

Muchas gracias y vayan con Dios. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. So how does Maduro respond to this big international outpouring of support for basically his ouster? Well, he threw a diplomatic ties to the U.S., he ordered the personnel of the embassy out in 72 hours. This started kind of a fascinating chain of events where the U.S. said it wasn't going to leave because it recognized Juan Guaido as the president,

and Guaido came out with a statement saying, your embassy officials are welcome to stay. We're the government, and we would love to have diplomatic relations with you continue just as they had before. And how have the people of Venezuela responded to this intervention by countries like the U.S.? It's been surprising to me. It was surprising to me starting maybe 18 months ago when I talked to friends and colleagues who were back in Venezuela, and they would ask me what the U.S. was going to do about this. And my response would always be, what do you mean what the U.S. is going to do about it? You don't certainly want the U.S. to be involved in this,

do you? I mean, the U.S. has got a kind of a long history in Latin America that people don't like. I mean, it was the U.S. that brought Pinochet into power. It was the U.S. that had the coup that got rid of Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in the 1950s, who was a democratically elected leader. U.S.'s history of interventions has been very checkered, but it is a consequence of this strange situation that Maduro has put the country in, where an unpopular leader who's presiding over a deep collapse in the country won't go, won't take the exit. The people have actually got to the position, and this isn't everybody in Venezuela, but this is a lot of people in Venezuela who are saying, why doesn't the U.S. intervene and try to save us? And if it's not the U.S., then why don't

our own military do this? I think that's what you actually hear much more on the streets of Venezuela, is how could the military stand by and let this man continue to run the country as he does. And these two things, asking for intervention and asking for a military coup, are parts of the past that Latin America's been trying to bury for years. So to see them both be part of the landscape again in Venezuela, I find to be a little bit terrifying, frankly. I met a woman who was protesting in a plaza last year, and she was telling me how much she wanted Donald Trump to intervene. And this shocked me. She told me that she'd be happy to see U.S. tanks circling around Caracas. And I told her, do you know what this

means to have a U.S. invasion of your country? And this girl was 19. I don't think she really knew. But you are seeing people that are saying things that you would have thought were preposterous years ago because they've suffered so many years under Maduro. Given the openness because of the situation in Venezuela, two countries like the U.S. weighing in, does the support and the recognition of all these international powers

give the opposition more power as they try to take over? Well, it does and it doesn't. Symbolically, it's great. They have all this support from outside of Venezuela. But what they need is support inside Venezuela. What they have now is all the recognition, but they don't have any of the weapons. They don't have control over the military. And ultimately, it's the military that's going to be the arbiter of power in Venezuela and really has been the one that's been holding up Maduro. If anything's going to change, they have to go from holding up Maduro to holding up Guaido. Ultimately, the power in any constitutional democracy is kind of imaginary.

It's whether people are willing to respect the norms. And when they don't, like what's happened in Venezuela and the constitution has kind of melted away, it just comes down to the people that have got the weapons as the ones that can say who's in charge. It's the ones with the weapons that are saying Maduro's in charge. And if that changes,

it's probably going to be the same generals who are the ones that determine that he's not. Does that start to look, Nick, like a military coup backed by the U.S. government? It does, because you have the U.S. government supporting opposition parties that are supporting military intervention by their own military against the man who's running the government. Each of those links is there, and it would link the U.S. to what happens afterward. You just don't know. When you ask the armed forces to get involved, it's really up to them what happens next. So it could all go very badly, and then everybody who supported it would be implicated,

including the U.S.? Yeah, potentially. So what exactly is the military weighing right now, knowing that they hold all the power in this equation? So on one side, the military lives very well under Maduro. The top brass of the military live lavish lives. There's lots of forms of revenue. They have lots of control over the economy. Many top officers are involved in the drug trade, smuggling, even though there's a big

crisis in Venezuela. They're not living it at the top. On the other end, they're seeing that this institution, which had been beloved by Venezuelans, is getting increasingly tarnished for being on the side of Maduro. And they're also seeing that so much of the world is now getting behind Guaido and wondering probably whether Maduro is going to be around forever and what they're going to do after Maduro is gone themselves. So this is kind of the dilemma that they're facing. Whose side do they get on? Which side do they think is going to be right in history? that they're facing. Whose side do they get on?

Which side do they think is going to be right in history? And Nick, given how much time you have spent on the ground in Venezuela, I wonder if you have an instinct for which of these will weigh more on the military and how it will go.

Well, I can't say how long it's going to take, but I think that these military officers and rank-and-file people are looking out their windows every morning, and they're seeing that the crowds are angry. And that they're getting bigger. And that they need to do something about these crowds.

And they need to get on the side of them, as opposed to the side of the single person who's running the country. But I have no idea how they're going to make that decision or when. A este santo nombre, a este santo nombre, templo de pavor, el lideroísmo que otra vez triunfó. Gloria al bravo pueblo que yugo lanzó, la ley respetando la virt virtue and honor. Glory to the brave people that the yoke threw. The law respecting virtue and honor. Here's what else you need to know today. So, Mr. President, later today, day 34 of this partial government shutdown, the Senate will be voting on a proposal to finally end it.

On Thursday, for the first time since the partial government shutdown began, the Senate voted on two plans proposed by Republicans and Democrats to reopen the government. President's compromise would accomplish three things. First, it ends the shutdown and resumes pay for federal workers right away. Second, it strikes a bipartisan compromise on the issue of immigration and border security

with ideas from both sides. And third, it provides stable, full-year funding for the federal government. The Republican bill, which would have funded President Trump's proposed border wall, failed by a vote of 50 to 47 and was supported by a single Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. and was supported by a single Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Our proposal allows us to open up the government and then, then after government's open, settle our differences over border security. The Democratic bill, which would not have funded the wall, also failed by a vote of 52 to 44, but was supported by half a dozen Republicans, including Senators Susan Collins of Maine,

Mitt Romney of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who defied the president in backing the measure. How ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise the president of the United States couldn't keep, and that America is not interested in having him keep. This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, take it from the farmers and ranchers that were there and have the Mexicans pay for it isn't true. That's why we're here, because he's now saying the taxpayers have to pay for it. Before and after the votes, tempers flared on the Senate floor

as lawmakers like Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado expressed their fury over the length of the shutdown and the absence of serious negotiations to bring it to an end. The least we could do is reopen our government and stop pursuing the self-inflicted harm that it creates to have hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of work and not being paid, not able to support their families, while we continue to stand on this floor having mindless arguments that are going to do nothing to advance the future of our country. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester,

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