Venezuela’s former President Juan Guaidó arrived in Miami, Florida, on Tuesday morning from Bogotá after Colombian migrant authorities forced him to board a plane out of the country.
Guaidó, who the regime of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro banned from leaving the country, arrived in Colombia by land on Monday intending to meet with the Venezuelan diaspora in the country and conduct meetings with international delegations attending a conference on Venezuela organized by Colombia’s radical leftist President Gustavo Petro. While a major leader of the Venezuelan anti-Maduro opposition, establishment opposition figures excluded Guaidó from the invite list to the summit.
“After sixty hours on the road to get to Bogotá, avoiding the persecution of the dictatorship, defying the Maduro regime, I was forced to leave Colombia,” Guaidó said in a video posted on Twitter shortly before his departure to the United States. “The persecution of the dictatorship extended, unfortunately, today to Colombia.”
After arriving in Miami, Guaidó denounced that the Maduro regime had issued direct threats to himself, his wife Fabiana Rosales, his family, and daughters.
“I completed 70 hours or more of travel, very worried for my family, for my work team,” Guaido said. “We have already seen some consequences of the dictatorship. Tortured, persecuted and threatened. I would like to give details of the threats, but I feel that their lives are in danger.”
“They have received calls directly threatening, not only Fabiana [Rosales, Guaidó’s wife] but also her family, my work team,” Guaidó continued, “and we have seen how the dictatorship on other occasions has responded.”
The former interim president was deported from Colombia hours before the start of an “International Conference on the Political Process in Venezuela,” ongoing at press time in the Colombian capital.
The conference on Venezuela, organized by leftist former guerrilla insurgent Petro, will feature representatives of some 20 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, European Union states. These nations will extend support alongside representatives of the Maduro regime and the Venezuela establishment “opposition,” from which Guaidó once emerged as leader.
Petro said during his official visit to the United States last week that his International Conference on Venezuela aims as its primary objective the lifting of international human rights sanctions on Maduro.
“More democracy, zero sanctions – that is the goal of the conference in Bogotá,” Petro said in New York last week.
Hours before the start of the conference, however, the Maduro regime announced on Monday a list of five demands that the United States and other countries must comply with before the regime returns to the negotiating table with the Venezuelan “opposition.”
Maduro’s list of demands includes the lifting of all U.S. and other sanctions, an end to the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s investigation into Maduro’s crimes against humanity, and Maduro regime control over all Venezuelan government foreign assets.
The ICC probe, the regime claims, “affects” the regime’s “most important leadership.” The foreign assets in question include the $3 billion the establishment opposition agreed to share with the Maduro regime, despite its illegitimate status, during talks in November.
Lastly, the Maduro regime demanded the immediate liberation of Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman known as Maduro’s financial brain, currently on trial in the United States on charges of money laundering.
“We do not accept less from that conference in Bogotá than the lifting of all sanctions so that Venezuela has commercial, financial and economic freedom, and to recover everything that needs to be recovered in the economic, productive and social areas,” Maduro said during a new episode of his new weekly Monday show With Maduro+.
Colombia’s Foreign Ministry informed on Monday that the country’s top diplomat Álvaro Leyva Durán did not invite Guaidó, who has not been president since the beginning of this year, to participate in the conference.
Petro confirmed Guaidó’s departure to Miami on Tuesday morning, stating on social media that Guaidó would have been “gladly offered asylum” if he had entered Colombia with his passport and had requested it.
“Simply come in with his passport and ask for asylum. It would have happily been offered to him,” Petro said. “He has no reason to enter the country illegally. He was offered a transit permit, he was not deported back to his country and with US permission he flew to that country.”
“Obviously a political sector wanted to disrupt the free development of the international conference on Venezuela,” he continued.
Later, in a second post, Petro asserted that Guaidó had not been expelled.
“Mr. Guaidó was not expelled, it is better that lies do not appear in politics,” Petro said. “Mr. Guaidó had an agreement to travel to the United States. We allowed it for humanitarian reasons despite the illegal entry into the country.”
Colombia’s migration authority also issued a public statement on Tuesday morning denying that it had deported Guaidó but, rather, that the former Venezuelan president was offered a “transit permit” that would have allowed him to remain in Colombia for up to 15 days. Guaidó, the authority claimed, chose instead to enter Colombia illegal and thus went through the “same procedure” used for all other foreign nationals.
Leyva Durán, the Colombian foreign minister, told the press on Tuesday morning that Colombia “is not a country that deports,” claiming that Guaidó was “accompanied” by U.S. agents at El Dorado airport and that Guaidó’s plane ticket was “provided by the United States.”
Juan Guaidó assumed the interim presidency of Venezuela in January 2019 after socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro clung to power by holding sham presidential elections in 2018, which were not recognized by much of the free world.
Maduro’s sham election and refusal to step down caused the then opposition-led National Assembly to act according to what the Venezuelan constitution determined was a “rupture in the democratic order,” which allows the legislature to appoint its head as interim president of Venezuela. Guaidó’s designation as interim president gave rise to a constitutional crisis in Venezuela, with both Guaidó and Maduro contesting the nation’s presidency in the following years.
Despite the international recognition of 50 some countries, Guaidó failed to exert any power in the country and failed to remove Maduro. He also did not deliver his promise to organize free and fair elections to succeed him, meaning his presidency never evolved beyond a symbolic status. Guaidó’s presidency was dissolved in December 2022 after the opposition-led National Assembly voted to not renew his presidency for an additional year.
Colombian magazine Semana reported on Tuesday morning that, according to an anonymous source from the Venezuelan opposition, the Colombian government “blackmailed” Guaidó, forcing him to leave in exchange for the safe passage of his wife and daughters out of Venezuela.
“The government of Colombia, at the direct request of Gustavo Petro and Álvaro Leyva, blackmailed Juan Guaidó,” the cited source claims. “They asked him to leave Colombian territory immediately, on a direct flight to the United States. In exchange they committed to manage and guarantee the safety of his family in Venezuela”
The source cited by Semana also claimed that Maduro and the administration of leftist American President Joe Biden were both involved in the deal.
According to the source, the commitment to Guaidó upon leaving Colombia, would have been specifically “to guarantee the safety of his wife Fabiana Rosales and minor daughters and allow them to leave Venezuela freely to reunite with her husband and father.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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