Venezuelan troops block aid convoy
Two protesters killed as security forces fire tear gas
CUCUTA, Colombia — A U.S.-backed campaign to force President Nicolas Maduro from power met strong resistance Saturday from Venezuelan security forces who fired tear gas on protesters trying to deliver humanitarian aid from Colombia and Brazil, leaving two people dead and some 300 injured.
Throughout the turbulent day, as police and protesters squared off on two bridges connecting Venezuela and Colombia, opposition leader Juan Guaido made repeated calls for the military to join him in the fight against Maduro’s “dictatorship.” Colombian authorities said more than 60 soldiers answered his call, deserting their posts in often-gripping fashion, though most of them were low-ranking and didn’t appear to dent the higher command’s continued loyalty to Maduro’s socialist government.
In one dramatic high point, a group of activists led by exiled lawmakers managed to escort three flatbed trucks of aid past the halfway point into Venezuela when they were repelled by security forces. In a flash the cargo caught fire, with some eyewitnesses saying the national guardsmen doused a tarp covering the boxes with gas before setting it on fire. As a black cloud rose, the activists, protecting their faces from the fumes with vinegar-soaked cloths, unloaded the boxes by hand in a human chain stretching back to the Colombian side of the bridge.
“They burned the aid and fired on their own people,” said 39-year-old David Hernandez, who was hit in the forehead with a tear gas canister that left a bloody wound and growing welt. “That’s the definition of dictatorship.”
For weeks, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration and its regional allies have been amassing emergency food and medical supplies on three of Venezuela’s borders with the aim of launching a “humanitarian avalanche.” It comes exactly one month after Guaido, in a direct challenge to Maduro’s rule, declared himself interim president at an outdoor rally.
Even as the 35-year-old lawmaker has won the backing of more than 50 governments around the world, he’s so far been unable to cause a major rift inside the military, which is Maduro’s last remaining plank of support in a country ravaged by hyperinflation and widespread shortages.
Amid the standoff, Guaido was turning to diplomatic actions.
As night fell, he refrained from asking supporters to continue risking their lives and make another attempt to break the government’s barricades. Instead, he said he would meet U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Monday in Colombia’s capital at an emergency meeting of mostly conservative Latin American governments to discuss Venezuela’s crisis.
But he did make one last appeal to troops.
“How many of you national guardsmen have a sick mother? How many have kids in school without food,” he said, standing alongside a warehouse in the Colombian city of Cucuta where 600 tons of mostly U.S.-supplied boxes of food and medicine have been stockpiled. “You don’t owe any obedience to a sadist … who celebrates the denial of humanitarian aid the country needs.”
Guaido later tweeted that he had decided to “propose in a formal manner to the international community that we keep all options open to liberate this country which struggles and will keep on struggling.”
Earlier, Maduro struck a defiant tone, breaking diplomatic relations with Colombia, accusing its “fascist” government of serving as a staging ground for a U.S.-led effort to oust him from power and possibly a military invasion.
“My patience has run out,” Maduro said, speaking at a massive rally of red-shirted supporters in Caracas and giving Colombian diplomats 24 hours to leave the country.
Clashes started Saturday well before Guaido straddled a semi-truck and waved to supporters in a ceremonial send-off of the aid convoy from Cucuta. In the Venezuelan border town of Urena, residents began removing yellow metal barricades and barbed wire blocking the Santander bridge.