In the early hours of this Tuesday, the isolated, somber and tense figures of the opposition leaders Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo López on the central highway of Caracas (Francisco Fajardo) in the Altamira road distributor, a well-to-do area in the east of the city, they anticipated nothing new for the coup plot launched a little earlier with the help of a group of some 30 officers and non-commissioned officers of the Bolivarian National Guard and the Bolivarian Intelligence Service.
The main novelty was Lopez in the street, because he was serving a sentence in domiciliary mode and obviously had escaped. A symbolism: it was said that Guaidó had decreed a pardon, and that the police had complied. But everything started badly, because it started with lies. There Lopez announced by twitter that he was in "La Carlota", to sow the idea - widely spread afterwards - that a military uprising had recognized the authority of deputy Guaidó, self-proclaimed president, and occupied the Francisco de Miranda air base, known like ... La Carlota.
They never entered the air base. Perhaps never would have known this had not been there, always timely and courageous, TeleSUR journalist Madeleine Garcia.
A Lopez and Guaidó soon joined some allies, deputies of the National Assembly, and stayed a while there asking with apparent desperation for social networks that "all the people" were to back them. The answer was delayed and did not reach to be massive at any moment of the day. By about eight o'clock in the morning, when everything had to start, it was already over.
The overestimated idea.
The deliroid idea, in this case, seems to have been the hope that the hardened proclamations of social networks materialized in going to put the chest in a possible combat with no assured end: the middle class, as is known by multiple studies, characterized by being fearful and cautious, like the small dogs that bark behind bars. And collateral to this idea, the other that when seeing their colleagues raised and backed by hundreds of thousands, the officers and soldiers of the air base were going to open the doors to entrench them there and generate a domino effect in the National Armed Forces Bolivarian
None of this happened. Worse still (for Guaidó and López): most of the military participants in the adventure escaped soon from there and went to the base. They said that they had been deceived by some of their superiors with an alleged operation in a penal establishment, in which the starting point of the march would be the Altamira distributor.
Guaidó and López retreated to a nearby plaza, that of Altamira, an old bastion of violent protests and left their followers on the highway, attacking the airbase with stones and molotovs. And also with bullets: a colonel was severely wounded in the neck. But this scenario, which was repeated for hours, is the same as in 2014, 2016 and 2017: it had gone from a coup d'état to a topic of public order.
At this point, the presidential palace of Miraflores was already safe, massively guarded by tens of thousands of Chavistas.
The international press did not want to hear any of this. They continued much of the day, throughout Latin America and the world, repeating the slogans of Guaidó: that this was the final phase of "Operation Libertad," which throughout the country the people were mobilizing, that 90 percent of the Armed Forces repudiated the "dictatorship" and that their victory was a matter of hours. In short, one more of the many "D-Days" promised to the segueres of the opposition.
The majority of Latin American "progressive" leaders, who do not seem to be disturbed by the prospect of a far-right dictatorship in Venezuela, remained silent during the day. Former Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz, one of the architects of the Lima group, put out his voice at the end of the day to sentence what was known from 8 in the morning: that the coup had failed.
As it is de rigueur, the United States, through the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, did not delay in supporting the "putsch", as the governments of Argentina, Chile and in particular the Colombian president Iván Duque did later. A virtual meeting of the Lima Group was held as a matter of urgency, and an extraordinary session of the Organization of American States was convened (from which Venezuela withdrew on Saturday the 27th in the exact term of two years following the denunciation of the treaty of affiliation), and a physical meeting of the foreign ministers of the same Group of Lima for Friday, May 3.
López: cold water.
The jet of cold water arrived in the middle of the afternoon, when it was learned that Leopoldo López, instead of participating in the vanguard of the "great Operation Libertad", was introduced to the Chilean diplomatic mission as a "guest", in a situation similar to that of another member of the "youth patrol" of the Venezuelan right, Freddy Guevara, since 2017. It was also known that 25 of the coup-plotters took refuge in the Brazilian embassy.
In a strange twist, Lopez would later leave the Chilean legation to move to Spain (the persecution of Maduro does not seem so brutal after all), because - according to Chilean Foreign Minister, Roberto Ampuero, there was no room with the other guests. It is vox pópuli in the Chilean Chancellery that Guevara has turned the diplomatic residence into a space of its own, with food, servitude, gardens and free swimming pool.
Guevara had already confessed last week, in an interview with a Chilean newspaper, that he used the diplomatic residence as a meeting place to overthrow the Venezuelan government. On Tuesday, Spanish MEP Beatriz Becerra, an enthusiastic supporter of an American invasion of Venezuela, highlighted the role that Embassy could play from now on as a center of operations for the coup d'état, taking advantage of the diplomatic status of a country that does not recognize to the government of Nicolás Maduro.
Conjectures were then opened about whether the entire operation had no other purpose than to rescue Lopez and make him regain his leadership of the far right, perhaps because Guaidó, deliroid, had begun to take seriously his role as imaginary president.
If the plan was to dig into the La Carlota airbase - a "beachhead" where to raise the flag - it is remarkably similar to the adventure of "humanitarian aid" launched from Colombia on February 23, when three trucks were launched and crowds throwing stones and Molotov cocktails on both sides of the border to surpass the guard and possibly ask from "liberated territory" for a foreign intervention.
The failure of the coup caused a furious reaction from the US Secretary of State, who attributed the loyalty of the Venezuelan military to ... Cuba !, and announced even more blockade and attacks against the socialist island in the Caribbean. Something that will require a lively imagination, since in recent days Washington has intensified anti-Cuban sanctions, extending them to any government or company in the world that trades with that country.
The Venezuelan people - like the Cuban people - have defeated all the maneuvers and conspiracies, but the US blockade makes them pay a very high price. Caracas recently published some figures of the cost in lives - tens of thousands - for the seizures of medicines and medicines, as well as the theft of Venezuelan financial resources and assets in the United States and England.
With the solidarity of Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and other countries, Venezuela runs a race against time: the war unleashed against it accelerated rapidly the decomposition of the global legal and institutional architecture. A new planetary order is based on the fall of neoliberalism as a single system and the United States as the undisputed economic leader; Capitalism is restructured and centrifugal forces appear.
The United States fights in Venezuela for hegemony in its backyard, with the help of individuals like Piñera, Macri, Bolsonaro and Duque. It revives the "Monroe Doctrine" ("America for the Americans"), and exerts every conceivable pressure to prevent Russia, China and Iran from doing business in the region, with non-interventionist agendas in the internal affairs of the States.
The blows are hard, but the system cracks. The neoliberal governments stagger in Latin America and Europe. The fate of the Bolivarian Revolution depends in the first place on the Venezuelan people, but also on the speed with which the spaces of sovereignty and independence in the Latin American region and in the world are regained .