A border-town bridge over a near-dry riverbed has become the scene of a showdown between the Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro and his U.S.-backed rival.
At the Colombian end in Cucuta is the logistics hub from which the Venezuelan opposition wants to organize food and medical shipments to alleviate suffering and undermine Maduro. On the Venezuelan side, freight containers and a tanker trailer have been dragged into the road to block vehicles. Security forces patrol the riverbed nearby.
About 10 trucks of aid will arrive in Cucuta on Thursday, but won’t be sent into Venezuela until next week, opposition lawmaker Gaby Arellano said in a phone interview. The U.S. Embassy said in a release the shipments would roll into the city at about 1:30 p.m.
Juan Guaido, the Venezuelan National Assembly leader recognized as the country’s rightful leader by more than 30 governments, needs to deliver the aid to maintain pressure on Maduro’s authoritarian regime and demonstrate his ability to help the masses. But Maduro has said international aid convoys are a pretext for invasion, and there’s no sign that his armed forces will heed Guaido’s call to let the shipments through.
Under Maduro’s failed socialist policies, Venezuela has sunk into a humanitarian crisis, and hunger is common in the once-wealthy petrostate. Children beg for scraps and adults pick through garbage hoping to feed their families.
U.S. sanctions on the oil industry, the only real source of hard currency for the government, threaten further suffering. Those sanctions, which were rolled out last week, form part of what would appear to be a two-pronged approach by Guaido and his U.S. backers — strip Maduro of the cash he needs to buy even the small amounts of food he’s been handing out to Venezuelans, and then ride to the rescue with critical supplies of their own.
It’s unclear whether the Guaido camp can achieve this daunting task, but the political significance is clear: On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted a picture of the blocked bridge, saying, “The Maduro regime must LET THE AID REACH THE STARVING PEOPLE.”
The U.S., Canada and European Union have pledged $100 million in aid at Guaido’s behest. That represents only about two weeks of food and medical imports, said Francisco Rodriguez, chief economist at Torino Economics in New York.
Guaido held a planning meeting in Caracas on Wednesday with a handful of opposition mayors to discuss its distribution.
