Venezuelan presidential crisis
Based on Wikipedia: Venezuelan presidential crisis
For four years, Venezuela had two presidents. Not co-presidents sharing power in some experimental arrangement, but two men each claiming to be the sole legitimate leader of the nation—one controlling the military, police, and government buildings, the other recognized by dozens of foreign countries as the rightful head of state despite never having run for the office.
This bizarre situation began on January 23, 2019, when Juan Guaidó, a thirty-five-year-old politician most Venezuelans had never heard of, stood before a crowd in Caracas and swore himself in as acting president. Within hours, the United States, Canada, and most of Latin America recognized him. By the end of the week, so had most of Western Europe.
Nicolás Maduro, the man who actually controlled the presidential palace, the armed forces, and the state television stations, dismissed Guaidó as an "immature" leader of a group of "little boys." His prison minister publicly announced she had already picked out a cell for Guaidó and asked him to hurry up and name his cabinet so she could prepare accommodations for them too.
How Venezuela Ended Up With Two Presidents
The roots of this constitutional showdown trace back to Hugo Chávez, the charismatic socialist revolutionary who governed Venezuela from 1999 until his death from cancer in 2013. Chávez rewrote the country's constitution, nationalized industries, and built a political movement called Chavismo around himself. When he died, his chosen successor was Maduro, his vice president and former bus driver turned union organizer.
Maduro won a razor-thin election in 2013, but he lacked Chávez's personal magnetism. More critically, he inherited an economy built almost entirely on oil exports just as global oil prices were about to collapse.
What followed was catastrophic.
Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proven oil reserves, yet by 2019 it couldn't feed its people. Hyperinflation rendered the currency worthless—at its peak, prices doubled every few weeks. Grocery stores stood empty. Hospitals ran out of basic supplies. More than seven million Venezuelans fled the country, one of the largest refugee crises in modern history. A Venezuelan economist calculated that the economy contracted more severely than any peacetime economy in recorded history.
The government blamed American sanctions. Critics pointed to mismanagement, corruption, and the dismantling of the state oil company's technical capacity. Both factors played a role, though the crisis began before the harshest sanctions were imposed.
The Constitutional Chess Game
In 2015, amid growing discontent, Venezuelan voters elected an opposition majority to the National Assembly for the first time in sixteen years. This should have provided a check on presidential power. Instead, it triggered a constitutional crisis.
Before the new legislators could take their seats, the outgoing Chavista-controlled assembly packed the Supreme Tribunal of Justice—Venezuela's highest court—with Maduro loyalists. The newly stacked court promptly stripped three opposition lawmakers of their seats, citing alleged "irregularities" in their elections. This conveniently prevented the opposition from holding the two-thirds supermajority needed to challenge the president.
The maneuvering escalated from there. In 2017, facing massive street protests, Maduro called for elections to a new body called the Constituent National Assembly, theoretically tasked with rewriting the constitution. The opposition boycotted, calling it a sham designed to circumvent the elected National Assembly. With no opposition candidates running, Maduro's allies won every seat.
This new assembly then declared itself the supreme governmental authority in Venezuela, effectively neutering the elected legislature. Over forty countries announced they would not recognize the Constituent Assembly's legitimacy.
By 2018, the National Assembly—technically still existing but stripped of practical power—remained what human rights organizations called the only legitimate democratic institution left in Venezuela. There were no independent checks on presidential authority.
The Election That Sparked the Crisis
In May 2018, Maduro called snap presidential elections, moving them up four months ahead of schedule. Major opposition parties were banned from participating. Opposition leaders were jailed, exiled, or barred from running. International observers from the European Union and the Organization of American States declined to monitor the vote, saying conditions didn't exist for a fair election.
Maduro won with 68 percent of the vote. Turnout, according to the government, was 46 percent—though the opposition and independent analysts suggested it was far lower.
Most Western democracies refused to recognize the result. The Lima Group—a coalition of Latin American countries formed specifically to address the Venezuelan crisis—called the election illegitimate. The United States imposed additional sanctions. But Maduro proceeded with plans for his second inauguration on January 10, 2019.
Days before that inauguration, a Supreme Tribunal justice named Christian Zerpa defected to the United States. He had been considered close to Maduro. From Miami, Zerpa declared Maduro "incompetent" and "illegitimate."
It was an omen of the chaos to come.
The Constitutional Argument
When Guaidó claimed the presidency, he wasn't simply declaring himself ruler by popular acclaim. The opposition built their case on three articles of Venezuela's own constitution, the same document Chávez had written.
Article 233 addresses what happens when a president-elect is "absolutely absent" before taking office. In that case, the constitution says, the president of the National Assembly becomes interim president until new elections can be held. This provision had been invoked before—when Chávez died in 2013, just weeks after his final inauguration, it triggered the emergency election that brought Maduro to power.
The opposition's argument went like this: since the 2018 election was fraudulent, there was no legitimate president-elect. Maduro's term from 2013 to 2019 had legally ended. Therefore, the presidency was vacant, and constitutional succession meant the National Assembly president—Guaidó—should assume the role.
It was creative constitutional interpretation, to say the least. Venezuelan legal scholars disagreed about whether this reading held up. Article 233 seems designed for situations where a president-elect dies or becomes incapacitated, not for disputed elections. But the opposition had two other constitutional provisions to invoke.
Article 333 calls on citizens to restore and enforce the constitution if it's being violated. Article 350 goes further, stating that Venezuelans shall "disown any regime, legislation or authority that violates democratic values, principles and guarantees or encroaches upon human rights."
Combined, the opposition argued these articles didn't just permit but required them to act against what they considered a dictatorship.
The Man Nobody Knew
Juan Guaidó was an unlikely figure to become the face of Venezuela's opposition. An industrial engineer by training, he had been active in student protests against Chávez and later won a seat in the National Assembly. But he wasn't a household name. When he became president of the National Assembly in January 2019—a position that rotated among opposition parties by agreement—most Venezuelans had never heard of him.
This obscurity was, paradoxically, an advantage. The more prominent opposition leaders had been jailed, exiled, or banned from politics. Leopoldo López, the most charismatic opposition figure, was under house arrest. Guaidó was young, clean-cut, and untarnished by the internecine feuds that plagued Venezuelan opposition politics.
His assumption of the Assembly presidency in early January 2019 set the crisis in motion. Within days, he was meeting with representatives from the Lima Group and the Organization of American States, which represents nations across North and South America. The groundwork for international recognition was being laid even before Maduro's second inauguration.
The Day Venezuela Got Two Presidents
On January 10, 2019, Maduro took the oath of office for his second term. Within minutes, the Organization of American States Permanent Council passed a resolution declaring his presidency illegitimate and calling for new elections.
Thirteen days later, on the anniversary of the 1958 overthrow of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Guaidó made his move. At a massive rally in Caracas, with hundreds of thousands of supporters in the streets, he raised his right hand and swore himself in as acting president.
The United States recognized him immediately. So did Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and most other Latin American nations except Mexico. Over the following days and weeks, the list grew to include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and dozens of other countries.
At his peak, Guaidó was recognized by approximately sixty nations as Venezuela's legitimate president.
Maduro, meanwhile, retained recognition from Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and about twenty other countries. More importantly, he retained control of the military, the police, the government ministries, and the presidential palace. Recognition from Washington means little when the generals in Caracas take their orders from someone else.
The Failed Uprising
For a few months, it seemed possible that Guaidó's gambit might work. Massive protests continued. International pressure mounted. The opposition hoped that military officers, seeing the writing on the wall, would switch sides and escort Maduro from power.
It almost happened—or at least, it was supposed to.
On April 30, 2019, Guaidó appeared outside a military base in Caracas alongside Leopoldo López, who had somehow been freed from house arrest. Guaidó called on the military to rise up. He stood with a small group of soldiers who had apparently defected.
The expected cascade of military defections never materialized. After a tense standoff lasting several hours, the attempt fizzled. López took refuge in the Spanish embassy. The soldiers who had joined Guaidó either fled or were arrested. Maduro appeared on television, victorious, declaring the "coup" defeated.
What went wrong remains disputed. Opposition figures claimed that key military and government officials had secretly agreed to switch sides but got cold feet at the last moment. The government portrayed it as a desperate, poorly planned putsch that never had a chance.
Regardless of the truth, the failed uprising marked a turning point. International support for Guaidó began to erode. If the military wouldn't budge, what exactly was the endgame?
The Long Stalemate
What followed was years of fruitless negotiation and gradually diminishing international attention.
Norway's conflict resolution center mediated talks between representatives of Guaidó and Maduro. The talks went nowhere. Negotiations moved to Barbados. Also nowhere. In September 2019, Guaidó announced the end of dialogue after the Maduro government stopped showing up for forty days, apparently protesting new American sanctions.
The Trump administration tried various approaches. In March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic was beginning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo proposed a transitional government that would exclude both Maduro and Guaidó from power. Guaidó accepted. Maduro rejected it.
Meanwhile, daily life in Venezuela ground on in misery. The economy continued to collapse. Refugees continued to flee. The pandemic made everything worse. But the political situation remained frozen: Maduro in power, Guaidó claiming power, neither able to dislodge the other.
The Slow Fade
International support for Guaidó eroded gradually, then suddenly.
The European Union stopped recognizing Guaidó as president in January 2021, though it still refused to recognize Maduro as legitimate—a kind of diplomatic limbo. The European Parliament continued to back Guaidó, and the EU threatened more sanctions, but the unified international front was cracking.
By late 2022, even Venezuela's opposition had grown tired of the experiment. The interim government had failed to achieve any of its stated goals. Maduro remained in power. The military remained loyal to him. International recognition hadn't translated into actual authority.
In December 2022, three of the four major opposition parties voted to dissolve the interim government entirely. They created a five-member commission to manage Venezuelan assets held abroad—the main tangible thing Guaidó's parallel government had controlled—and began preparing for the 2024 presidential election.
The four-year experiment in constitutional brinkmanship was over.
What It All Meant
The Venezuelan presidential crisis illustrated several uncomfortable truths about international politics and constitutional government.
First, international recognition matters far less than domestic power. Sixty countries calling you president means nothing if you can't command the loyalty of your own military. Guaidó could travel abroad and meet with world leaders, but he couldn't order a single Venezuelan soldier to do anything.
Second, constitutions are only as strong as the institutions that enforce them. The Venezuelan opposition had plausible constitutional arguments. They may even have had the better reading of the law. But when the courts are packed with loyalists and the military takes orders from your opponent, legal arguments become academic exercises.
Third, international attention spans are short. The Venezuelan crisis commanded global headlines in early 2019. By 2022, it had faded into background noise, another intractable problem in a world full of them.
Finally, the crisis showed how democratic institutions can be hollowed out gradually, through a series of moves that each seem incremental but collectively amount to authoritarianism. Pack the courts. Neuter the legislature. Ban opposition parties. Hold elections with no real opposition. Each step has a justification; the cumulative effect is one-party rule with democratic trappings.
Maduro remains in power as of this writing. Venezuela remains in crisis. And the brief, strange period when the country officially had two presidents has faded into a cautionary tale about the limits of constitutional arguments when confronting entrenched power.