DISINFO: Guaidó sees sanctions and accusations only as tools to pressure Maduro
SUMMARY
The a recent video in which Venezuela’s Juan Guaidó offers to promote a national salvation agreement, including the government of Nicolás Maduro, starts with an apparently conciliatory tone, though there is not much love throughout the rest of it. As, for example, when he demands that Caracas comply with his demands, because otherwise sanctions and accusations of drug trafficking and crimes against humanity will continue raining on the country, which means that he rather believes in those accusations as mere tools for pressure than in the accusations themselves.
RESPONSE
The claim is a deliberate distortion of Juan Guaidó’s original video, which proposes a national salvation agreement based in several points.
In the fourth point, Guaidó calls for “the commitment of international community to achieve this recovery and offer incentives to the [Maduro’s] regime, including the progressive lifting of sanctions, of course conditioned to the compliance of those essential goals of the agreement”. Immediately, he adds that the negotiation process must include “guarantees for all actors, but essentially, accountability mechanisms for the regime if it tries to eschew again a negotiated solution”.
Minutes later, Guaidó says that “the current path chosen by the dictatorship, of arrogance, the same that it chose in 2018 and 2020, will only deepen the crisis, its international isolation, indictments over terrorism, drug trafficking, human rights violations, accusations of crimes against humanity”.
What Guaidó is saying is that unless there is a change of strategy among the Venezuelan opposition and the international community, Nicolás Maduro’s government will continue with its current behaviour. He is not threatening that “sanctions and accusations will continue raining on the country”, as the disinformation piece claims. Therefore, the claim that Guaidó only “believes in those accusations as mere tools for pressure” is fallacious.
Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaidó is a frequent target of pro-Kremlin disinformation. See other examples in our database, such as claims that he is a far-right US stooge that has low support in Venezuela, that he was involved in the big corruption scheme known as ‘Operation Green Suitcase’, that he and Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya are Western puppets, that the West refuses to call the coup attempt in Venezuela ‘a coup’, or that the EU stances on the assault on the US Capitol and on Juan Guaidó shows its double standards.