Venezuela’s opposition may be hopelessly divided but people fighting to rid the country of the autocrat Nicolás Maduro can agree about one thing: President Biden is doing very little to help.
Many of those who dream of bringing free elections and open democracy to the once oil-rich nation have found themselves in a very unusual position—they are pining for the days of Donald Trump.
The former president didn’t do enough to force Maduro out but he did put Hugo Chávez’s successor under pressure. Biden—by contrast—seems happy to largely ignore him, although the Trump-era sanctions on Venezuela remain in place.
“It feels like Biden represents never-ending dialogs, bureaucratic committees and special envoys,” a former aide to opposition leader Juan Guaidó told The Daily Beast. “It creates this uneasy feeling that Maduro is here to stay, not a guy to be hunted down, but a counterpart for a talk.”
Trump’s toughness on Maduro, which included a $15 million bounty the former president put on his head a year ago, won him a legion of fans in Venezuela. The most ardent of those call themselves magazolanos in tribute to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.
Rafael Paredes is typical. He would build a huge statue at the beaches of la Guaira, once a doorway for conquistadors arriving into pre-colonial Venezuela, in honor of Trump.
“He got Maduro scared, while Biden gives him a sense of relief,” said Paredes, 40, who works as a chef in one of the few remaining high-end restaurants in downtown Caracas.
He fears things are going back to a subdued and hopeless reality. In the U.S there is a well-mannered, traditional president; in Venezuela the opposition has retreated and became almost invisible. The intensity in Paredes’s country is gone, replaced by a low-key energy. Life has settled into a quiet, boring routine. And Maduro is still in power.
Once bold and uncompromising, Juan Guaidó who back then declared Maduro had to go, is now opting for negotiations with the Venezuelan autocrat, something the majority of Venezuelans despise given the previous rounds of futile negotiations with the government. Many believe such talks give Maduro political oxygen.
“We have no leverage. I believe Juan [Guaidó] is improvising now, trying to stay relevant but increasingly fading,” says a former aide to Guaidó who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue. “What a waste of political capital and popular goodwill.”
Despite the fact that Donald Trump did not achieve anything in Venezuela besides creating unrealistic hopes, Venezuelan politicians believe Trump’s direct threats were at least gnawing away at Maduro’s psyche.
Trump’s successor Biden is perceived among some of them with suspicion and exasperation given what some say are his left-leaning ideology and policies.
Sociologist Luis Vicente León, director of a major domestic polling firm called Datanálisis, told The Daily Beast that his field work shows that Biden is seen among many Venezuelans as too far to the left. “They even call Biden here a communist. Nonsense, of course, but somehow it sticks.”
Juan Andrés Mejía, once a rising star in the Juan Guaidó party Voluntad Popular, now exiled in Mexico, says that in general Democrats are viewed in Venezuela as more sympathetic to the cause of the Bolivarian revolution, launched more than 20 years ago by the late Hugo Chávez.
“I would recommend to my American colleagues on the democratic side to be much more careful and not buy into leftist regime’s propaganda in the region,” Mejía told The Daily Beast.
Still, many are dumbfounded by Trump’s popularity and the existence of the so-called magazolanos.
“So here you have a president who berates all his critics, calls the free press the enemy of the state and constantly lies. In a way Trump is no different from Chávez and Maduro, yet there is a substantial number of people here in Venezuela who love Trump. I don't get it,” says Lisseth Boon, the Venezuelan award-winning journalist and author.
She never believed that Donald Trump was coming to liberate Venezuela as many magazolanos did. “I always laughed at the notion that the U.S marines were already on the beaches of la Guaira,” said Boon.
Elliot Abrams laughed, too. Abrams was Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela and Iran. He threw cold water on the feverish theory, widely circulating among magazolanos, that Trump ever came close to an invasion or air strikes by the U.S against Maduro’s regime.
“Trump lost interest in the Venezuelan cause after Guaidó's failed military uprising,” Abrams told The Daily Beast, referring to the attempted coup led by the leader of the Venezuelan opposition which happened in April of 2019. Any military strike was actually wishful thinking, Abrams emphasized.
The fact that the U.S marines never showed up doesn’t bother the chef. Not a bit. “Trump has many issues but he made Maduro cold and sweaty,” said Paredes. “This seňor Biden is too soft, too accommodating. With thugs like Maduro you have to get into a fight.”
