A former Venezuelan politician and ambassador has given Portugal’s state news agency Lusa the benefit of his take on the United States’ ‘large scale attack’ over the weekend, explaining that what comes next will be a “race of endurance rather than speed”.
Milos Alcalay is under no illusions that the exfiltration of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, (and effective second in command), Cilia Flores, was “the beginning of the end” of the Bolivarian regime.
A former permanent representative to the United Nations, Alcalay suggests there are many nuances at play – and that by saying that he doesn’t think Venezuela could be led at this point by opposition heroine María Corina Machado (because she may be a ‘very nice woman’ but she ‘doesn’t have the respect’ that she needs for such a task), Mr Trump may actually be protecting her.
Alcalay posits that the Americans have been at pains to stress that their intervention overnight between Friday and Saturday “was not to change the regime” – therefore why would they support regime change?”
Equally, if Mr Trump came down in favour of María Corina Machado at such a delicate moment (when the regime is still, technically in charge) what danger would that pose for her, and her supporters?
Alcalay – Venezuela’s ambassador to Brazil, Israel and Romania before resigning as a diplomat in protest to the “ideological, political and anti-democratic orientation” of the regime of Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro’s predecessor – believes everything now will take its time.
The fact that the Americans say they are prepared to work with Delcy Rodriguez – the replacement from the regime, chosen by Maduro himself, has already “given rise to internal suspicion within Maduro’s groups” who may now be wondering whether she was the ‘inside informant’ that tipped the U.S. off about the whereabouts of Maduro on Friday night…Delcy Rodriguez may not be in a comfortable position at all.
But there is another very important reason for keeping the regime in place: “not supporting a regime that dominates everything at this moment” would introduce the “risk of civil war, which no Venezuelan wants”, says Alcalay.
Talking to Lusa via Whatsapp from Caracas, Alcalay gave the benefit of years of diplomacy: he suggested that the three key players in this current crisis have ‘different timings’: the opposition, led by María Corina Machado and Edmundo González, wants to end the current situation and “enter democracy once and for all”; the Bolivarian regime wants to “buy time” because “the longer it lasts, (the more) it will try to stay in power” and the Trump regime is focused on “doing what it says” (as opposed to the response of all other ‘world players’, including Europeans, which just take “declarative positions” but effectively do very little to change very bad situations.)
For all these reasons, the U.S. attack marks “the beginning of the end of the regime, but in slow motion”, he says.
After “26 years of domination, a completely new stage is opening up (…) Removing the two most important figures from power – Maduro and the one he calls his first combatant, Cilia Flores – is like removing the king and queen in one fell swoop in a game of chess”.
And regarding the international community’s ‘reactions’, Alcalay had another refreshing take: “Of course, Maduro’s allies, Brazil, Cuba, Chile and Mexico in the Latin American and Caribbean region, will continue to cry out to the heavens that the United Nations Charter has been violated”. But that same Charter “is violated by the Bolivarian regime from the first to the last article!”
What is important now, concludes the former diplomat, is that ‘the alternative of transition’ now has the support of every country that believes in democracy. In his exact words, that it has the “greater support, not only from Trump but from the government of Portugal, from European governments, and from allies who believe in democracy”.
Source: LUSA
