Nicolás Maduro calls him “a boy playing politics,” but, in truth, Juan Guaidó has served the biggest blow to Maduro’s political career by proclaiming himself the interim president of Venezuela with the support of the Donald Trump’s US administration.
A 35-year-old industrial engineer and native of northern Venezuela’s Vargas state, Guaidó was, until January 23, unknown in the United States, the European Union, and a dozen Latin American countries.
He reached his first political milestone just a few weeks before this when he became the youngest president of the country’s National Assembly, a legislative body consisting of an overwhelming oppositional majority, and which is not respected by Maduro’s government.
With short black hair peppered with grey, he had never been a man of great speeches, but Guaidó pushed himself to become the leader of a divided and unstructured opposition, whose biggest leaders were imprisoned, exiled or out of action.
In fact, that is the fate of the current heads of his party Voluntad Popular (VP): Leopoldo López was imprisoned, Carlos Vecchio exiled and Freddy Guevara has seeked asylum.
His supporters highlight his private personality and the troubled tale of his adolescence, when he survived one of the worst natural disasters in Venezuelan history. The Vargas tragedy consisted of a series of landslides and floods that devastated the country’s Caribbean coast in December 1999. The death toll is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
“Guaidó is a fresh young man, and educated — he looks like the people, he talks like the people, he is a survivor and a family man, and also had prospects in big-league baseball,” José Manuel Bolívar, one of his party directors said.
“I swear to formally assume the powers of the national executive as the president of Venezuela,” Guaidó said on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets of Venezuela.
Following such a statement, Guaidó forever abandoned international anonymity.
The Euronews
