The Biden administration will continue to recognize Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of the country and won’t negotiate with President Nicolás Maduro. A similar policy was promoted by President Trump before Biden and was supported by many Venezuelans living in the United States. Ned Price, State Department spokesperson, said, “I certainly don’t expect this administration to be engaging directly with Maduro.” The European Union and several dozen other nations do not recognize Guaidó as President of Venezuela. Maduro has called Guaidó a puppet of the United States and has accused Washington of trying to oust him in a coup.
I think not supporting Maduro is the right choice for the United States to make. Maduro seems more like a dictator than a president, as he has starved and repressed his people. I think that his oppression and blatant mismanagement of Venezuela and it’s people justifies his removal from office. I don’t even really know who Guaidó really is or who he stands for, but odds are that he’s better suited as president than Maduro. If Washington D.C. is ok with him leading Venezuela instead of Maduro, then I am sure it will be okay. Maduro’s socialist leading has run Venezuela into the ground, even with an economic head start with oil.
To connect this to class, we’ve been learning about realist theory and the United States’s way of dealing with systems and countries we don’t like. The United States has been through this scenario before; there is a leader that has stepped on the United States’s toes by either not being a democracy or oppressing its people in some way. We then step in and promote another guy who is much more aligned with the United States, and typically they are sworn into office after a little bit of time. The argument being that it is the United States’s duty to do this as global democratic hegemon.