Juan Guaidó is the Venezuelan opposition figure the United States recognized as the country’s interim president starting in 2019, in an attempt to depose Nicolás Maduro. John Kiriakou dismisses the effort, and Guaidó’s legitimacy along with it: “When we were at Sputnik, I always referred to Juan Guaidó as George Washington University grad student Juan Guaidó — because that’s all he was.”[1][2]
Kiriakou recounts that a reporter, which he believes was from MSNBC, once asked then-National Security Adviser John Bolton why he continued to refer to Guaidó as “President Guaidó” when the Venezuelan constitution held that an unassumed presidency lapses if the office is not taken up within 30 days of election — and Guaidó had never been elected at all. Per Kiriakou, Bolton had no real answer.[2]
Kiriakou says the U.S. later tried the same approach with María Corina Machado, but argues both efforts were doomed because Venezuelans who support Maduro do so out of allegiance to the Chavista revolutionary ideology, not personal loyalty to Maduro himself.[1]
Nobody read the constitution
Kiriakou’s account of the recognition campaign emphasises both the pressure applied and the man’s actual position. “We coerced something like 36 countries into recognizing Juan Guaidó as the president of Venezuela. In fact, he was just a graduate student here at George Washington University in Washington DC. Never had access to Venezuela.”[3]
The detail he says undid it was in the text nobody consulted: “there’s a stipulation in the Venezuelan constitution saying that if the president can’t assume the presidency within 30 days of taking the oath of office, then he no longer continues to be the president. And apparently at the White House, nobody bothered to read the Venezuelan constitution — because Juan Guaidó never left Washington.”[4]
He uses the episode as the yardstick for María Corina Machado: “I don’t think she’s any more than Juan Guaidó was.”[5]