During a televised speech this afternoon, Maduro threatened opposition leader Juan Guaido with arrest, promising that the day when he would see the inside of a jail cell “will come“.
During his speech, Maduro was asked by a journalist why Guaido has not been arrested for violating a 2019 court order banning him from leaving the country. Maduro responded by saying:
The day that the courts of the Republic give the order to arrest Juan Guaido for all of his crimes, that’s the day when he will go to prison. That day has not come, but it will come.
Earlier this week, the Maduro regime arrested Guaido’s uncle, Juan Jose Marquez, and later accused him of smuggling explosives into the country on a commercial flight from Portugal.
Maduro was also asked about his mercurial stance on the United States, which is characterized by wild swings between fiery attacks against the White House to friendly proposals for negotiation. Today, Maduro’s tone took a page out of the latter stance. He said:
I believe in dialogue, and I will always say this: the best way to resolve conflicts is by talking it out. So, estoy a la orden del señor Trump [roughly, “I’m ready to listen to Mr. Trump”] (…) We’re ready to listen, I’m ready to listen, to dialogue and to talk, to [reach an] understanding.
As Army Readies for Exercises, Bernal Says War with US Would be “Suicide”
Freddy Bernal, a leading figure inside the PSUV, spoke to media last night about the possibility of a military confrontation with the United States, calling such a scenario “suicide” for Venezuela.
Bernal was speaking in the border community of La Fria, in Tachira state, when he said:
We respect the government of the United States. It’s a very powerful power. It has a lot of military strength. We never talk about violence (…) it would be insane, it would be suicide, if there was a confrontation with a power with those characteristics.
Bernal’s comments are markedly different from those of other PSUV leaders such as Diosdado Cabello, who promised last year that a US invasion of Venezuela would be turn into another “Vietnam”.
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