Juan Guaidó said Venezuela’s regime deals with the opposition with torture, murder, exile, threats, and division — just as dictators in Nicaragua and Cuba do.
Venezuela’s opposition leader said that after more than four years of persecution, he decided to travel out of Caracas, through Venezuela and Colombia, to get to the United States.
“Hope… is latent in Venezuela, today; unfortunately they try to silence it,” Guaidó said in Spanish on Thursday. “That’s why they tried to kidnap me … and they had plans, and we found out about them … That’s why we avoided handing over a hostage to the dictatorship.”
The 39-year-old father of two arrived at Miami International Airport on a commercial flight on Monday night from Colombia’s El Dorado International Airport to later meet with his mother Norka Márquez.
“I was persecuted in two countries,” Guaidó said about Venezuela and Colombia, during a news conference in Miami-Dade County’s city of Coral Gables.
Guaidó said he will not be seeking political asylum in the U.S. Instead, his agenda includes a trip to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to meet with Democrats and Republicans.
“Let’s not allow Russia to continue to destabilize the American continent,” Guaidó said, also later adding that the political persecution of the opposition in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba is “backed by Moscow.”
Guaidó, the former president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, said his wife, Fabiana Rosales, 30, and their two daughters, Miranda and Mérida, were back in Venezuela and he was eager to bring them to safety.
Guaidó said his sudden departure from Caracas to the Colombia-Venezuela border brought back memories of the pain he felt while having to leave his native coastal city of La Guaira after a natural disaster in 1999.
This time, Guaidó said, he crossed a bridge at the Colombian border with an expired passport, because Venezuelan authorities have refused to renew it in their effort to isolate him.
“I crossed the border on foot.”
Once in Colombia’s border city of Cucuta, Guaidó said he wasn’t allowed to board a commercial flight to Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and was threatened with deportation.
Guaidó said that while he traveled to Bogotá, where he met with U.S. diplomats, he stumbled upon Venezuelan refugees who were forced to hike without nothing more than a backpack.
“It cannot be impunity that reigns in the region,” Guaidó said, vowing to continue his political work with the backing of seven Venezuelan political parties.
He said his goal is to return to Venezuela and his focus remains on efforts to unite the opposition and to seek international support, so there can be real protections for human rights activists and competitive primary elections to “recover Democracy in Venezuela.”
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