Will Venezuela’s ‘Operation Scorpion’ sting Guaido?

Jim Wyss and Antonio Maria Delgado, Tribune News Service

Over the past few weeks, Venezuela’s opposition has been raising the alarms about “Operation Scorpion” — a campaign of intimidation, bribery and extortion to derail the re-election of National Assembly President Juan Guaido this weekend.

By most accounts the scheme has failed and Guaido will hold on to his seat in Sunday’s vote. But even if Operation Scorpion doesn’t deliver a fatal sting, the 36-year-old lawmaker, who’s recognised as the country’s legitimate leader by Washington and more than 50 other nations, could have a rough 2020.

Venezuela’s opposition controls 112 of the National Assembly’s 167 seats, and Guaido only needs 84 votes to keep his post. In interviews, he’s assured supporters that he has “many more than necessary to win re-election.”

But Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his allies have been chipping away at that lead. Last month, Venezuelan lawmakers and the US State Department warned that deputies were being offered bribes of up to $1 million dollars to deny Guaido their vote. In addition, Venezuela’s courts have accused opposition lawmakers of being tied to a series of attacks, including the Dec. 22 raid on a military base in southern Venezuela that the government says left at least one dead.

The carrot and stick tactics are part of a coordinated plan to undermine the opposition and sideline Guaido, said Nicmer Evans, a Caracas-based political analyst.

“The goal of Operation Scorpion is to convince 30 deputies to not vote for Juan Guaido,” he said. “But it’s falling short.”

By Evans’ count, Maduro has only been able to buy off or sideline 14 deputies, but the true impact of Operation Scorpion won’t be visible until all the votes are tallied. “You should never underestimate (Maduro’s) capacity to manipulate the vote,” Evans said.

On its surface, the election seems like a minor affair, a reshuffling of the legislature’s executive board. But it’s an existential threat for Guaido. It’s his role as head of congress that gives him the constitutional justification to claim that he, not Maduro, is the legitimate president of Venezuela. If he loses his congressional post, he loses the presidency, and the international community would have to decide whether it should then recognise his successor as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.

If Guaido isn’t reelected, it will be a “hard blow” to the regime’s foes and open the door for Maduro to elevate minority parliamentary factions and create a “collaborationist opposition,” said Diego Moya-Ocampos, the lead Venezuela analyst with the London-based consulting firm IHS Markit.

Moya-Ocampos said Maduro allies might take extreme measures to derail Sunday’s vote, including trying to physically block lawmakers from attending the session or allowing pro-government gangs, known as colectivos, to intimidate the deputies.

The opposition is trying to avoid that trap by allowing lawmakers to vote remotely in Sunday’s election. Venezuela’s high court has declared that measure illegal, but Guaido insists it’s necessary to “counter the regime’s pretensions to break (legislative) quorum and to eliminate and/or dissolve the Assembly.”

Guaido first captured international attention on Jan. 23, 2019, when he accused Maduro of stealing the 2018 presidential race and declared that it was his constitutional duty to assume the presidency. The bold move united the fractured opposition and electrified the crowds. But since then Guaido’s three-part battle cry (the end of Maduro’s “usurpation,” the creation of a transitional government, and free and fair presidential elections) has grown stale.

Even if he wins Sunday’s vote, his troubles aren’t over. New elections for the entirety of the National Assembly are scheduled for this year. And that will undoubtedly reignite the debate as to whether the opposition should be participating in an election controlled by the “illegitimate” Maduro regime and his compliant National Electoral Council.