“It’s not possible to explain the atrocities that our country has endured the last 20 years,” said Carlos Guillén Martinez, an army lieutenant who fled the country last year after he claims he was tortured by Mr. Maduro’s agents. Mr. Guillén says he and others are planning to return with arms if Mr. Maduro’s government holds this year.
“We are as firm on this as ever,” he said. “We keep moving forward and we won’t lose our North Star.”
他说:“我们在这方面一如既往地坚定。”“我们继续前进,我们不会失去我们的北极星。”
The crisis in Venezuela has created a untenable standoff — one country with two presidents. On Friday, Mr. Maduro expressed a willingness to meet with the opposition, while Mr. Guaidó made his first public appearance since declaring himself the nation’s legitimate interim president, telling supporters to rally against the authorities “if they dare to kidnap me.”
Both sides in the standoff are courting the military as the gatekeeper of control over the country. The crossroads are familiar for Venezuela’s armed forces, which have spent generations enmeshed in the nation’s politics and repeatedly brokered power during the time of Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, himself a former army commander.
But the crisis marks a large step backward for the region as a whole, which many hoped had left behind its cycle of dictatorships, coups and foreign interventions. As other Latin American countries have strengthened their democracies, Venezuela has followed a different path of increasing instability under Mr. Maduro and uncertainty about the way forward.