The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

The big bang in Venezuela came on Friday, January 11. The new, young President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, announced at a huge rally in Caracas that the Assembly believed Maduro’s manifestly fraudulent 2018 reelection was illegitimate, and therefore invalid. Accordingly, the Assembly, Venezuela’s only legitimate, popularly elected institution, had declared the Venezuelan presidency vacant. Under the vacancy clause of Hugo Chavez’s own Constitution, Guaidó said he would become Interim President on January 23, which was the anniversary of the 1958 military coup that overthrew the Marcos Perez Jimenez dictatorship, and oust Maduro to prepare new elections.3 The US had only late word the National Assembly would move in this direction. We played no role encouraging or assisting the Opposition. They saw this moment as possibly their last chance. It was now all on the line in Venezuela, and we had to decide how to respond. Sit and watch? Or act? I had no doubt what we should do. The revolution was on. I told Mauricio Claver-Carone, whom I had recently chosen as NSC Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere, to issue a statement of support.