Venezuela, 2019 — military coup attempt

Event Summary

On 30 April 2019 the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, flanked by a group of defecting soldiers, appeared near the La Carlota air base in Caracas and called for a military uprising to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro, in an operation he named Operacion Libertad that collapsed within a day. Guaido, who had proclaimed himself interim president in January and won recognition from dozens of governments, had spent months trying to peel the armed forces away from Maduro; the opposition figure Leopoldo Lopez, freed from house arrest that morning by sympathetic officers, appeared alongside him, and reports emerged of a secret plot in which senior officials, including the intelligence chief and the defense minister, had supposedly agreed to abandon Maduro. But the plan unraveled: the anticipated mass military defection never materialized, key figures who had reportedly agreed to switch sides pulled back, and by afternoon government forces had dispersed Guaido's supporters with tear gas, while colectivo militias fired on protesters.

The intelligence chief Manuel Cristopher Figuera did break with Maduro and fled, and Lopez took refuge in a foreign embassy, but Maduro held the loyalty of the military and survived. The failed uprising, later dubbed Venezuela's Bay of Pigs, was a devastating blow to Guaido's movement.