Juan Guaidó Talk

The Atlantic Council hosted a live 30 minute Q&A between Juan Guaidó and journalist María Elena Salinas on Zoom today. It was interesting to see him (he took tons of notes, including during the concluding remarks--what was there to write?) though there was not much of substance. He did deny that there were negotiations between the opposition and Nicolás Maduro.

One thing that caught my attention was language. For Guaidó, there is only "la dictadura." I think I only heard him say Maduro's name once. It became briefly confusing for me because the journalist asked him what "the government" was doing, and he naturally answered what he was doing, but then she also referred to "Presidente Maduro" so it's not clear which "gobierno" she meant to refer to. It's a long-standing semantic thing.

They allowed a single question to be asked, and sadly it was about Iran, at which point he rambled a bit with caveats about "we speculate" and "we don't know for sure." Russia is far more important than Iran.

His connection was not great, and I kept thinking that in my Zoom meetings we'd say, "Hey Juan you're cutting out!" and he's mess with something and say, "Can you hear me now?"