Caracas: President Nicolas Maduro has ordered the closure of Venezuela’s border with Brazil in an increasingly fraught power struggle with Juan Guaido, the opposition leader spearheading efforts to bring humanitarian aid into the country despite a military blockade.
Guaido set out in a convoy of vehicles to personally pick up US aid being stockpiled on the other side of the Colombian border, defying Maduro’s military to stop him. Embattled Maduro has dismissed Guaido’s humanitarian caravan as a “cheap show” and slammed aid as a precursor for a US military intervention in the oil-rich but crippled Latin American country.
A separate caravan of buses and trucks containing opposition lawmakers had earlier left eastern Caracas bound for the border. Several of the trucks were stopped by security forces and their drivers forced to get out, but the rest of the caravan was allowed to continue, lawmakers said.
Also, Russia on Friday accused the United States of using aid deliveries to Venezuela as a ploy to carry out military action against President Nicolas Maduro’s government.
