After a day of drama, a stalemate over aid to Venezuela

BY ABOUT 11am on February 23rd, four lorries, each loaded with 20 tons of food, medical supplies and toiletries, had arrived at the Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander bridges, which link the Colombian border town of Cúcuta with Venezuela. At the Simón Bolívar crossing south of the city, used by thousands of people on a normal day, Colombian police opened a metal barricade they had erected and thousands of Venezuelans poured through, hoping to clear a passage for the supplies to enter Venezuela. Chanting “liberty”, they headed towards riot police, who had arrayed themselves behind transparent shields on the Venezuelan side of the bridge. Minutes later, the first tear-gas grenade fell on the advancing Venezuelans. They fled. Many were hurt in the stampede.

The attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Venezuela, orchestrated by Juan Guaidó, who is recognised as the country’s interim president by its opposition-controlled legislature and by most Western and Latin American democracies, had three objectives. The first was publicly to shame the dictatorial regime of Nicolás Maduro. Its corruption and incompetence have inflicted years of hardship on Venezuelans. The second was to relieve that hardship by delivering some 600 tons of aid, most of it provided by the United States. The third and most important was to bring the regime down by driving...