MADRID -- Juan Guaido, the man who one year ago launched a bid to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, on Saturday arrived in Spain, where a thriving community of Venezuelans and a storm among Spanish political parties awaited him.
Venezuela's main opposition leader is on an international tour to bolster support for his U.S.-backed effort to remove Maduro and lead the country until a presidential election deemed transparent can be held.
After stops last week in London, Paris and the Davos Economic Forum, where Guaido was received by the European Union's leadership and heads of government including Britain's Boris Johnson and France's Emmanuel Macron, Guaido is walking into a kerfuffle in the Spanish capital.
It's his position as a challenger to Maduro's legitimacy that puts Spain in a tricky balancing act.
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Despite being one of the nearly 60 countries that last year recognized Guaido as Venezuela's interim president, Spain's new left-wing coalition has not granted the politician an audience with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Instead, Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya held a brief meeting with the 36-year-old politician.
That has earned Sanchez strong criticism from his political opposition, which includes three parties spanning from the ideological center-right to the far-right. The Socialist leader has governed since earlier this month in partnership with the anti-austerity Unidas Podemos (United We Can) party, whose members have shown strong support for Maduro's government.
But the criticism turned into a full-scale opposition-led offensive against Sanchez after media this week disclosed details of a secretive encounter at Madrid's airport between a member of his Cabinet and Venezuela's vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who is banned from stepping into EU territory.
Transport Minister Jose Luis Abalos, a key figure in Sanchez's Socialist party, first denied the episode, then argued that he had been at the airport last Sunday at midnight on a private visit to welcome Venezuelan Tourism Minister Felix Plasencia, a friend of his who was in Madrid for a tourism fair.
Finally, on Friday, the government again changed the initial account to explain that Abalos had been compelled to greet Rodriguez and that he had convinced her not to attempt to enter Spain because that would violate EU sanctions.
Although Spanish police sources told The Associated Press that Rodriguez never left the airport and technically didn't enter the country, the Spanish government has been in damage control mode over its handling of the episode.
After days of silence, Sanchez addressed the controversy for the first time Saturday, saying he had no intention of dismissing Abalos as the conservative opposition demanded.
"He did everything in his hands to avert a diplomatic crisis. And he succeeded," Sanchez said.
As a powerful ally of Maduro, Rodriguez is on an EU sanction list and barred from entering the territory of any of the bloc's members since mid-2018. Since the first reports of the encounter at the airport appeared in media late on Thursday, neither the Venezuelan vice president nor Maduro's government have publicly commented on the trip.
At the Madrid city hall, Guaido received the city's Golden Keys from its conservative mayor, Jose Luis Martinez Almeida.
Guaido thanked him for the warm reception and said he took it as a "a recognition and a boost to the struggle of millions of Venezuelans."
A Section on 01/26/2020