SAN CRISTOBAL, Venezuela — The Trump administration is preparing to make a more forceful push this week to unseat Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, after a weekend plan to coax his military to abandon him and allow in hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid ended in deadly violence and with little clarity about what comes next.

Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Colombia on Monday to meet with regional leaders – including the head of the Venezuelan opposition, Juan Guaido – and discuss potential options for a more muscular front against Maduro. While the White House originally cast Saturday’s aid push on the Venezuelan border as a potential tipping point for ousting Maduro, administration officials said Sunday that the weekend’s violence had frustrated those plans, making new action necessary.

Pence plans to announce “clear actions” to respond to the weekend’s clashes, though he is not likely to address whether the U.S. military would get involved, a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, told reporters Sunday.

Asked whether President Trump would deploy the military to intervene, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday that “every option is on the table.”

“We’ll continue to build out the global coalition to put force behind the voice of the Venezuelan people,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

Guaido suggested Saturday that he would entertain more radical solutions to try to oust Maduro, whom opposition figures blame for the deaths of at least eight people as a result of Saturday’s border violence.

“Today’s events force me to make a decision: to pose to the international community in a formal way that we must have all options open to achieve the liberation of this country that is fighting and will continue to fight,” Guaido tweeted.

The opposition leader – who had secretly crossed the border into Colombia to lead the aid effort, running the risk of being barred from re-entry or arrested upon return – will have an opportunity to make his case directly to Pence during their face-to-face meeting Monday.

Guaido’s comments suggested the opposition’s limitations after a plan they had hoped would cause deep fissures in Venezuela’s military instead produced only modest cracks. In the face of Maduro’s military blockade of aid, the opposition largely failed to bring in the assistance they hoped to deliver to the neediest Venezuelans.

Maduro celebrated the retreat of the aid trucks; he had called the aid a pretext for a U.S. invasion. But the U.S. official called that a “tactical victory” at best, and one that is “perishable.”

Last week, Trump delivered an ultimatum to members of the Venezuelan military, warning that they would “lose everything” if they stood with Maduro and harmed innocent civilians.

The opposition’s strongest U.S. backers, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sharply criticized Maduro and suggested repercussions.

“After discussions tonight with several regional leaders it is now clear that the grave crimes committed today by the Maduro regime have opened the door to various potential multilateral actions not on the table just 24 hours ago,” Rubio tweeted late Saturday.

In a provocative move Sunday, Rubio tweeted out two photos – one of former Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi sitting in a gold chair while in power and the other of his bloodied face and body as he was surrounded by a crowd of rebel fighters shortly before his death in 2011.

Yet as Guaido and other opposition leaders prepared for Monday’s meeting in Bogota, they appeared to be running out of options.

Last month, the United States imposed sweeping sanctions that effectively cut off Maduro’s biggest source of hard currency – oil sales to the United States. Having done that, the United States has pulled the most powerful economic lever it had.

The sanctions risk worsening Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, since the nearly bankrupt government – now even more cash-strapped – is the chief importer of food and medicines. The U.S. calculation is that the sanctions will make Maduro’s rule untenable. But there are still no guarantees that they will do anything more than make a bad situation worse on the ground.

After an aid operation that failed to achieve its goals, the opposition is also in danger of losing its greatest ally: momentum.

The opposition and its U.S. and regional allies will continue trying to court military officials by promoting the promise of amnesty if they turn against Maduro. But observers say that dangerous scenarios loomed larger “than ever.”

“There is no question that a military intervention to resolve the Venezuela crisis is more plausible than ever,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank. “Guaido’s insistence that ‘all options are on the table’ echoes President Trump’s words, first uttered in August 2017 and widely interpreted as serious consideration of military action.”

No military option would be clean or easy, and critics say its threat potentially helps Maduro – an autocratic leader who has used repression against his own people – portray himself globally as a leftist martyr persecuted by the Trump administration.

Copy the Story Link