Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo López, a confrontation without truce for decades

Leopoldo López with Henrique Capriles, in an image from January 2012 Jorge Silva / REUTERS

For many political observers, the history of the opposition's inability to free itself from Chavista hegemony rests on the difficulty of reaching minimum agreements, acting with loyalty, and agreeing on complementary strategies among its leaders with greater traction.

The relentless rivalry between Leopoldo López and Henrique Capriles takes all the honors on this balance, very often.

There is no source that is capable of affirming that the endless disagreements between Capriles and López have a personal section.

Both are silent when they have to see each other in Skype or Zoom meetings.

The trips they have committed have founded a terminal mistrust.

No one has been able to answer why a truce, a temporary contract of mutual interests so common among politicians, has not been possible.

Nor do there seem to be, on a conceptual level, major differences in substance.

They are both political animals.

Capriles is cautious, progressive and angry;

López is impulsive and individualistic.

Both identified in the other an obstacle to realizing their objectives.

The uninterrupted animosity between Capriles and López is well known in the country: assumed as a hopeless reality among opposition politicians, and frequent talk in the Venezuelan press circles during the 20 years that both have in public life.

It is, as expressed by many of the people consulted, close to each other, who prefer to speak under condition of anonymity, of a malignancy that finds its core in certain basic symmetries.

Two ambitious and charismatic political leaders, belonging to families with a strong identity, of similar age -Capriles is 48 years old;

López, one more- and origin, with a tendency to lead groups and do things on their terms.

In 2000, Capriles and López, together with Julio Borges, founded Primero Justicia, the party with which the Venezuelan democratic society laid the first stone to confront the recent triumph of Hugo Chávez, a year earlier.

Very quickly, both leaders electorally conquered the mayoralties of Chacao (López) and Baruta (Capriles), two important middle and upper class municipalities in eastern Caracas, from which they became national benchmarks.

At the head of both offices, however, the character of both was displayed, and mutually identified as rivals, the difficulties to work together became chronic.

“They always felt more important than the party itself.

The party was seen as a platform ”, comments a retired politician from Primero Justicia.

The personal distancing between the two, galvanized after eight years as mayors in contiguous municipalities, reached a first systemic short-circuit in 2005. As Primero Justicia was a promising force on the rise, the idea of ​​not attending the legislative elections of back then - which had a reliability margin incomparably higher than the current one - under the assumption that it did not offer all the guarantees to participate.

The 2005 abstentionist thesis found in Leopoldo López one of its activists and conspired against Julio Borges, the founder and head of Primero Justicia, who then had presidential aspirations.

In addition to automatically granting Chavismo total control of the National Assembly, the debate produced the division of the party and López's departure.

The break was made.

The Capriles-López confrontation experienced a period of relative détente around 2010, a year after the former mayor of Chacao had founded Voluntad Popular, the party he still leads.

That truce was never cooperation or closeness.

López was politically disqualified by a Chavez court and his popularity experienced a retreat.

The then certainty about the possibilities of the electoral path made Capriles grow, which was able to successfully exercise the important government of the Miranda State and increase its political capital despite its frequent difficulties with Hugo Chávez.

López surprisingly declined his candidacy in favor of Capriles in the 2011 opposition presidential primaries, thereby securing his nomination.

This unusual agreement was met with irony by public opinion at the time, which christened the alliance "Capoldo".

Opposition hopes were based on it.

In 2012, Capriles appointed López the head of the electoral logistics command of that decisive feat in the face of Chávez's third reelection, and a new incident ensued: Capriles accused Leopoldo López of assuming Chávez's electoral defeat too quickly on election day , promoting the news and encouraging early discouragement and desertion among electoral witnesses with deliberate malice.

On the contrary, López accused Capriles of not wanting to take people out to the streets after the electoral victory of Nicolás Maduro in 2013, after the death of Chávez, and in which his successor prevailed by half a point.

The leader of Voluntad Popular became the driving force behind popular protest at a time when the economic and social crisis was deepening.

Leopoldo López was harshly recriminated for his leading role in organizing the massive national wave of protests against Maduro in 2014. The disturbances of the La Salida movement, with a ration of dead and wounded, enraged part of the opposition leadership, Capriles el first, for never having been revealed and hindering the peaceful path to power.

López ended up in jail and the certainty about the possibility of a change through the electoral route was further broken.

However, La Salida produced a displacement of support for Capriles to the detriment of López, already in the Ramo Verde prison.

Despite López's imprisonment, the opposition achieved a resounding victory in the 2015 parliamentary elections, which exacerbated the confrontation with Chavismo, which began all kinds of maneuvers to limit the power of the opposition.

López regained a lot of momentum in January 2019, when Juan Guaidó was appointed president of the National Assembly and proclaimed himself interim president of Venezuela, as was recognized by nearly 60 countries, a maneuver promoted in the shadows by his political boss.

Guaidó's impulse edged Capriles, who for more than a year kept a very low profile and supported the figure of the young politician.

Meanwhile, in the shadows, López gained strength, who has been the one who has mainly managed the strings of the opposition strategy.

There are two events, however, that have diminished that support.

The failed insurrection of April 30, 2019, which led to the release of Leopoldo López, a refugee since that day at the Spanish Embassy in Caracas and the failed paramilitary incursion of last May, in which Guaidó and López were shaken.

Capriles, who by then had already been critical of the virtuality in which Guaidó's interim government became - "Internet government", described it this week - was maneuvering in the shadows until, this week, he finally decided to launch into the offensive.

A step that, no one doubts, is another chapter of the particular animosity between the two leaderships.