While not uncommon globally, politicising aid is always a questionable strategy.

Almost every time it occurs, it’s precisely those most vulnerable and in need who pay the ultimate price whenever political leaders start playing hardball over the provision and free movement of food, medicines and other necessities.

One need only look to Syria these past years. 

In terms of humanitarian provision, Venezuela seems headed in the same direction right now following the insistence by the country’s opposition leader Juan Guaido that February 23 be the deadline for allowing aid to enter his beleaguered Latin American homeland. 

More than two million people have fled the country's soaring hyperinflation and severe food and medical shortages over the last two years and the situation deteriorates by the day.  

Mr Guaido’s “direct order” to the country’s military to let aid convoys through, flies in the face of the blockade ordered by President Nicolas Maduro on the three lane bridge that marks the border between Venezuela and neighbouring Colombia.

Large quantities of badly needed aid supplied by the US have been warehoused on the Colombian border since last week. 

By throwing down such a new and explicit challenge to President Maduro, Mr Guaido must know he is playing with fire.

“The humanitarian aid is going to enter one way or another,” Mr Guaido told supporters earlier this week during a speech to tens-of-thousands of Venezuelans protesting in Caracas against President Maduro’s authoritarian government. 

“We’re going to organise the biggest mobilisation in our history,” Mr Guaido warned.

Mr Guaido and his political allies have said they plan to be at the front of the February 23 push to get the aid in, even if it means risking their lives. 

“We have never told people to do something we are not willing to do,” said Jose Manuel Olivares, a close ally of Mr Guaido. 'We're going to be there with people taking the risk,” he insisted.

It’s a bold ultimatum by Mr Guaido and his supporters, which clearly has two political aims. The first is a direct appeal to ordinary Venezuelans around a specific issue, by calling on them to mobilise caravans across the border. 

While a potentially dangerous scheme, it's one that plays to Mr Guaido’s second aim too of trying again to embarrass and undermine President Maduro’s rule. 

Most importantly it could drive that wedge between the Venezuelan ruler and his military, something Mr Guaido has been trying to do from the outset of his campaign to bring about change in the country.

Venezuela’s opposition hopes bringing aid to the border will drive soldiers to abandon Mr Maduro rather than comply with his orders to block the shipments. 

Almost from the start of his campaign and confrontation with the president three weeks ago, Mr Guaido offered amnesty to military officials that join his opposition and help restore democracy. 

Clearly he continues to recognise how crucial the military is to that process and the direction in which it jumps politically as the most likely determining factor in the country’s crisis.

Despite though Mr Guaido’s authoritative-sounding assertion in giving a “direct order” to the army, there has been little evidence that the allegiance of the security forces, the country’s key powerbroker, has swung behind the opposition leader. 

For his part Mr Maduro, remains equally entrenched and made a show of overseeing military operations played on state TV almost daily. 

He has jogged with troops in formation, mounted an amphibious tank and railed against what he says is an impending US invasion that he has likened to a Latin American Vietnam.

In a provocative interview with the BBC, Mr Maduro vowed to block the American humanitarian aid to desperate Venezuelans, arguing it was a ruse to justify US military intervention and a coup d’etat. 

“They are warmongering in order to take over Venezuela,” he told the British broadcaster. 

Despite his doggedness though he continues  to face a stiff challenge from Mr Guaido. According to Diego Moya-Ocampos, a Venezuelan analyst with the London-based consulting firm IHS Global Insight, Mr Guaido has gained broad support beyond the middle classes and deep into Venezuela’s slums, once a stronghold of the ruling socialist party.

But that has not translated into support from the military and security forces, despite Mr Guaido’s offer of amnesty.

“The military has had more than one opportunity to withdraw support for President Maduro,” Mr Moya-Ocampos said. “It has consistently continued to back him.”

And so the crisis deepens with the issue of aid now coming to the fore as a potential flashpoint between the two sides.

Trucks carrying US relief supplies have rolled into the Colombian border town of Cucuta but continue to have their entry into Venezuela blocked by the Venezuelan military, with Mr Maduro describing it as a “show of fake humanitarian aid”.

Meanwhile, the UN says it cannot deliver humanitarian assistance to Venezuela unless requested to do so by the government.

At a press conference in Cucuta last Friday, Lester Toledo, Mr Guaido’s spokesperson in Colombia, said: “Dear military personnel, this aid is also for you... here comes food for your children, here comes medicine for the people who are suffering.” 

But international humanitarian organisations all too familiar with the “weaponisation” of aid remain wary of the political motives of both sides involved insisting that any supplies must be free from such constraints and conditions.

Aid agencies operating within Venezuela have remained discrete about the humanitarian situation within the country due to the government’s sensitivity toward the issue and official stance that it needs no assistance.

An international NGO forum in Colombia, which includes Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Medecins du Monde, Terre des Hommes and others, has expressed concern about the plans to send humanitarian aid over the border from Colombia.

“Any potential political use of humanitarian aid can generate risks, in particular for those the aid is intended to support, if this use is not based on technical and objective criteria,” it warned.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which operates independently and in support of the Venezuelan Red Cross, was also critical of the “highly politicised environment”, which it said makes it “challenging for humanitarian organisations to operate in”.

As the February 23 deadline looms, the country waits nervously to see what the outcome might be. Instead of bringing some relief to those most in need the wrangle over aid may only serve to push Venezuela even further to the brink.