No agenda yet for Pompeo visit - Todd
-advance team arrives
With an agenda not yet fixed, a United States government team arrived yesterday in Guyana and will today begin preparations for Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s visit later this week, Minister of Foreign Affairs Hugh Todd said.
“A team will be here [meeting with various officials] tomorrow; a preparation team. When that prepping team comes, we will have a more formal pronouncement on the details and so forth,” Todd told Stabroek News yesterday when contacted.
The Foreign Affairs Minister explained that there is much to be “mapped out” ahead of Pompeo’s visit as it is the first time such a high ranking US official has made a State Visit here and “with such a visit there has to be lots of security planning and an overall agenda set which requires a lot of work”.
“This is also not like a regular regional head of state visit that we are accustomed to. A lot of different preparations will have to go into this,” he added.
Todd said that he hopes by the end of today there will be an official announcement.
A US military passenger plane arrived in the country yesterday around 5:15 pm with the advance party, Head of the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority, retired Colonel Egbert Field confirmed.
Pompeo is expected to be in Guyana from
Thursday, September 17 to Friday, September 18 and this newspaper understands that the Irfaan Ali government has already set up its own delegation for planned meetings. Those meetings are expected from Thursday evening.
Already, the Ali administration has been urged to make its position known on non- negotiable elements with respect to Venezuela.
Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira has described the scheduled visit as “important and significant.”
“Especially in light of what has happened over the five months and the US government’s support to Guyana during that time this visit is important,” the minister stressed while explaining that she was unaware of whether it was a trip to the Caribbean and Latin America region or to Guyana alone.
The last time Pompeo visited the Caribbean region – in January – he ran afoul of then Chair of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Mia Mottley for failing to engage with all of CARICOM.
“As Chairman of CARICOM, it is impossible for me to agree that my Foreign Minister should attend a meeting to which members of CARICOM are not invited,” Mottley said at the time while suggesting that it would be an attempt at divide and rule among CARICOM countries “if some are invited and not all”.
Touring
Over the last month, Pompeo has been touring
the world in what the Associated Press has described as an attempt to burnish the foreign policy credentials of President Donald Trump ahead of November’s presidential election.
Pompeo was most recently in Qatar, where the negotiating teams of the Taliban and the Afghan government have begun hammering out a road map for a post-war Afghanistan. These negotiations follow a peace deal the United States and the Taliban signed in February in Qatar’s capital of Doha.
On Saturday he was in
Cyprus where he met with that country’s President Nicos Anastasiades. Then, he signed a MOU with Cyprus “to create a new training center to be funded by the United States” and built in that country. “It will provide expertise for the rest of the region on border security and nonproliferation. It will be known as the Cyprus Center for Land, Openseas, and Port Security, or
CYCLOPS,” he had said.
And Pompeo said on Twitter that “The Republic of Cyprus is a key partner in the Eastern Mediterranean and we are committed to deepening our bilateral relationship.”
In this region, the US government has been trying to drum up support against the Venezuelan government led by Nicolas
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