Call for calm in Venezuela
MONTEVIDEO: European and Latin American leaders yesterday called for dialogue and elections to solve a deepening crisis in Venezuela, warning against rash intervention in the country even as trucks bringing humanitarian aid lined up near the border.
International pressure on Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro to step down has intensified this week as a flood of EU members followed the US move to recognise opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president of the economically shattered South American nation.
Russia and China continue to back Maduro and have warned Washington and others not to intervene.
Holding its inaugural meeting in Uruguay’s capital Montevideo, the European Unionbacked International Contact Group on Venezuela called for a more handsoff approach than that advocated by the US and some other Latin American nations.
EU member states in the group include France, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Britain. Latin America members include Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Uruguay.
In power since 2013 and reelected last year in a vote critics have called a sham, Maduro has presided over an economic collapse marked by widespread shortages of food and medicine and hyperinflation.
The first trucks carrying humanitarian aid meant to cross the border into Venezuela arrived on Thursday in the Colombian border city of Cucuta, where officials were to await instructions on how to distribute the food and medicine.
Escorted by police motor cycles, the trucks pulled into the northern city, where desperate Venezuelans were waiting to see whether Maduro’s government would clear the border road he has blocked and allow the humanitarian shipments to pass.
In Washington, Elliott Abrams, the US special envoy on Venezuela, said President Donald Trump’s administration is imposing a ban on travel to the United States by members of Venezuela’s constituent assembly, a body controlled by Maduro and denounced by the opposition as illegitimate.
Regarding aid being send to Venezuela’s border, Abrams said, ‘‘I don’t think we or the Colombians or the Brazilians or anyone else is planning to try to force it in.’’
Maduro, who calls Guaido a US puppet seeking to foment a coup, has maintained power with the backing of Venezuela’s military, though the opposition leader has asked the military to side with the forces of democracy.
In Washington, Navy Admiral Craig Faller, head of the US military’s Southern Command, told the senate armed services committee most of Venezuela’s 2000 generals were loyal to Maduro because of the wealth they amassed from drug trafficking and petroleum and business revenue.
Trading houses that resell Venezuelan crude oil have not yet found workarounds since the US announced sanctions to cut off socialist President Nicolas Maduro’s revenue, according to shipping data and sources.
Merchants, trading partners and Venezuela’s staterun PDVSA were expecting oil swaps and socalled triangulation of sales to be the easiest ways to continue shipping, as has happened when sanctions were imposed on other nations.
But the US measures — tougher and deeper than past sanctions — have for now blocked a large portion of trading in Venezuelan oil worldwide as endusers are reluctant to take cargoes, leaving barrels stranded in the Atlantic basin.
That threatens global trade that is worth $6 billion a year.