The Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, will host his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, who sought to be a guarantor of the electoral recomposition of the neighboring country. This meeting takes place after Petro criticized the disqualification of opposition member María Corina Machado and at a time when the region faces new conflicts with the diplomatic dispute between Ecuador and Mexico.
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This Tuesday, April 9, the presidents of Venezuela and Colombia meet in Caracas, a month after a meeting in which they talked about issues such as migration, energy transition and climate crisis.
The conclave takes place after the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, expressed his rejection of the disqualification by the Supreme Electoral Court against María Corina Machado and the impossibility of registration of Corina Yoris, her successor in the candidacy.
The criticism of Petro, who sought to sponsor negotiations between the ruling party and the opposition in Venezuela for elections to be held, generated a wave of negative comments from members of Nicolás Maduro's Government, not only against the Colombian but also against other Latin American leaders such as Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The head of state of Colombia said that Machado's disqualification was “a democratic coup” and stressed that democracy must “maintain the political rights of all citizens,” which made the Venezuelan opposition react positively.
However, Maduro toned down the controversies on the eve of receiving Petro. “No one will separate us from Colombia, we have great objectives to achieve together. Advance the economy, trade, peace… We are helping Colombia in peace and we will continue together,” he expressed.
For his part, after statements by Maduro, where he called the left and right governments as cowards for not condemning the attacks on his government, Petro responded.
“There is no cowardly left, there is the probability of, through deepening democracy, changing the world. Chávez's magic was to propose democracy and change in the world. Today's revolution is: transforming the world by deepening democracy,” Petro wrote in his X account.
In the speech on Monday, April 8, where Maduro stressed that “life is beautiful when there are differences in criteria,” he explained that the agenda of issues to be discussed with his Colombian counterpart include diplomatic cooperation, border security, trade, economy and energy.
This agenda was set by the foreign ministers of Venezuela and Colombia, Yván Gil and Luis Gilberto Murillo, respectively, after the first meeting of the monitoring mechanism of the Neighborhood and Integration Commission, held in the border city of Cúcuta.
Regional tensions
The meeting takes place amid growing regional tensions, such as that between Ecuador and Mexico.
On Thursday, April 4, Ecuador asked the Mexican ambassador in Quito, Raquel Serur Smeke, to leave the country by declaring her “persona non grata”, following criticism from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador about the last Ecuadorian elections in which the candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
A day later, the granting of asylum to Glas and the Ecuadorian police intervention in the Mexican embassy deepened the crisis. The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, broke diplomatic relations with Ecuador and ordered the return to the country of all the staff of his embassy in Quito.
The irruption of the Ecuadorian Police into the diplomatic headquarters aimed to arrest former vice president Jorge Glaswho according to Mexico was staying as a guest in that place.
Ecuador assured that it proceeded after exhausting dialogue with the Mexican Government to arrest the politician, convicted by the Justice of his country in corruption cases. Quitó also argued that there was “a real risk of flight.”
However, on April 8, Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena stressed that the procedure was unjustifiable, since Quito violated international law by retaining a person who had political asylum.
On the same Monday, the president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, described the crisis as a “complex and unprecedented situation.” Noboa assured that he had to make “exceptional decisions to protect national security, the rule of law and the dignity of a people that rejects any type of impunity for criminals, delinquents or narco-terrorists.”
With EFE and local media
