Marco Teruggi
Mike Pompeo, U.S. Secretary of State, former director of the CIA, was in the Colombian city of Cúcuta, on the Venezuelan border, yesterday afternoon. He was accompanied by President Ivan Duque, Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes, and Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez. They toured the humanitarian aid collection center and the Simón Bolívar international bridge, places that on February 23 had been the center of media and political attention when, allegedly, trucks with aid would enter Venezuela.
Pompeo and Duque held a joint press conference after the meeting. “The United States will continue to use every economic and political means at our disposal to help Venezuelans through sanctions, visa cancellations and other means,” said Pompeo, who ended his Friday-Sunday tour to Chile, Paraguay, Peru and finally Cúcuta, where the main focus of each meeting was Venezuela.
Duque, for his part, referred to the commitment to maintain his support to achieve the “unrestricted defense of democratic principles in Venezuela, highlighting the importance of having achieved the recognition of self-proclaimed Juan Guaidó’s envoy to the Organization of American States and the meeting of the Lima Group today in Chile. “We are with you to defeat the dictatorship and regain freedom,” he concluded.
Pompeo returns to the United States after his tour and meeting with the presidents of each of the countries, within a context characterized by the need to reorder strategies with respect to Venezuela, after a series of actions that failed to achieve their objective to force the exit of Nicolas Maduro. Simultaneously to his tour was Elliot Abrams, special coordinator of North America for Venezuela, who went to Spain and Portugal.
The main axes tackled in each country and case were the need to increase macroeconomic sanctions -as Repsol could take measures- on leaders of Chavismo, the humanitarian crisis, and the geopolitical dimension of the threat that Venezuela represents for the U.S., through their alliances with Russia, Cuba, China and Iran.
The question of military intervention was less pronounced. Pompeo and Abrams once again confirmed that all options are on the table, although they did not go into this matter in depth when their allies in both the Lima Group and the European Union have emphasized that any resolution must be peaceful and democratic.
Within the framework of Pompeo’s tour, bilateral issues were also discussed with each of the countries, as well as issues of a transnational dimension repeated at each press conference: the threat posed by Chinese investments in the continent. The paradigmatic case was in Chile, where the Secretary of State declared that “when China does business in places like Latin America, it often injects corrosive capital into the economic bloodstream, giving life to corruption and eroding good governance. He also threatened to “make decisions about where we place our intelligence,” should the Chilean government move forward in a possible alliance with the Huawei company. Xu Bu, China’s ambassador to Chile, replied: “Mr. Mike Pompeo has lost his mind and has gone too far”.
The tension around that issue confirmed the gap between the political dimension of ties between governments aligned with the U.S. strategy and the economic dimension. It is not the first time that this has been demonstrated, it is one element of the tensions that formed part of the central agenda at a time marked by the dispute between the United States and China, which has its epicenter in the area of technology and innovation.
Pompeo’s tour was followed closely from Venezuela, on days when the political agenda overlapped. Chavismo remembered the days of April 2002 when the coup against Hugo Chávez was defeated, with three days of mobilization taking place, closing on April 13 with a great demonstration of strength by the Bolivarian Militia, which, as announced by Nicolás Maduro, has reached 2 million 200 militiamen.
The Right, for their part, maintained its agenda of activities centered in Caracas, and later, over the weekend, in the state of Zulia, on the border with Colombia. There Guaidó travelled, made speeches, and organized a mobilization in the city of Maracaibo, using a road map that remains unchanged and without proposed goals or objectives to be achieved, explaining many of the obstacles to avoiding a decrease in expectations.
Today’s Lima Group meeting will take place more than a month after the previous one. The results of the agreements made during Pompeo’s tour will be seen there, particularly in the economic and diplomatic spheres. The military option is still excluded from the public agenda, although it is in the private sphere: it was reported that last Wednesday there was a meeting organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, where Guaidó’s envoys in the U.S., the former head of the Southern Command, officials and former officials of the State Department, USAID, Donald Trump’s advisors, among others, attended to address this issue.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
