Campaign strategy due to the flow of Venezuelan migrants? Colombian President Gustavo Petro will host a summit next week that seeks to advance negotiations between the Venezuelan government and opposition.
The head of state has proposed a formula: “more democracy, less sanctions,” he said this week in Washington during a visit to the United States.
In the meeting in Bogotá, which begins on Tuesday, April 25, instead of delegates from the government of Nicolás Maduro and the Unitary Platform that opposes him, representatives of 15 countries will participate, including the United States, which has imposed most of the most of 900 sanctions that weigh on the institutions and officials of Venezuela.
This Thursday, at the White House in Washington, Petro explained to President Joe Biden his three-point plan: “to promote the Venezuelan electoral schedule, the entry of Venezuela into the Inter-American Human Rights System and progressively deactivate the sanctions.”
But Petro’s formula for more democracy and zero sanctions touches both sides of the conflict in Venezuela differently.
Maduro made his position clear after a meeting with Petro in March: the summit should be useful for him “to turn the page on this tortuous period of sanctions.”
His foreign ministry reacted positively to Petro’s recipe to unblock the dialogue, but conditioned its success on first having all sanctions annulled, which he called “unilateral coercive measures.”