Acting Venezuelan President arrives in Barbados

BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos, CMC—Venezuela’s act­ing Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­driguez ar­rived in Bar­ba­dos last night, her sec­ond vis­it to a Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) coun­try since she was sworn in­to of­fice in Jan­u­ary, fol­low­ing the Unit­ed States in­va­sion of the South Amer­i­can coun­try that led to the de­ten­tion of for­mer pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro.

Ro­driquez had vis­it­ed Grena­da on April 9 for a few hours and held dis­cus­sions with Prime Min­is­ter Dick­on Mitchell and oth­er mem­bers of his cab­i­net, in what an of­fi­cial state­ment lat­er de­scribed as a “cor­dial and con­struc­tive at­mos­phere.”

No de­tails of Ro­driquez’s vis­it here have been re­leased, but an in­formed source told the Caribbean Me­dia Cor­po­ra­tion (CMC) that she will meet with Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley to­day be­fore her de­par­ture hours lat­er.

“She seems to be mak­ing the rounds to some Caribbean coun­tries,” the source told CMC.

Last week, for­mer Trinidad and To­ba­go prime min­is­ter Stu­art Young post­ed on hs so­cial me­dia page a pho­to­graph of him­self and Ro­driquez fol­low­ing a meet­ing in Cara­cas.

“It was a plea­sure meet­ing Her Ex­cel­len­cy, Del­cy Ro­driquez, Pres­i­den­ta En­car­ga­da, of the Bo­li­var­i­an Re­pub­lic of Venezuela ear­li­er this week,” Young, a for­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter, wrote on his Face­book page. (See page 6)

T&T Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who has been de­clared “per­sona non gra­ta” by Venezuela’s Na­tion­al As­sem­bly, has in the past been open­ly crit­i­cal of Ro­dríguez and the Maduro ad­min­is­tra­tion. She re­cent­ly an­nounced that Port-of-Spain in­tends to send a diplo­mat­ic mis­sion to Cara­cas to en­sure T&T se­cures its “just share” of cross-bor­der oil and gas re­sources.

The Drag­on gas field—lo­cat­ed in Venezue­lan wa­ters but close to Trinidad’s en­er­gy in­fra­struc­ture—has been viewed as a key sup­ply source for the coun­try’s liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas LNG in­dus­try. Progress has been com­pli­cat­ed by geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions and sanc­tions im­posed on Venezuela. Sim­i­lar­ly, the Lo­ran Man­a­tee field, which strad­dles mar­itime bound­aries, has long been the sub­ject of bi­lat­er­al dis­cus­sions, with T&T mov­ing ahead with de­vel­op­ment on its side while ne­go­ti­a­tions con­tin­ue re­gard­ing the Venezue­lan por­tion.