Venezuelan official directs President’s call for peace to US

DA­REECE PO­LO

Se­nior Re­porter

da­reece.po­[email protected]

A Venezue­lan of­fi­cial is sug­gest­ing that Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo’s re­cent call for diplo­ma­cy should be di­rect­ed square­ly at the Unit­ed States, as the world’s largest air­craft car­ri­er ar­rived close to the coun­try’s bor­ders.

The USS Ger­ald R Ford en­tered Caribbean wa­ters on Sun­day, join­ing eight war­ships, a nu­clear sub­ma­rine, F-35 air­craft and hun­dreds of mil­i­tary per­son­nel. Its ar­rival comes as US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump re­fus­es to rule out de­ploy­ing troops to Venezuela, even while in­sist­ing he re­mains open to talks with Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro.

The Venezue­lan of­fi­cial, who spoke with Guardian Me­dia via What­sApp on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, was re­spond­ing to re­marks Kan­ga­loo de­liv­ered at the An­nu­al Heads of Mis­sions Din­ner on No­vem­ber 5.

Ad­dress­ing diplo­mats and their spous­es, in­clud­ing For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Sean Sobers, Kan­ga­loo said, “Co­op­er­a­tion is al­ways bet­ter than con­flict, di­a­logue is al­ways bet­ter than dis­pu­ta­tion, and re­spect is al­ways bet­ter than re­gret.”

The of­fi­cial de­scribed her mes­sage as ac­cu­rate and time­ly, adding it “fit per­fect­ly for Trump and gen­er­al­ly US gov­ern­ments through his­to­ry to fol­low.”

Mean­while, for­mer for­eign af­fairs min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne is sharply crit­i­cis­ing what he views as Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s pro­longed ab­sence from open me­dia scruti­ny, ar­gu­ing that more than five months with­out a full press con­fer­ence have co­in­cid­ed with a dra­mat­ic redi­rec­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s for­eign pol­i­cy.

In a Face­book post on Mon­day, Browne claimed the Gov­ern­ment has “out­sourced diplo­ma­cy,” strained re­la­tions with re­gion­al neigh­bours, dis­tanced it­self from the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of in­ter­na­tion­al law, and presided over do­mes­tic up­heaval. .

“So many months with on­ly spo­radic Prime Min­is­te­r­i­al tweets and What­sApp mes­sages to se­lect re­porters. The ini­tial prac­tice of Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar ap­pear­ing at post-Cab­i­net press con­fer­ences has fall­en in­to abeyance. The ques­tion is why,” he wrote. “The prob­lem the Prime Min­is­ter faces is that the tune be­ing played is not her own; she is mere­ly lip-sync­ing from an ex­ter­nal­ly script­ed agen­da and finds her­self un­able to prop­er­ly ex­plain or jus­ti­fy it in front of the press.”

In a brief re­sponse yes­ter­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar dis­missed Browne’s cri­tique, say­ing, “If Amery hates the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and Amer­i­can peo­ple, he should sim­ply re­turn his and his fam­i­ly’s US visas to the lo­cal US em­bassy.”