Raphael John-Lall

Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro is ac­cus­ing the gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar of act­ing be­hind the backs of T&T’s cit­i­zens and the mil­i­tary au­thor­i­ties to turn the coun­try in­to an “air­craft car­ri­er” against Venezuela.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go mort­gaged its seas to threat­en Venezuela, and the peo­ple of T&T are com­plete­ly against it. It is a dis­grace that the po­lice and mil­i­tary forces of that coun­try do not know where the Unit­ed States troops are,” Pres­i­dent Maduro ar­gued.

He made these re­marks on his week­ly Mon­day night pro­gramme, Con Maduro.

This week, T&T and the US mil­i­taries are hav­ing joint drills from No­vem­ber 16 to 21 as ten­sions in the Caribbean rise.

With this in­for­ma­tion, Maduro re­ferred to the mil­i­tary ex­er­cis­es an­nounced by Port-of-Spain with US troops and lo­cal news re­ports that T&T’s mil­i­tary of­fi­cers were al­leged­ly not aware of the ex­act where­abouts of the US troops.

“That has nev­er been seen be­fore,” said the Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent, while lament­ing that he be­lieves “the Prime Min­is­ter of Trinidad and To­ba­go is go­ing to have a very bad time.”

He called on the peo­ple of T&T to em­brace the his­toric broth­er­hood that has unit­ed the peo­ples of T&T and Venezuela, while lament­ing that the po­lit­i­cal lead­er­ship was putting that sov­er­eign coun­try in dan­ger of a pos­si­ble armed con­fronta­tion with a neigh­bour.

He al­so boast­ed that Venezuela had one of Latin Amer­i­ca’s best mil­i­taries, but he had no in­ten­tions of colonis­ing the Caribbean is­lands.

“Our mil­i­tary pow­er is not in­tend­ed to have bases abroad. It is not in­tend­ed to colonise the Caribbean is­lands. Our mil­i­tary forces are in­tend­ed to de­fend our home­land,” he said.

Pos­si­ble talks

Dur­ing the pro­gramme, Maduro al­so re­act­ed to com­ments made by US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump on Sun­day and Mon­day that there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty that both coun­tries could ne­go­ti­ate a peace­ful so­lu­tion.

Pres­i­dent Trump said on Mon­day that he would not rule out de­ploy­ing US troops on the ground in Venezuela, but he al­so said he was leav­ing open the pos­si­bil­i­ty of talk­ing to Pres­i­dent Maduro.

“I don’t rule out any­thing,” the Pres­i­dent told re­porters in the Oval Of­fice. “We just have to take care of Venezuela.”

Pres­i­dent Maduro’s re­sponse was a con­cil­ia­to­ry one.

“Any­one who wants to talk to Venezuela will talk face to face," he re­spond­ed.

He stressed that Cara­cas' po­si­tion re­gard­ing in­ter­na­tion­al law was al­ready ex­pressed in a let­ter sent on Sep­tem­ber 6.

Maduro em­pha­sised the val­ue of words as a fun­da­men­tal tool for na­tion­al lead­ers.

"I think the most pow­er­ful thing a leader can have is their word, and the writ­ten word lasts for­ev­er," he said, re­fer­ring to the let­ter.

The Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent read ex­cerpts from the let­ter in which Venezuela con­demned the use of force to re­solve dif­fer­ences be­tween coun­tries and reaf­firmed that com­mon ground can on­ly be found through diplo­ma­cy and di­a­logue.

"Peace has no al­ter­na­tives. End­less wars are an end­less abyss. We must reaf­firm the right of peo­ples to peace," he em­pha­sised.