Raphael John-Lall

Free­lance Cor­re­spon­dent

Civ­il so­ci­ety or­gan­i­sa­tions in Trinidad and To­ba­go are sup­port­ing the Venezue­lan Gov­ern­ment as it con­tin­ues ini­tia­tives that would lead to the re­turn of oust­ed Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cil­ia Flo­res.

A me­dia state­ment is­sued by the Venezue­lan Em­bassy in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day shed light on a vir­tu­al meet­ing on Mon­day, which brought to­geth­er a group of Caribbean ac­tivists, le­gal ex­perts and po­lit­i­cal lead­ers.

The par­tic­i­pants of the meet­ing, among oth­er things, laid out an ac­tion plan to de­fend the Venezue­lan cause.

Deputy Po­lit­i­cal Leader of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ), Rad­ha­ka Gual­bance, was one of the speak­ers. Al­so par­tic­i­pat­ing in the meet­ing were mem­bers of the in­dige­nous group, the Waraos of San Fer­nan­do.

Dur­ing the ses­sion, Gual­bance echoed the con­tents of a let­ter dat­ed Jan­u­ary 8 that the As­sem­bly of Caribbean Peo­ple, a re­gion­al group of which the MSJ is a mem­ber, had sent to the Unit­ed Na­tions con­demn­ing the il­le­gal at­tack of the Unit­ed States against Venezuela on Jan­u­ary 3.

Gual­bance al­so crit­i­cised the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Gov­ern­ment for the role it has played dur­ing the Venezue­lan con­flict over the last few months.

Ac­cord­ing to the em­bassy’s state­ment, as part of ac­tions de­nounc­ing and con­demn­ing re­cent at­tacks against Venezuela by the Unit­ed States, po­lit­i­cal and civ­il or­gan­i­sa­tions, ju­rists, and sol­i­dar­i­ty move­ments from across the world joined an ini­tia­tive to con­cen­trate ideas and en­er­gies in de­fence of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean as a “Zone of Peace.”

Par­tic­i­pants came from An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, Ar­genti­na, Ba­hamas, Bar­ba­dos, Be­lize, Cana­da, Cu­ba, Cu­ra­cao, Do­mini­ca, Grena­da, Guyana, Haiti, Ja­maica, Mar­tinique, Pales­tine (from the Gaza Strip), Paraguay, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, St Lu­cia, Suri­name, Trinidad and To­ba­go, and Venezuela, among oth­er re­gions.

The state­ment from the em­bassy added that this event fea­tured the par­tic­i­pa­tion of more than 180 po­lit­i­cal and so­cial ac­tors from the afore­men­tioned coun­tries.

It al­so in­clud­ed, among its ac­tion pro­pos­als, the de­vel­op­ment of strate­gies from a per­spec­tive of analy­sis and study of the dif­fer­ent threats that put the re­gion at risk.

The meet­ing served to ar­tic­u­late pro­pos­als and ac­tions be­tween so­cial and sol­i­dar­i­ty move­ments of the Caribbean, uni­fy­ing cri­te­ria in the face of ex­ter­nal threats that seek to desta­bilise the re­gion, the em­bassy said.

“Each of the il­lus­tri­ous in­ter­ven­tions co­in­cid­ed with the need to build an in­ter­na­tion­al sol­i­dar­i­ty net­work that al­lows for a de­fence of the sov­er­eign­ty of our na­tions, as well as to im­ple­ment an ac­tion plan that seeks to in­flu­ence the re­for­mu­la­tion of the for­eign pol­i­cy of each of our coun­tries,” the state­ment said.