Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor–News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

The Cab­i­net will not be tak­ing a po­si­tion on the Venezuela elec­tion re­sult, nor will Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley make any pro­nounce­ments on it.

Speak­ing at a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment func­tion on Fri­day evening, Row­ley made T&T’s stance clear, say­ing, “There are peo­ple in Trinidad who have come from Venezuela be­cause they didn’t like the last re­sult and I’m not sur­prised that they are still here. But, what we have to be care­ful with is that we don’t take ad­vice from peo­ple whose agen­da and in­ter­ests are not the same as T&T. We would main­tain our po­si­tion un­til there is rea­son to change it.”

He added, “The last time we had to go to the UN and speak to the sec­re­tary-gen­er­al. I don’t know if the same thing will hap­pen again this time but what is hap­pen­ing is we are not with­out some in­ter­est in what goes on in Venezuela but what­ev­er role we have to play, we’ll play it with­in the con­text of our un­der­stand­ing of and con­fir­ma­tion of the rules and reg­u­la­tions that gov­ern peo­ple’s in­ter­nal elec­tions.”

Thou­sands of peo­ple ral­lied in the streets of Venezuela’s cap­i­tal on Sat­ur­day, wav­ing the na­tion­al flag and singing the na­tion­al an­them in sup­port of an op­po­si­tion can­di­date they be­lieve won last Sun­day’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion by a land­slide.

Au­thor­i­ties have de­clared Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro the win­ner of the elec­tion but have yet to pro­duce vot­ing tal­lies to prove he won. The Op­po­si­tion mean­while says it has proof that its can­di­date, Ed­mun­do González, won.

The Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment has ar­rest­ed hun­dreds of op­po­si­tion sup­port­ers who took to the streets in the days af­ter the dis­put­ed poll, and Maduro has threat­ened to lock up op­po­si­tion leader María Co­ri­na Macha­do and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date González.

Row­ley on Fri­day warned against try­ing to change the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment by force, not­ing the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in­volv­ing Maduro and Juan Guai­do re­sult­ed in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion.

“When the Unit­ed States, Cana­da and the Eu­ro­pean Union de­cid­ed to change the gov­ern­ment in Venezuela by force, Trinidad and To­ba­go, Bar­ba­dos, Mex­i­co, Uruguay all took ob­jec­tion be­cause a bad sit­u­a­tion was about to get worse. We be­lieve that as we do be­lieve now, that any at­tempt to forcibly change the gov­ern­ment of Venezuela by out­siders is ask­ing for trou­ble, yet un­known.”

Com­par­ing the op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress’ chal­lenge to PNM’s vic­to­ry in the 2015 Lo­cal Gen­er­al Elec­tions to the sit­u­a­tion in Venezuela, Row­ley said, “Here in T&T, we too had an elec­tion. PNM won an elec­tion. What did the Op­po­si­tion do? They went to court and told the court they want five seats can­celled be­cause the elec­tion was not prop­er­ly held. Of course, our courts func­tion. They lost, and up to this day parts of the courts not func­tion­ing any­more be­cause the PNM can­not col­lect its costs from the UNC tak­ing us to court and if there are chal­lenges to the re­sults in Venezuela, we will ob­serve the facts as they sur­face, but T&T will not be out there on any­body’s in­struc­tion, ring­ing any­body’s bell, and tak­ing any­body’s bush tea for a fever that we didn’t cre­ate.”