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Canada will host a meeting of Western Hemisphere countries next Monday to address the political and economic crisis in Venezuela.
The Lima Group, a coalition of more than a dozen countries in the Americas, minus the United States, was formed in August 2017 to address Venezuela's growing backslide into authoritarianism. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland confirmed its next session will be in Ottawa.
Canada needs to play a leading role in the Lima Group because the crisis in Venezuela is unfolding in Canada's global backyard, she said.
"This is our neighbourhood," said Freeland said Monday. "For Canadians, we have a very direct interest in what happens in our hemisphere. That is why we have been so active and will continue to be so active."
The group has recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela's interim president, saying President Nicolas Maduro's continuing dictatorial rule is creating an economic and humanitarian crisis that has swelled beyond his country's borders. Maduro was populist leader Hugo Chavez's vice-president and came to power with Chavez's death in 2013.
Freeland praised the role of Canadian diplomats in Caracas, who helped get the country's opposition parties to coalesce behind the 35-year-old Guaido.
The Canadian Press interviewed senior Canadian government officials who have described Canada's role in aiding democratic forces to help rescue the once oil-rich country from the economic and political spiral that has forced three million Venezuelans from their homes.
Freeland said Monday's talks will focus in part on the refugee crisis has that has forced a flood of displaced people into neighbouring Colombia and Brazil.
"Some of the stories of people coming across the border, unaccompanied children for example, in terrible conditions are really heart-wrenching," said Freeland. "We've seen with Syria the way in which a refugee crisis can have much broader destabilizing impacts."
The Lima Group has also called for Maduro's ouster, saying Guaido is the only "legitimately elected" Venezuelan leader after he won control of its National Assembly.
On Jan. 10, Maduro was sworn in as president with support of countries such as Cuba, Russia and China. The Lima Group denounced Maduro as illegitimate and Freeland said, "the Maduro regime is now fully entrenched as a dictatorship."
Freeland has branded the rise of authoritarian leaders as a major foreign-policy challenge and she suggested Monday that Canada needs to work against it in the Americas.
"Our hemisphere has been going in the right direction and it is really important to stand up or to speak up for democracy and human rights."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spoken to Colombian President Ivan Duque and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to affirm their support of Guaido in recent days. On Sunday, Trudeau and Sanchez also agreed on "the imperative for new, free and fair elections in Venezuela," according to Trudeau's office.
Comments
The Lima group is nothing but a bunch of right wing fascists supported by the US. They are all just itching to get their dirty hands on all that Venezuelan oil.
This is outrageous. We are shamelessly backing a coup against an elected president. Contrary to claims by Trump, Bolton and their more coherent echo chamber, the simple fact is that Venezuelan elections including the most recent one are unusually free and fair, not just by Latin American standards, but by any standards. Their process is one of the cleanest and most resistant to fraud in the world. They ID voters with fingerprints. Their polling stations and the central counting outfit all have representatives from opposition parties scrutinizing what's going on, like here in Canada. Above all, they have electronic voting machines but every vote generates an accompanying paper ballot, verified by the voter, which is used to audit the results. So, if you were to hack the software, the audit of paper ballots would show the discrepancy.
Maduro won re-election resoundingly for two reasons. First, the economy is crap but the opposition don't have any serious suggestions about how to improve things, plus they go around killing people. Burn a couple poorer darker folks alive on the public street and it's amazing how all the other poorer darker folks become reluctant to vote for you--who knew? Second, half of them boycotted the election; you don't run, you don't get votes. Duh.
Furthermore, allegations of Maduro being "authoritarian" are basically ludicrous. This is a country where major opposition figures have for years been appearing on national TV and in the major newspapers calling for the violent overthrow of the government and then complaining they have no free speech. And then they just continue on being politicians. So what would happen if Maxime Bernier went on CTV and called for the military to remove Justin Trudeau from power, or for the American military to invade and do so? Would this be considered business as usual? I suggest that he would be in a heap of trouble, and we would not consider it "authoritarian" if there were legal consequences. But in Venezuela, there are none. This is authoritarian? The only time any of them have ever gotten jailed was when they were backing actual insurrectionary riots, funded by a foreign power, which were actually shooting both civilians and police officers. Again, in Canada if that kind of stuff was happening Justin would take the cue from his dad and invoke the War Measures Act, and whoever was pushing that stuff would be in jail as a terrorist, and nobody would be calling him a "dictator" for it. And let's not even THINK what the Americans would do in such a situation. Remember what happened when one guy blew up one bomb in Chicago? The whole city was in lockdown for days. Maduro is clearly far less authoritarian than we are.
This is fundamentally different from situations like Syria or Iraq; those were/are bad, but the US and its allies could truthfully say the people they were putting down were dictators (much like everyone in the region they support). Here it's a flat out lie--we, Canada, are shamelessly bringing down a democracy and trying to replace it with a coup government. Lest we forget, last time roughly the same gang we're promoting grabbed the reins of power, they cancelled the constitution, rounded up lots of people and stuffed them in jail, and turfed all the elected legislators and the supreme court. It's pretty clear to anyone who's looked at their overall track record that these are people with no scruples about violence who, on the whole, would be happier to institute a dictatorship than play the democracy game.
So Trudeau's people, completely backed by the Conservatives, are simply backing a bunch of Pinochets against an elected president, while having the gall to claim they're doing it in the name of democracy. This is an event that deserves to go down in infamy. It is an absolute inversion of the principles we claim to stand for; it SICKENS me that this is being done in my name.