The Venezuelan presidency has already confirmed to the Argentine government that it is the intention of Nicolás Maduro to travel to Buenos Aires over the weekend to participate in the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which will take place on Tuesday the 24th. High official sources confirmed to
Clarín
.
Maduro 's
presence is also confirmed in Brazil,
where Luis Inacio Lula da Silva's team is negotiating a one-on-one meeting with the Venezuelan president.
Lula will be in Buenos Aires on January 23, to hold his first bilateral as president with Alberto Fernández.
And he seeks to take advantage of Argentina as a "neutral" territory to relaunch bilateral relations with Chavismo, and.
until reopening the embassy in Caracas, closed by Jair Bolsonaro.
It would also be the first meeting between Alberto Fernández and Maduro.
Likewise, Maduro
will decide on the time if there are conditions to travel to this CELAC -he was already in
Mexico, in September 2021-
and whether or not he is encouraged to come to Argentina where various protests await him.
One march is called for the afternoon of Sunday the 22nd, the other for Tuesday the 24th. Both at the Sheraton hotel in Buenos Aires, where the Chavistas like to stay, although no one confirms if they will do so this time.
There is also a scheme of arrest requests and sanctions against him from the United States -a reward for him offers 15 million dollars- although official voices in Washington and here clarified that the hierarch is not at risk because there is no arrest warrant international against his person.
But it is worth remembering that both his government and that of Cuba conveyed their concerns to the Argentine foreign minister: they fear that the Conviasa planes that transport Maduro and Miguel Díaz Canel will be subject to embargoes, as happened with the Emtrasur Boeing, held in Ezeiza since last june.
The president of the PRO, Patricia Bullrich, tweeted in the last few hours: "
We want an Argentina free of dictators! Let's all say NO to the "visit" of autocratic presidents. Our country is NOT a holdout
. "
A group of deputies, such as Cristian Ritondo, Alejandro Finocchiaro, Hernán Lombardi, Soher El Sukaria, Fernando Iglesias and others asked to declare him
"persona non grata"
and others such as Ricardo López Murphy and José Luis Espert expressed their repudiation against a possible visit by the presidents. from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
At the inauguration of Lula da Silva, on January 1, Maduro was going to go, but in the end he canceled, harassed by a protest by public employees in Venezuela, and also because in Brazil,
half the population rejects his presence.
In Argentina, meanwhile, the government is advancing in its rapprochement with Caracas.
In fact, he made a gesture towards the regime.
In the Official Gazette on Tuesday an agreement between the two countries was announced by which Argentina
abolished the visa in the Venezuelan passports of diplomats, officials and service.
This will expedite their entry into the country.
"Argentina, within the framework of the policy of normalizing its relations with Venezuela, has adopted various measures such as the appointment of Ambassador Oscar Laborde," the chief of staff of the Foreign Ministry, Luciana Tito, told Clarín on Tuesday before the consultation. Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero's right-hand man said that "in the same way, the validity of the Agreement between Argentina and Venezuela for the suspension of visas in diplomatic, official or service passports, which had been in force since September 1996, and which was suspended on January 11, 2019" (beginning of Mauricio Macri's government that brought the link to the level of charge d'affaires).
"In addition, it is worth clarifying that Venezuelan citizens do not need a visa to enter the country for tourist purposes," added Tito.
Although the Government at this time has some twenty confirmed leaders at the CELAC meeting on Tuesday -the Ecuadorian Guillermo Lasso would have finally chosen not to go-, Lula's presence made the meeting more attractive.
Last week, in his speech before the National Assembly, Maduro proposed advancing "a new regional geopolitics, a new integration of the Great Homeland."
This is what the late Néstor Kirchner, Hugo Chávez and Lula da Silva tried without success in the 2000s.
Maduro said that he spoke on the phone the other day with the leader of the PT and now president again.
That he spoke personally with the president of Colombia Gustavo Petro, and also with Alberto Fernández.
"A new hour is coming, a special hour to unite the efforts of Latin America and the Caribbean to advance in the construction of a powerful bloc of political forces" and of economic power, Maduro opined.
And he said that this bloc should speak to the world and to "integration" and to the "conformation of new poles of power" that "our older brother, President Xi Jinping, speaks of" and also of "a multipolar, multicentric world that he speaks of our older brother President Vladimir Putin".
In that sense, he called for a "cohesive Latin American Caribbean bloc" and said that Vezuela "was taking the lead."
But no one in the region answered him.
look too
Cuba and Venezuela fear that the planes that come to the CELAC summit in Buenos Aires will be hijacked
look too
Assault on power in Brazil: Lula starts the week stronger and Bolsonaro, with bad grades