Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is in Trinidad and Tobago today for what is being described as “a brief state visit” with the government of this country.
The last time the Venezuelan president came to T&T was in July 2013 under far more relaxed circumstances and promissory conversations were held about a variety of matters of relevance to both nations, but urgency in acting on those matters has not characterised prior engagements.
That’s not likely to be the case today. This visit happens against a backdrop of dramatic reports of the accelerating collapse of Venezuela’s economy. The Venezuelan government instituted a formal state of emergency last week after progressively reducing the country’s working week, currently down to two days.
The growing crisis has the potential to encourage an unsupportable number of informal refugees to seek their fortunes in T&T while Mr Maduro has an immediate need to offer real world short-term relief to his increasingly unsettled citizens.
Venezuelans already resident in T&T who are not supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution championed by the late president Hugo Chavéz do not plan to offer a particularly pleasant welcome for his successor and a T&T government committed to its own democratic promise of free speech should not be seen to refuse those persons their right to object to the presence of Venezuelan leader.
But the Government must also act in accordance with a foreign policy that respects the duly elected leader of a sovereign nation and engage in these talks with an eye to working to restore balance while pursuing mutual advantage.
There are several matters likely to be on the agenda at today’s meeting. The T&T response must be measured as well as compassionate. Any engagement with Venezuela must proceed on the basis of a sustainable exchange of resources, and key to such considerations must be a strategy with clear timelines to act on the estimated trillion cubic feet of natural gas that lie on the border of both nations in the Loran-Manatee fields.
Both nations have been discussing the shared fields since 1990, when a Delimitation Treaty was signed and again in 2003 when a memorandum of understanding spelling out the procedure for the unification of the deposits on our shared borders was signed.
Any agreements regarding the commercial exploitation of Loran-Manatee will take years, possibly a decade to deliver returns and Venezuela’s needs are immediate.
Venezuela, the country with the largest proven deposits of oil reserves in the world—set in 2012 at 296.5 billion barrels—is now reeling from the precipitous drop in oil prices and has articulated no social plan that is likely to arrest its fundamental problems.
In the face of this untenable situation, both nations must address a situation that’s likely to encourage an influx of migrants and the very real prospect of a dramatic increase in the number of Venezuelan citizens who decide to stay in T&T either on the immigration books or off them.
There remains an opportunity as this stage to craft a response to this situation which avoids untidy emigration issues in favour of a sustainably compassionate response to the needs of the citizens of Venezuela.
The Government should pursue such agenda initiatives with respect for the elected leader of Venezuela, in a manner which does not interfere with the democratic process of our neighbour by offering opportunities for political gamesmanship, but which brings sustainable relief to Mr Maduro’s troubled country within the scope of our ability to assist.