The Foreign Minister of Colombia, Álvaro Leyva, read the conclusions of the first International Conference on the political process of Venezuelaheld in Bogotá this Tuesday.
In brief statements at the end of the meeting, he explained that the 20 delegations from the participating countries, as well as the representations of the Venezuelan government and opposition, “identified common positions” around three issues:
1.- Electoral schedule that allows the holding of “free and transparent elections, with full guarantees for all Venezuelan actors.”
2.- The steps agreed between the parties must go in parallel with the lifting of the different sanctions.
3.- The continuation of the negotiation process facilitated by the Kingdom of Norway, which has taken place in Mexico, is accompanied by the acceleration of the implementation of the single trust fund for social investment in Venezuela (social agreement reached in November 2022).
Leyva explained that the representatives of a group of countries, which were part of the conference, “will inform President Nicolás Maduro and the opposition parties of Venezuela of the results of the conference, for its evolution and comments.”
The head of Colombian diplomacy also informed a new call to the same delegations that attended the invitation of President Gustavo Petro, “in order to follow up on the development of what has been achieved today (Tuesday).”
“This is the opportunity to highlight that those present have accepted the intervention of the president (Petro) (…) as the point of reference to take into account in the execution of what was agreed,” Leyva closed.
Conference expectations
Earlier, Colombian President Gustavo Petro commented at the opening of the conference that it “creates a lot of expectations” because “both countries depend on the fate of the other.”
Likewise, he reiterated that Venezuelan society wants “not to be sanctioned, because the sanctions have fallen on the people (…) we have seen it here in the streets of Colombia (…) America cannot be a space for sanctionsIt has to be a space of freedoms”.
Along these lines, this Monday the President of the Republic, Nicolás Maduro, established as a condition sine qua non to return to dialogue with the opposition “the demand that the US government deposit the 3,200 million kidnapped dollars, which are in the Venezuelan accounts abroad.”
The Venezuelan president recalled that on November 26, 2022, Venezuela signed a social agreement for 3.2 billion dollars for social investment during Mexico’s dialogues with the Unitary Platform, whose funds would be administered by the UN.
