The president of Colombia, Iván Duque, described the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, as “criminal” and “murderer”, and criticized, in an interview with Efe, the “syrup” diplomacy practiced by some countries in relation to Caracas. “Nicolás Maduro is a criminal, he is a murderer and that is why I denounced him before the International Criminal Court,” said Duque. in reference to the complaint he filed in 2017, when he was a senator, for alleged human rights violations in Venezuela.
(Continued rapprochement between the US and Venezuela on energy issues).
“There are countries that have had with him (Maduro) a mellifluous diplomacy, a diplomacy of syrup, timorous, timid, not to say defeatist, and one cannot bend in the face of crime,” he said. The allegations of “such an atrocity” against Maduro, he added, have not prevented Colombia from maintaining a “fraternity” relationship with the Venezuelan people and welcome 1.8 million emigrants “in a gesture that has no precedent in the history of migration.”
“We have the greatest wave of fraternity for the Venezuelan people, but also the clearest firmness against an opprobrious, mafia regime, and also with links to international terrorism,” insisted the president of Colombia, who today concludes his participation in the Oceans conference being held in Lisbon.
(Colombia, the only Latin American country ‘global partner’ of NATO).
Iván Duque, of the Democratic Center, the party created by former president Álvaro Uribe, will leave power in August in the hands of Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president that Colombia will have.
EFE
