The President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, appointed Jaime Gazmuri as the new ambassador of that country in Venezuela, seeking to fully restore diplomatic relations between the two South American nations.
Gazmuri, a member of the Socialist Party, was a senator for 20 years and Chile’s ambassador to Brazil during the second term of former president Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018), review the statement official of the Chilean Foreign Ministry.
The diplomat has extensive professional experience as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Organization of American States (OAS).
He was currently working as a member of the Electoral Qualifying Tribunal; of the Advisory Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, and vice president of the Permanent Forum on Foreign Policy.
Chile and Venezuela have not had high-level diplomatic relations since 2018, when the conservative Sebastián Piñera decided to unilaterally cut off the functions of his ambassador in Caracas. To date, there was only the figure of a charge d’affaires in both capitals.
Piñera was one of the most active members of the Lima Group, a regional bloc created in 2017 to support the destabilizing actions of the Venezuelan opposition in the country, and which fabricated several invasion attempts against the national territory.
Expedite repatriation of Venezuelans
The new Chilean ambassador will arrive in Caracas amid the conflict on the Chilean northern border, which that country decided to militarize to prevent the entry of South American migrants, including a large group of Venezuelans.
Due to this problem, the Government of Venezuela recently activated a humanitarian flight for the repatriation of compatriots stranded on that border. However, due to the Unilateral Coercive Measures that weigh on Caracas, the planes of the state airline Conviasa cannot land at Chilean airports, preventing the development of the Vuelta a la Patria plan.
The first flight left for Caracas from the border city of Arica, 2,000 kilometers north of Santiago, on May 7 with 115 migrants on board.
A couple of weeks ago, A delegation from the Chilean Foreign Ministry visited Venezuela to negotiate new humanitarian flights to repatriate migrants who cannot return to Chile or enter Peru, reports EFE.
