The president of Colombia Gustavo Petro said this Wednesday that It is time for a general amnesty and a transitional government in Venezuela, the same day of the Nobel Peace award ceremony won by opposition leader María Corina Machado.
Critical of the pressure from the United States on the regime of Nicolás Maduro and of the elections in which the democratic opposition won, Petro insisted on a peaceful solution to the political crisis.
“The problem in Venezuela is more democracy and it is time for a general amnesty and a transitional government with the inclusion of everyone,” the leftist president wrote in X, at a time when Machado is on his way to Oslo on a secret trip.
Ana Corina Sosa Machado, daughter of the winner, He instead collected the Nobel Prize in Norway with an emotional speech against the “brutal dictatorship.” His mother couldn’t make it to the ceremony on time.
In hiding since August 2024, the opposition member managed to leave Venezuela.
Petro’s claim was in response to the persecution against Cardinal Baltazar Porras, whose passport was taken away by the Chavista regime when he was traveling to Spain this Wednesday.
“The answer is not military isolation”
Venezuela and Colombia are under pressure from the United States, which deployed a robust military offensive against drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the Pacific, with attacks that leave 87 dead since September.
“Maduro must understand that “The response to external aggression is not only military enlistment but a democratic revolution.”. And that it is “with more democracy that a country is defended, not with more inefficient repression.”
Maduro considers that the real objective of Washington’s military deployment is to remove him from the power he illegitimately occupies.
In August 2024, the Colombian president had already sent a similar message, in which he proposed lift “all sanctions against Venezuela” and a “general national and international amnesty.”
Petro has mediated for the release of political prisoners in Venezuela, many of them Colombians imprisoned as “mercenaries.” According to the most recent count by Foro Penal, In Venezuela there are at least 893 political prisoners.
