The Foreign Ministers of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) asked on Monday to keep the region “as a land of peace”, after an emergency virtual meeting to analyze the naval deployment of the United States in the Caribbean, near Venezuela.
The Colombian Foreign Minister, Rosa Villavicencio, host of the meeting, said that the agency advocates “the need to keep Latin America as a land of peace, outside of any intervention and in the strict respect for the statements of the United Nations and the maintenance of peace and sovereignty of countries.”
Colombia, which since last April has the Pro Tempore presidency of the CELAC, summoned this meeting last night after the sending of US warfalls to the south of the Caribbean with the purpose of “stopping drug flow,” according to Washington.
In that sense, the Colombian minister said that today’s call representatives of 23 of the 33 countries that make up the CELAC attended.
The White House defended the military deployment in the Caribbean last week, which includes destroyers, a launching cruise and a fast attack nuclear submarine, as part of its anti -drug strategy and assured that it has the support of several Latin American countries.
Troops ready to “invade”
During this Monday’s meeting, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil said that 4,200 “trained” troops from the United States are “ready and prepared to invade” the Venezuelan territory and demanded from the American country the immediate retirement of these military and the eight vessels that, according to Caracas, are deployed near their coasts.
“The United States has concentrated military assets near the Venezuelan coasts, we are talking about eight military vessels they possess, as far as we know (…), more than 1,200 missiles on board,” Gil said.
The Venezuelan Foreign Minister also denounced “the presence in the Caribbean of a nuclear submarine” that, he considered, “violates not only the peace zone” declared in 2014 “but would also be violating” the Tlatelolco Treaty of 1967, which declared Latin America and the Caribbean as a free zone of nuclear weapons.
Gil said that the United States excuse for “this unusual and rude deployment” is a “totally false story” about “an alleged poster that they have called Los Soles poster”, an alleged drug trafficker organization indicated as a terrorist by Washington, which links it to the government of Nicolás Maduro.
The role of the CELAC
The CELAC, created in 2010, is made up of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and functions as an intergovernmental mechanism for dialogue and political consultation.
Its objective is to strengthen regional integration and advance common consensus without the participation of the United States or Canada.
“Celac was born to speak in their own voice, today that voice must say without ambiguity: we reject the logic of intervention, we reaffirm the United Nations Charter, we demand that all legitimate concern be channeled by diplomatic and multilateral roads,” said the Colombian Foreign Minister when intervening at the meeting.
That is why he put that body as a platform to “channel Latin American and Caribbean solutions to regional”.
For Villavicencio, “protecting the peace zone” of the region “does not imply denying our internal differences or minimizing the severity of transnational organized crime” but there are other ways to face that situation.
“It means facing it with institutions, judicial and police cooperation and mutual trust, not with military threats that inevitably end up generating negative implications for human security, trade, tourism and economies of all our countries,” he added.
