Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Elías Jaua is beginning a world tour that will take him to Bolivia, Portugal, and Russia in which he plans to denounce the alleged interference of the U.S. in Latin America. The tour follows a day in which Jaua directly told Secretary of State John Kerry to refrain from comments on the socialist nation.
After Secretary of State Kerry said publicly that he believed alleged peace talks between the Venezuelan socialist government and a moderate group of opposition leaders were a “total failure,” as they had resulted in no changes in the nation’s status quo, Jaua essentially told Kerry he was not entitled to the opinion. “This is not an issue that concerns Mr. John Kerry,” Foreign Minister Elias Jaua told reporters Monday, according to Reuters.
Jaua had returned from Ecuador, where he had lodged a formal complaint with the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), the same group organizing the talks. The complaints stem from calls within the United States Congress, most prominently from Senator Marco Rubio, to sanction high-ranking leaders of the Venezuelan government who have been complicit in the extensive human rights violations occurring in that country since a wave of protests began in February, after the arrest of Popular Will opposition leader Leopoldo López.
“The government and senate of the United States, making a show of their pretended hegemony, [have] not conformed systematically with the international obligation of nonintervention in the internal affairs of Venezuela,” Jaua alleged in the Unasur meeting, which is not expected to result in major consequences for the United States.
Jaua plans to tour the world with accusations of interference by the United States, first stopping in Algeria for a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, which Jaua described, according to Venezuelan newspaper El Universal, as “the group of majority opinion in the United Nations… we will speak in defense of peace for the Venezuelan people, in defense of the right to live in democracy before the more than 100 countries participating in this meeting.”
Jaua also has a private meeting planned with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and will travel to Portugal before returning to Venezuela.
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