Mexico will host, between Friday (25th) and Saturday (26th), the initial meetings for the resumption of dialogue between the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition. The announcement of the dates was made by the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who two weeks ago had already anticipated the confirmation of the return of the talks.
Attempts at negotiation between the parties were suspended by the regime in October last year, in retaliation for the extradition, from Cape Verde to the United States, of Colombian businessman Alex Saab – a former dictatorship official, considered a figurehead of Maduro.
The return of dialogue was one of the main topics of a meeting in Paris attended by Petro, the presidents of France, Emmanuel Macron, and Argentina, Alberto Fernández, and a representative of the government of Norway. At the meeting were the leader of the Chavista National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, and Gerardo Blyde, who led the negotiations for the opposition before the effort was interrupted.
The event also decided that Dag Nylander, director of the Norwegian Center for Conflict Resolution, will be one of those in charge of overseeing the negotiations.
Petro stated, at the time, that the resumption of talks should prioritize the granting of guarantees such as freedom for all political prisoners in Venezuela. “Mexico’s deal must guarantee that everyone who wants to participate in the 2024 elections will do so,” he said.
Caracas’ official electoral calendar predicts a presidential race for 2024, but Maduro has yet to set a date for the election. Faced with the reorganization of the opposition, which decided to hold primaries to have a single name in the dispute, Chavismo even threatened to anticipate the process. “We are not afraid of elections, we are not running away. We can even hold them before 2023,” Diosdado Cabello, the regime’s strongman, said in a recent speech.
When talks were interrupted last year, in addition to the presidential election, there were six other priorities on the agenda – from combating the Covid-19 pandemic to a review of the role of the regime’s repression forces. Whether this list will be maintained has yet to be announced.
In the first meetings, this weekend, the conversations should precisely target the rules of the new phase and a schedule for establishing the objectives – the forecast is that the rounds include a monthly meeting of two days.
Dialogues between the dictatorship and the Venezuelan opposition are nothing new. There have already been failed attempts in the Dominican Republic and Barbados, for example, in 2018 and 2019.
The return of the dialogue table takes place at a time when there is the expectation of softening of economic sanctions against the Maduro regime by the United States and Europe; Macron, for example, recently proposed resuming bilateral work. This is because geopolitical changes catalyzed by the War in Ukraine forced these great powers to look for alternatives in terms of oil and energy — and Caracas is one of the largest oil producers in the world.
Amid elections for left-wing names in the neighborhood, such as Petro himself in Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) in Brazil, the dictator has been experiencing a phase of certain recovery of his image, in the face of the erosion of the opposition —fractured under the leadership of Juan Guaidó.
In addition to signaling in relation to sanctions, Joe Biden’s government in Washington has made gestures of approximation, such as the authorization to exchange prisoners on both sides. In October, Venezuela agreed to release seven Americans in exchange for two nephews of the first lady, Cilia Flores, convicted of drug trafficking.
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