For Venezuela Opposition, Meeting with President Maduro Could Further Expose Rifts
For Venezuela Opposition, Meeting with President Maduro Could Further Expose Rifts
AS/COA’s Christopher Sabatini comments on Venezuela’s opposition leaders meeting with President Nicolás Maduro to cease violence around the street protests.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan opposition leaders have agreed to meet with President Nicolás Maduro on Thursday in a possible first step toward ending two months of anti-government protests and street clashes, which have left at least 39 people dead.
The meeting will be broadcast live on Venezuelan television and radio, at the insistence of the opposition, and will be attended by mediators from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and the Vatican.
Maduro said the encounter would not amount to negotiations, telling supporters that he would not accept any “preconditions” and that the principles of the socialist system built by his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, were not on the table.
For Venezuela’s fractured opposition, the meeting poses a far bigger challenge.
Though the country’s opposition leaders are nominally united under the big-tent banner of the Democratic Unity Roundtable, known as the MUD for its initials in Spanish, the MUD delegation scheduled to sit down with Maduro on Thursday is viewed as the opposition’s more moderate wing....
“The Venezuelan opposition has had a repeated tendency to fall into a trap of its own making,” said Christopher Sabatini, director of policy at the Council of the Americas, a New York-based policy organization focusing on Latin America....
