Relations With the Next Colombia

Whatever happens in the second round, this election marks the end of an era. It's expected that whoever wins will establish diplomatic relations with Venezuela. We'll see

  • Leftist Gustavo Petro obtained 8,526,352 votes (40.32%) in the first round of the Colombian election on Sunday. Populist Rodolfo Hernández got  5,952,748 votes (28.15%). The second round of the Colombian presidential election will take place on June 19th. Federico Gutiérrez was the biggest loser and announced that he’d support Hernández in June. Diosdado Cabello said that it’s possible that Venezuela re-establishes diplomatic relations with Colombia—something both candidates had offered. He also said he expects Colombian elites to block Petro from obtaining victory: “in the second round the winner is always who they want it to be.”
  • Cabello assured that Venezuela has understood that the “State can’t do everything” and that they’re moving away from oil dependency. After 23 years in power, he asked the PSUV to deploy all over the country to know what the population demands. 
  • CECODAP founder Fernando Pereira assured that school authorities must deal with the claims that guns have been brought to classrooms, and that there’s been episodes of gun violence in Venezuela, students attacking students. He warned that these events have been carried out in vengeance for bullying, theft, and crimes of passion. 
  • CONVITE’s Francelia Ruiz explained that almost 87% of senior citizens are living in extreme poverty because of poor pensions, low accessibility to quality public services, disproportional increase of goods and services, and the collapse of the health system, among others. 

Utopix reported that there have been 75 femicides in Venezuela in the first four months of the year, which represents an average of four murdered women per day. 

  • Humberto Prado, from the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, denounced that there’s a group of 13 political prisoners with cases where judges have ruled that they should be released from jail but haven’t. 
  • The faction of Copei controlled by authorities appointed by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice, Juan Carlos Alvarado, assured that they’re going through a re-instutionalization process that seeks the commitment with their new leadership and that they’re holding elections with “the lower ranks” for the first time in 76 years. According to him, they had a participation rate of over 92%, a figure that’s impossible to prove. 
  • AD’s Carlos Prosperi assured that if members of his party decided that he could be their candidate in the opposition primaries, he’ll “assume the responsibility con humility. Not to participate but to win the primaries and the presidential elections in 2024. Of course we can win,” he said. 
  • The UCV Electoral Commission granted the presidency of the student body to Jesús Mendoza, youth leader of Fuerza Vecinal. He has a lead of less than 100 votes over candidate Sebastián Horesok and yet, his first statement was truly hostile. Horesok asked “witnesses to review the certificates and rectify the irregularities.” 
  • Acceso a la Justicia warned that recent rulings of the TSJ against the lawyers guilds in  Carabobo and Lara prove that the strategy to neutralize and intervene in the right to free association that the TSJ and the CNE have been doing for the last 20 years is still part of the new Supreme Tribunal of Justice’s agenda. 
  • CEOFANB Commander Domingo Hernández Lárez tweeted that they dismantled three camps for drug trafficking, building illegal runways and manufacturing explosives in states bordering with Colombia. 
  • The president of the Tax Law Association, Manuel Iturbe, said that the problems with the IGTF persist because of having to adapt fiscal machines and because of how vague the law is, so much that it could “generate a double tax.” 
  • The Frente Nacional de Lucha de la Clase Trabajadora denounced that at least 800 employees of the El Palito refinery in Carabobo could be fired to hire private contractors. 

PDVSA ordered over 100 gas stations to sell diesel fuel at 0.5 dollars per ltr. The gas crisis could then be explained: there was enough diesel fuel to send to Cuba, they just didn’t want to sell it at the previous price. 

  •  Mexican president Andrés López Obrador said that Joe Biden hasn’t responded to his petition of inviting dictatorships to the Summit of the Americas and he even mentioned that Biden must be busy because of the school shooting in Texas. 

Naky Soto

Naky gets called Naibet at home and at the bank. She coordinates training programs for an NGO. She collects moments and turns them into words. She has more stories than freckles.