Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares is trying to defuse the diplomatic crisis with Venezuela, after the chancellor of Nicolas Maduro's government, Yván Gil, summoned his ambassador to Madrid, Gladys Gutiérrez, for consultations, and summoned the Spanish ambassador in Caracas, Ramón Santos. In statements to RNE this Friday, Albares described the measures adopted by his Venezuelan counterpart as “sovereign decisions” and, after recalling that he himself has taken them on occasion with other countries, he added that “therefore, there is nothing to comment on.” He assured that his intention was to maintain “the best possible relations with the brother people of Venezuela.” Government sources rule out that, in reciprocity, the Foreign Affairs will decide to summon its ambassador to Caracas for consultations and insist on the convenience for Spain to maintain its diplomatic presence in the Caribbean country at these critical times.
Maduro's foreign minister announced that he was taking the measures to protest statements by Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles, who called the Chavista regime a “dictatorship.” Unlike Robles, Albares avoided using the term, saying that the foreign minister “is not a professor of constitutional law or a political scientist,” but rather “he is the last person who should put any kind of qualifier” on a government.
Gil announced, via his Telegram channel, the call for consultations by his ambassador (which means the temporary withdrawal of his highest diplomatic representative in Madrid) and the summons to the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Spanish ambassador in Caracas. He described the statements of the Spanish minister as “insolent, intrusive and rude.” And he warned that “they testify to a deterioration in relations between the two countries.”
After receiving Ambassador Ramón Santos at his ministry headquarters “to express the firm position of the Venezuelan government,” the Chancellor issued a statement on his Telegram channel in which he assured that his country “will not allow any interventionist action by the Venezuelan government.” Spain in matters that are the exclusive responsibility of Venezuelans” and “will adopt the necessary measures to protect its sovereignty.” But for now, the note is limited to a rhetorical protest and does not contain any practical measures.
Asked whether the Spanish government would recognize Edmundo González as president-elect, as requested by Congress, Albares recalled that only two countries have done so (Ecuador and Panama) and stressed that the Spanish government's request from the beginning has been that the minutes of all polling stations be disseminated so that “the will expressed by Venezuelans on July 28 is known and carried out.” He insisted that Spain is working within the framework of the common European position and with several Latin American governments to achieve, through dialogue between the Maduro government and the opposition, “a sovereign, truly Venezuelan, peaceful and democratic solution” to the crisis. According to Albares, the proposal approved by Congress at the initiative of the PP to recognize “in a very savage, irresponsible and hasty manner” Edmundo González as president-elect “was not in favor of Venezuelans, but against the government.”
The statements that shocked the Venezuelan regime were made by Margarita Robles on Thursday night at the Ateneo de Madrid, where she presented the work The boy who lost the war, by Julia Navarro. After alluding to the Francoist and Stalinist totalitarianisms reflected in the novel, the Minister of Defense recalled the Ukrainians “massacred by Putin”, the Afghan women erased from public life by the Taliban and also “the men and women who have had to leave Venezuela precisely because of the dictatorship in which they live”; Among them, he mentioned the opposition candidate Edmundo González, who has been a refugee in Spain since Sunday, which provoked applause from the audience. It was the first time that a member of the Spanish government had called the Maduro regime a dictatorship, although Robles is known for not mincing his words and, last May, he had described the Israeli military offensive on Gaza as “genocide”.
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On Thursday morning, the President Pedro Sánchez had received Edmundo González in La Moncloa, He has been a refugee since last Sunday in Madrid, where he arrived on a Spanish Air Force plane sent to Caracas to pick him up after requesting political asylum. However, the Spanish government took special care to minimize the institutional profile of the visit so as not to irritate the Maduro government: the media were not called and only images of Edmundo González and his daughter Carolina, a resident of Spain, were broadcast. walking through the gardens of La Moncloa with Pedro Sánchez, dressed informally and without a tie, who highlighted in a tweet the humanitarian and solidarity nature of the interview.
On Wednesday, the plenary session of Congress approved, with the opposition of the left, a proposal from the PP that urged the government to recognize González as the elected and legitimate president, in the face of the refusal of the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE), similar to Maduro, to publish the minutes of the polling stations, as required by law and as demanded by the international community.
Even before Robles' words, the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, one of Maduro's most trusted leaders, asked the deputies of that country to urge the executive to break off diplomatic, commercial and consular relations with Spain and to suspend commercial flights between Madrid and Caracas. “Let all the representatives of the Spanish government leave,” he shouted. This initiative, still in progress, is symbolic in nature, like that of the Spanish Congress, but it represents a sword of Damocles in case the Spanish government takes the decision to recognize the victory of the opposition candidate, whom it has not governed. do in the future.
The Minister of Economy, Trade and Business, Carlos Body, has called for calm in the face of the threat of suspension of trade relations with Venezuela. About sixty Spanish companies operate in the Caribbean country and more than 136,000 Spaniards reside there, while the number of Venezuelans in Spain stands at around 390,000.