Raphael John-Lall

The new air route of Ru­tas A�reas de Venezuela (RAVSA), a pri­vate air­line fly­ing from the east­ern Venezue­lan city of Ma­turin to Pi­ar­co, will strength­en re­la­tions be­tween T&T and Venezuela, Coro­mo­to Godoy, Venezue­lan Am­bas­sador to T&T said."With this air link, the goal is to strength­en re­la­tions with Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean", Godoy said in a state­ment to the T&T Guardian.On board the in­au­gur­al flight last Thurs­day was Deputy Min­is­ter for Air Trans­port Gen­er­al As­dr�bal Veloz.

Godoy said: "It was the vi­sion of Hugo Ch�vez and now the con­tri­bu­tion of the Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro for the mem­ber coun­tries of the Com­mu­ni­ty of Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean Na­tions (Celac) to be clos­er not on­ly po­lit­i­cal­ly but al­so ge­o­graph­i­cal­ly. Trinidad and To­ba­go is our near­est is­land neigh­bour, the time has come to work in those ar­eas that unite us for the de­vel­op­ment of an agen­da in favour of the peo­ple."

RAVSA will make a spe­cial of­fer in T&T of two per­sons on one tick­et. It will be­gin with two flights a week on Sun­days and Thurs­days and even­tu­al­ly will in­crease the fre­quen­cy to four times a week.Venezuela state-owned me­dia AVN said this is part of a plan for Venezuela to open new routes in the Caribbean.