Rhon­dor Dowlat

For­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine has voiced his con­cerns over the in­creas­ing­ly un­pre­dictable de­vel­op­ments in Venezuela, spot­light­ing a re­cent move by Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro that has raised ques­tions about the state of gov­er­nance in the coun­try.

In a strik­ing­ly un­usu­al de­ci­sion, Maduro de­clared the start of the Christ­mas sea­son on Oc­to­ber 1, an act Ram­nar­ine de­scribed as a clear sign that Venezuela’s lead­er­ship is veer­ing “from the strange to the bizarre.”

“You see what’s hap­pen­ing in Venezuela. It’s go­ing from the strange to the bizarre,” Ram­nar­ine stat­ed on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, un­der­scor­ing how such ac­tions re­flect deep­er is­sues with­in the coun­try.

He said the ear­ly de­c­la­ra­tion of Christ­mas was just one of many un­set­tling signs of in­sta­bil­i­ty.

“This is not nor­mal. It’s symp­to­matic of a lead­er­ship try­ing to dis­tract from the re­al is­sues at hand,” he added.

Ram­nar­ine al­so high­light­ed the re­cent is­suance of an ar­rest war­rant for op­po­si­tion leader Ed­mun­do Gon­za­lez, who, many be­lieve, le­git­i­mate­ly won the re­cent elec­tion in Venezuela.

“There’s an ar­rest war­rant out for Mr Ed­mun­do Gon­za­lez, who, by all re­ports, won the elec­tion. The air­craft of the pres­i­dent was seized and every day it’s a sto­ry that’s be­com­ing more and more bizarre,” he said.

Giv­en the chaot­ic po­lit­i­cal cli­mate, Ram­nar­ine ad­vised ex­treme cau­tion in any eco­nom­ic en­gage­ment with Venezuela.

“If I was sit­ting in Gov­ern­ment, I wouldn’t hang my eco­nom­ic hat or put all my eggs in that Venezue­lan bas­ket, giv­en what’s hap­pen­ing there,” he warned in a ref­er­ence to the Drag­on gas deal.

“De­spite the ex­ist­ing li­cences with Venezuela, a lot of things don’t work in Venezuela. It’s dif­fi­cult to pre­dict what will hap­pen next, and that’s a huge risk for our coun­try.”

Ram­nar­ine al­so touched on the broad­er geopo­lit­i­cal land­scape, not­ing that up­com­ing events such as the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in No­vem­ber could fur­ther com­pli­cate the sit­u­a­tion.

“We have to con­sid­er how these geopo­lit­i­cal shifts might im­pact our re­gion, es­pe­cial­ly with the un­pre­dictabil­i­ty we’re see­ing in Venezuela,” he not­ed.

Adding to the cho­rus of con­cern, Venezue­lan ac­tivist Sofia Figueroa-Leon con­demned Maduro’s de­c­la­ra­tion as a cyn­i­cal at­tempt to di­vert at­ten­tion from the coun­try’s deep­en­ing crises.

“The Venezue­lan pres­i­dent in­di­cat­ed that Christ­mas starts in Oc­to­ber, all with the pur­pose of dis­tract­ing,” she said.

“Even the Venezue­lan Catholic Church has said that the Christ­mas sea­son be­gins on De­cem­ber 1st and that Christ­mas should not be used for po­lit­i­cal pur­pos­es.”

Figueroa-Leon agreed with Ram­nar­ine’s as­sess­ment of the risks in­volved in do­ing busi­ness with Venezuela.

“I sup­port his feel­ing 100 per cent. Do­ing busi­ness with a coun­try in the midst of such in­sta­bil­i­ty is a very huge risk, es­pe­cial­ly for a small is­land na­tion like ours. It’s moral­ly wrong, not to men­tion ex­treme­ly risky,” she stat­ed.

She al­so high­light­ed the se­vere hu­man­i­tar­i­an im­pact of Venezuela’s on­go­ing in­sta­bil­i­ty, point­ing to the mas­sive mi­gra­tion cri­sis that has en­sued.

“We are al­ready see­ing mi­grants en­ter­ing Trinidad, com­ing and go­ing. The Venezue­lan mi­gra­tion to­wards Brazil and oth­er coun­tries start­ed prompt­ly af­ter the Venezue­lan elec­tions,” she ex­plained.

“So far, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 7.7 mil­lion Venezue­lans have left their coun­try in search of sta­bil­i­ty up to Ju­ly 28, 2024, the date of the Venezue­lan elec­tions, and they con­tin­ue to flee at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,000 per day,” she not­ed.

“How many more Venezue­lan mi­grants can South, Cen­tral, and North Amer­i­can coun­tries with­stand? Even Trinidad and the small­er Caribbean is­lands?”