KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs Sean Sobers says the Gov­ern­ment is “un­both­ered” by pro-Venezue­lan sup­port­ers who marched in Cara­cas against Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia dur­ing a vis­it to Point Lisas yes­ter­day, Sobers said the ad­min­is­tra­tion is equal­ly un­fazed by Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro’s call for cit­i­zens of T&T to unite with Venezuela for “peace,” and by the Venezue­lan Na­tion­al As­sem­bly’s de­c­la­ra­tion of Per­sad-Bisses­sar as per­sona non gra­ta.

Sobers said the Prime Min­is­ter’s po­si­tion re­mains clear—that the on­go­ing Unit­ed States mil­i­tary in­ter­ven­tion in the Caribbean is aimed at com­bat­ing nar­co-traf­fick­ing and transna­tion­al crime, not threat­en­ing any na­tion’s sov­er­eign­ty.

“We have seen a re­duc­tion in those types of crimes in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and the mil­i­tary in­ter­ven­tion is tak­ing place in in­ter­na­tion­al wa­ters. No­body’s sov­er­eign­ty is be­ing threat­ened—not Trinidad and To­ba­go’s and not Venezuela’s. All of what is be­ing ped­dled and pushed, we are un­both­ered by it,” Sobers said.

“We have more im­por­tant mat­ters to deal with, and we are fo­cused on these ef­forts to­day.”

He added that the Gov­ern­ment’s at­ten­tion re­mains on pro­vid­ing hu­man­i­tar­i­an aid to Caribbean coun­tries dev­as­tat­ed by Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa, rather than en­gag­ing in re­gion­al po­lit­i­cal dis­trac­tions.

Ear­li­er this week, Pres­i­dent Maduro urged cit­i­zens of T&T to “unite with Venezuela” in re­sist­ing what he de­scribed as US mil­i­tary ag­gres­sion in the re­gion. He called on Caribbean peo­ple to pre­vent Wash­ing­ton from “ig­nit­ing a war in the Caribbean.”

Mean­while, thou­sands of Venezue­lans took part in state-or­gan­ised demon­stra­tions across Mi­ran­da, wav­ing plac­ards bear­ing Per­sad-Bisses­sar’s im­age and ac­cus­ing her of sid­ing with Wash­ing­ton against Cara­cas. Pro­test­ers de­clared her per­sona non gra­ta and ac­cused her of tak­ing ac­tions that “de­stroy peace” in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.