Lima Group convenes to seek way forward on Venezuela’s crisis
Today, 14 foreign ministers from the Lima Group, an organisation dedicated to finding a peaceful solution to the crisis in Venezuela, will meet in Bogota.
The gathering comes almost a week ahead of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s inauguration for his second six-year term in office. The group has rejected the legitimacy of the May 20 election, decrying it as unjust and undemocratic.
Member states are divided over how the bloc should respond to Maduro regime. On one end, Peru has spearheaded a campaign to cut diplomatic ties with Caracas. Contrastingly, Mexico has maintained the strongest ties out of all Lima Group countries and opposes reducing diplomatic relations with the pariah state. Caught in the middle are Colombia and Argentina, which have discussed reducing relations, but not cutting them entirely. Both still maintain embassies in Venezuela that are staffed by chargé d’affaires.
Any agreement on a response is unlikely to come to fruition today. Though the group may issue further condemnations of the Maduro regime, diplomatic ties, per the demands of Lima, are unlikely to be severed completely, at least for the foreseeable future.
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