Caribbean bristles over US drive to oust Maduro

Caribbean countries are bristling over a US campaign to marshal support for regime change in Venezuela following a visit to the region by US secretary of state Mike Pompeo this week.

Pompeo's 22 January meeting with a few Caribbean foreign ministers in Kingston shed light on a rift among small nations that once benefited from Venezuela's subsidized oil supply program known as PetroCaribe. The program has mostly dried up because of Venezuela's eroded domestic production and refining, but political and commercial ties in some prominent cases have endured.

"PetroCaribe is fading into the sunset as the Maduro regime will do," Pompeo said after the meeting.

Six countries – the Bahamas, Belize, Haiti, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia and the Dominican Republic — were represented at the Kingston meeting. All except Belize had attended a March 2019 meeting in Florida with US president Donald Trump to discuss Venezuela.

Regional trading bloc Caricom, which represents 15 Caribbean nations except the Dominican Republic, agreed at a July 2019 summit to a position of non-interference in Venezuelan affairs, a stance shared by Mexico, Uruguay and more recently Argentina.

For some island nations, US oil and financial sanctions aimed at dislodging Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in favor of opposition leader Juan Guaido are reminiscent of the decades-old US embargo of Cuba, which many reject. Cuba continues to receive Venezuelan oil.

Despite hosting the meeting with Pompeo, Jamaica's government recognizes neither Maduro nor Guaido. But Jamaica's commercial ties to the US have deepened in recent years, with growing imports of US LNG. In a joint press conference with Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness, Pompeo highlighted that US companies have invested nearly $1bn in energy infrastructure in Jamaica and applauded Kingston's membership in a US-sponsored "Growth in the Americas" infrastructure campaign.

Holness was circumspect. The new countries had "very frank discussions…Jamaica was able to raise in direct ways our perspective on difficult and complex issues," he said.

Barbados prime minister and current Caricom chairman Mia Mottley decried the Kingston encounter. "It is impossible for me to agree that my foreign minister should attend a meeting with anyone to which members of Caricom are not invited. If some are invited and not all, then it is an attempt to divide this region," Mottley said.

Barbados is among the islands that has turned to solar energy. But it still needs market-priced imported oil for a new 33MW back-up power station scheduled for delivery in mid-2020.

Trinidad and Tobago, which like Jamaica has sought to steer clear of the Venezuelan dispute, supported Mottley's position. The country is holding out hope for Venezuelan natural gas supply to replenish its depleted domestic flow. In the meantime, Trinidad is coping with Venezuelan migrants who have flooded islands with little capacity to absorb them.

Antigua's foreign minister Chet Greene said his country was not invited to the Kingston meeting, and would not have attended if it had.

Jamaica rejected its neighbors' criticism. "All countries, large and small, have a sovereign right to engage bilaterally with any other country, beyond any regional or hemispheric arrangements," Jamaica's foreign minister Kamina Johnson-Smith said.

Among Washington's priorities is Caribbean support for the March 2020 re-election of Organization of American States (OAS) secretary general Luis Almagro, an outspoken US ally in the anti-Maduro campaign.

Several Caribbean nations, each of which has an OAS vote, say they reject Almagro's "history of intervention" in the domestic affairs of some countries, alluding to his vocal stance on Venezuela and more recent comments on the internal politics of the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. Almagro has denied any interference but has said the body has a responsibility to act in the face of Venezuela's humanitarian crisis and human rights violations.

The OAS ejected Maduro's representative in favor of a Guaido envoy in April 2019, three months after the opposition leader declared an interim presidency in Caracas.

By Canute James and Patricia Garip