Temer: At Dinner Trump Asked him, Leaders of Colombia and Panama, About Venezuela Intervention
In addition, the Brazilian ex-president states that he opposed Maduro for “institutional matters.”
The former Brazilian president, Michel Temer, said that during his tenure, during a dinner with his peers from Colombia and Panama, US President Donald Trump asked them how to intervene in Venezuela.
Temer, who assumed the first magistracy in August 2016 after the ‘impeachment’ against the then president Dilma Rousseff, labeled by several countries as a “coup d’etat”, made this comment before a question from the webportal “ALnavÃo” during a meeting with the ex- president in Casa de América, in Madrid (Spain).
Temer, who was also former vice president of Rousseff, recalled that during the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN), held in New York in 2017, Trump invited him along with the then leaders of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, and Panama, Juan Carlos Varela, to a dinner where he asked how to intervene in Venezuela.
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“Santos and I told him that we would make diplomatic decisions, that we weren’t going to do anything in the military style,” published the outlet.
“I opposed Nicolás Maduro”
At the meeting, he explained that the situation with the neighboring country was one of the major problems of his Government in the international arena: “I opposed Nicolás Maduro not because of something personal but because of something institutional.”
During his speech, he assured that “solutions are gradually appearing” in Venezuela, where in his view there is “a problem of radicalization.”
In his opinion, the self-proclamation of the opposition deputy Juan Guaidó , which occurred in January this year, was an extraordinary movement .”
The government of Temer coincided with the creation of the Lima Group, which does not recognizes the legitimacy of Maduro and the Venezuelan public powers, and which was formed to bypass the Organization of American States (OAS).
The pressure advanced by Washington against Caracas has increased in recent years.
For his part, Trump had said a month before the meeting with the ex-plaintiffs that he did not rule out a military intervention in Venezuela.
Featured image: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Brazil’s Michel Temer at a working dinner with Latin American leaders in New York, USA, on September 18, 2017. Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
Translated by JRE/EF
