Colombian President Gustavo Petro will host an international summit, starting today, focused on supporting negotiations between Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro government and the political opposition, aimed at restoring the country’s democracy.

Petro, who also maintains cordial relations with US President Joe Biden, has become an unofficial conduit between Caracas and Washington, reports Bloomberg.

The conference will be attended by representatives of 19 countries and the European Union. Two officials from the U.S. National Security Council, Jon Finer and Juan González, are expected to attend, along with former Senator Chris Dodd. (Reuters, New York Times)

The meeting will not be attended by representatives of Maduro’s government nor the political opposition, though Maduro and the opposition Plataforma Unitaria have given the summit their blessing, reports El País. However, other factions of the fractured opposition have questioned whether Petro can effectively mediate, reports the Associated Press.

Petro met with members of Venezuela’s opposition Plataforma Unitaria on Saturday, where he reportedly told them he hoped the summit could secure the release of political prisoners and set possible dates for presidential elections next year, reports Bloomberg.

Last week, after meeting with Biden, Petro told reporters that his proposal to the White House included developing an electoral schedule, with guarantees, and the gradual lifting of sanctions imposed by the U.S. with the objective that “the people decide freely without sanctions, without pressure, his own destiny.” (AFP)

Venezuela’s Maduro government is angling for easing of U.S. sanctions, including permission for foreign oil companies to resume production. “We won’t accept anything less from that conference in Bogotá than the lifting of all sanctions”, Maduro said Monday.

Venezuelan officials are the U.S. will accept an offer to release U.S. prisoners in exchange for sanctions relief reports Newsweek. The deal would, reportedly, entail the release of Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman acting as special envoy for Venezuela.

However, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council told Newsweek that the White House the two issues — prisoner releases and sanctions relief in exchange for democratization — are separate.

Last year, the U.S. conducted a prisoner swap with Venezuela that resulted in the release of seven U.S. citizens in exchange for two nephews of Maduro’s wife. Soon after the U.S. announced an easing of sanctions, coinciding with negotiations in Mexico City between Venezuela’s Maduro government and the political opposition.

A group of international organizations of civil society, including WOLA and Amnesty International, called on Petro to prioritize rights protections for Venezuelans, including the release of more than 300 political detainees and to “initiate the dismantling of repression and dissuasive mechanisms or that hinder the exercise of human rights.”

Guaidó complicates Summit

Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Guaidó travelled to Miami yesterday, just hours after he appeared by surprise in Colombia, saying he had crossed the Venezuelan border by foot. (See yesterday’s post.)

Speaking in a video posted on Twitter, Guaidó said he had planned to meet with Venezuela summit participants. But rather than welcome him, he said, the Colombians kicked him out. (New York Times)

Guaidó urged countries participating in the Bogota summit to speak for Venezuelans in exile, being effectively “the voice Maduro wanted to take from me,” reports Reuters.

His visit to Colombia, on the eve of the international summit on Venezuela, wasn’t warmly welcomed by some officials, according to Reuters, including Colombia’s Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva, who said Guaido had entered the country inappropriately and was not invited to the summit.

Guaidó rejected an invitation to participate in Petro’s meeting with Venezuelan opposition politicians over the weekend, according to El País.

Guaidó’s arrival complicated the Colombian government’s efforts to mediate between Maduro and political opponents, reports Bloomberg. Guaidó called for a protest in Bogotá’s main plaza today, to demand that Venezuelans overseas be allowed to participate in upcoming elections — coinciding with Petro’s inauguration of the summit blocks away.

“For the Petro administration it’s a liability to have Guaidó in its territory,” Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Bloomberg. “It complicates Bogotá’s strategy of trying to advance a democratic solution to the crisis in Venezuela while maintaining diplomatic relations” with the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

Haitian lynch mob kills 13 alleged gang members

A lynch mob killed 13 alleged criminals yesterday in Port-au-Prince. Footage shows people seizing the supposed gang members from a Haitian police checkpoint, surrounded them with gasoline soaked tires, and set them on fire.

“Pour gasoline, pour gasoline,” someone is heard saying on one of several videos showing the killing of the suspected gang members by the mob.

In a statement, the Haiti National Police confirmed the incident, yesterday, the latest as neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince increasingly come under attack by criminal gangs, police abandon posts and residents react with their own brand of justice, reports the Miami Herald.

The incident is the latest in Haiti’s increasingly intense security crisis, in which criminal gangs fight for control of Port-au-Prince and other territories, using violence against citizens as their primary weapon.

Criminal groups control about 80% of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, where some 200 gangs operate with impunity, according to estimates. (Reuters)

In just six days, between 14 and 19 April, nearly 70 people were killed in clashes involving gangs in Port-au-Prince’s largest shantytown, Cité Soleil, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. About 40 of the dead were shot or stabbed. At least two were children, reports the Guardian.

Six more burned bodies were laid in a nearby neighborhood later yesterday, and some witnesses said that police killed them and residents set them on fire, reports the Associated Press.

The United Nations Security Council was set to meet regarding Haiti’s security crisis, today. Yesterday, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres reiterated his call for the immediate deployment of an international armed force in Haiti to stem escalating gang violence, warning in a new report that insecurity in the capital “has reached levels comparable to countries in armed conflict.” (Associated Press)

Migrant Caravan defies Mexican gov’t

A group of 3,000 migrants traveling as a group through southern Mexico are marching towards Mexico city to demand changes in Mexico’s treatment of migrants. The caravan, the latest iteration of an annual “Migrant Viacrucis” march close to the Catholic Holy Week celebration, though this one started later than usual.

The caravan participants are demanding the end of detention centers like the one that caught fire last month, killing 40 migrants, as well as the dissolving of the country’s immigration authority, which is in charge of the detention centers.

In past years, parts of the migrant caravan have continued traveling from Mexico City towards the U.S. border and attempted to cross. The migrants are mainly from Central America, Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia, but the caravan also includes people from the Caribbean and a few from China and other Asian countries.

The caravan represents an “escape” from Tapachula, the city in southern Mexico where migrants — activists estimate as many as 40,000, currently — have been stuck in limbo, awaiting a humanitarian visa or refugee status permitting them to travel through Mexico.

(El País, Associated Press, Reuters)

More Migration

• Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that the country’s National Guard can support the National Migration Institute (INM) and guard the interior of migrant centers, reports Animal Político. Rights groups had asked the court to withdraw the National Guard from migration tasks, after documenting human rights violations, as well as other abuses.

Brazil

• Green energy technology will require billions of tons of critical strategic minerals. “That this scramble for resources is centered on the Amazon lays bare an uncomfortable truth: Climate policy and environmental protection are not the same thing, and as the energy transition gathers pace, that trade-off is becoming increasingly evident,” write Robert Muggah and Mac Margolis in Foreign Policy. “How Brazil handles the energy transition’s burgeoning hunger for resources will help determine whether our policies to save the planet will leave us with a planet left to save.”
  
  
• Pesticides banned in the European Union because of their links to human health risks are being exported and used on farms in Brazil supplying Nestlé, according to a new investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Repórter Brasil. (Guardian)

Jordana Timerman/Latin America Daily Briefing