ASSISTANT SECRETARY NICHOLS: Distinguished foreign ministers, ambassadors, senior representatives, Secretary-General, High Representative: Good morning, and welcome to today's ministerial level discussion on addressing the urgent situation in Venezuela.
I would now like to offer the floor to the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, for his opening remarks.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Brian, thank you very much. And good morning, everyone. It's very good to be with you this morning. And to my friend and colleague, Foreign Minister Mondino, thank you for joining us in convening this meeting and for your leadership on this issue.
On July 28th, more than 12 million Venezuelans defied a campaign of harassment, threats, violence to vote in their country's presidential election. If we have a single objective today, it's to ensure that the will and the votes of the Venezuelan people are actually respected, that they can determine their own future.
Nicolas Maduro is doing everything in his power to deny them that right, to strengthen his own grip on power. His regime arbitrarily barred the consensus opposition candidate and then prevented her chosen successor from running.
And after Venezuelans turned out to vote in historic numbers, the regime refused to release detailed electoral tallies. It tampered with election results; it falsely declared Maduro the winner; it cracked down brutally on peaceful protesters, political opponents; it unjustly issued a warrant for the arrest of the opposition candidate, Edmundo González.
These repressive actions have been enabled by years of efforts by the Maduro regime to systematically eliminate and eradicate the independence of Venezuela's institutions, including its judiciary.
The world knows about Maduro's abuses because of the thorough and impartial documentation of international NGOs, multilateral and regional organizations, and brave local journalists, human rights defenders, poll workers, citizens - organizations like the Carter Center, which determined that the election did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and that they could not verify the claim that Maduro won; like the UN Panel of Experts, which concluded that the National Electoral Council lacked basic transparency and integrity measures; and like the Venezuelan human rights groups that have documented arbitrary arrests of more than 2,000 Venezuelans and the killing of dozens of peaceful protesters since the election.
We come here united in the commitment to defend the human rights of the Venezuelan people, and committed to bring about an inclusive, Venezuelan-led effort to restore the nation's democratic future. That means insisting that Maduro engage in a direct dialogue with Venezuela's united democratic opposition that leads to a peaceful return to democracy. The United States and its partners stand fully ready to support this process.
Our ability to stay united in this effort is crucial. That's the lesson of the Barbados Agreement, which created the conditions for a competitive election on July 28th. For all of its challenges, the election showed the Venezuelan people - excuse me - allowed the Venezuelan people to express their will at the ballot box for the first time in many years.
The regime may try to obscure the results, but the Venezuelan people have spoken. Now, our job is to ensure their voices are heard.
That's what we've been pressing for through regional and international efforts. Weeks after the election, members of the Organization of American States adopted by consensus a resolution insisting the regime respect the human rights of the Venezuelan people, and calling for the protection, the preservation, and the impartial review of election results.
On September 10th, more than 40 countries, including the United States, adopted a UN Human Rights Council statement condemning the regime's widespread abuses and its erosion of the rule of law, and calling for the regime to end its repression.
Two days later, over 50 countries - from Africa, from Latin America, from Europe, from the Indo-Pacific - joined the European Union in endorsing a statement that called on the regime to stop violating the rights of Venezuela's citizens and to pursue an inclusive dialogue to restore democratic norms.
Sustaining this collective pressure in the months leading up to the January presidential inauguration is crucial.
We must continue to call on the Maduro regime to stop its repression of peaceful protestors, stop its repression of political opponents, immediately and unconditionally release all those who've been arbitrarily detained - including children.
We must press for the regime to allow for the return of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN-established Independent Fact-Finding Mission to Venezuela.
We must use all tools at our disposal to hold accountable the individuals who bear the highest responsibility for the grave human rights abuses being committed against the Venezuelan people - as the United States has done and will continue to do.
We must boost aid for the more than 7.7 million displaced Venezuelans, and for the countries who continue to show remarkable generosity in housing them.
We must demand that Venezuela provide full protection to diplomatic facilities and personnel, and to people seeking asylum in those facilities.
And we cannot be satisfied only with joint statements. We have to take joint action. That's the only way to change Maduro's calculus and his behavior.
On July 28, voters were far from the only Venezuelans who showed remarkable courage. For months leading up to election day, ordinary citizens trained to serve as testigos - witnesses who would observe whether people were allowed to exercise their right to vote - acted.
There were more than 30,000 polling places in Venezuela, and on July 28th, these witnesses from the opposition were at virtually every single one of them. They arrived before polls opened. They stayed past when they were closed, until they saw the ballots being handed over to election officials - defenders of democracy, armed only with their eyes and their voice.
It's no small part because of those volunteers that we know the will of the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans: to elect Edmundo González.
There are so many people in Venezuela who have taken profound risks to reclaim their democracy. Surely, we - the dozens of nations in this room - can summon a fraction of their bravery to stand with them, as they fight for the right to shape their own future.
Thank you.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NICHOLS: I now pass the floor to Her Excellency Diana Mondino, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Argentina.
FOREIGN MINISTER MONDINO: Thank you all for being here. Thank you for bringing us together to discuss this very, very sorrow issue.
We all know what's happening. I think we do. There are winds, authoritarian winds, blowing in our continent, and let's hope it does not become a hurricane. The things that are going on in Venezuela can become a most serious problem.
The destabilization system that Venezuela has imposed on other Latin American countries is huge. I've just heard 7.8 million people have left Venezuela. Most of them are coming into other Latin American countries. And not always can they be put together, put to work in the countries that host them. It is not easy to absorb those - that incredible number of people. It is not easy to fight any potential xenophobia that might arise, and which we have never had in Latin America.
The problem is Venezuela under Maduro does not need Venezuelans. They couldn't care less. They have oil; they have corruption. They may have other things, and they don't need people. They want to expel people. They don't care about their own people.
So we have to be very careful, and the case of Venezuela should be analyzed with the utmost seriousness. It is not only an election that did not work. The consequences on many, many countries - some of them present here - and its outcome will be an example that we will hear for many years if we do not act now.
We all know that we defend democracy. We all know that we defend freedom. We all know that there are certain things that should not be allowed. But then it happens. And when it happens, we do not have any kind of tools, particularly from all the different countries that we do respect democracy, to act with them.
I can tell you what Argentina has done to help the Venezuelans that already are in Argentina, but that's not much that we can do. We have approved a special regime for migratory regularization for the people that have left Venezuela. And some of them have been living in Argentina for 10 years now. Their children left Venezuela being babies; they do not have any kind of documents. They cannot become part of the - we are trying to have them become part of the formal labor market, but it is very difficult because they don't have the paperwork from their original country.
We are preparing also a list of officers and persons linked to the Venezuelan regime that will be banned for entering our country. You could probably do the same. And, well, maybe they have beautiful beaches in Venezuela, they may not even need to leave Venezuela. Or there may be other rogue countries that will take them or their families or their money or their operations. How do we go without that?
So I don't know how to change from words to action, because I'm not really sure what actions should be taken. Maybe it's something that we could discuss. But in the face of intensification of political repression - we've mentioned dead people; we've mentioned imprisoned people. Everybody who knows of Venezuela knows that everybody is having actually serious problems in having access to basic services.
On our side, we have urged the International Criminal Court to request a pretrial - a pretrial chamber to issue - eventually, if they think it's correct thing to do - to issue arrest warrants on Nicolás Maduro and other regime leaders. And that's in the framework of an ongoing investigation that has been going on for at least two years now. And we have followed a request after a, may I say, courageous ruling from our own federal justice which ordered, under the principle of universal jurisdiction, the immediate arrest for crimes against humanity for dictator Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and more than 30 other agents of state repression.
May I say that in the last two years, we have been taking witnesses to come and explain what has happened to them. This judge found that the heads of the regime are - were guilty of organizing a systematic plan of forced disappearance of persons, torture, homicide, political persecution. So we have - and Argentinian justice has requested Interpol to be notified of this decision in order to request their international arrest through the red alert system. We hope that the criminals of this plan cannot longer cover up their bloody plans.
Of course, there are many, many other issues going on in the world. We have wars in various areas. We have countries which have their own problems. But this is - there's a very big difference. This is a country that has problems inflicted by its own government. It's not a natural disaster as the fires we're seeing in Ecuador. It's not a war as we've seen in other regions of the world. It's something defined and decided by the government. So this is something that we must - we must find a way of at - at the very minimum to have - to have a light on this.
We have, I mean, other measures from the diplomatic perspective. We have solicited the inclusion of a democratic close - clause, I'm sorry - in the roadmap of the Brasilia Consensus. We have signed a letter addressed to the presidency urging to address the Venezuelan issue. Nothing has happened. We have to take a stand through different press releases. Okay. We subscribe to several declarations. That's that we're going to do. We fully agree with that. But it - apparently, Maduro doesn't read, doesn't read the declarations at least. So that's something that we have to take in control.
Well, as I said at the beginning, the authoritarian wind's blowing. I sincerely hope that someday, with commitment from every of us here present and the strong will of the Venezuelan people - they are the ones who are suffering - hopefully, those winds become a breeze of hope. Let's pray for that. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
ASSISTANT SECRETARY NICHOLS: I now ask that the members of the press retire, and we'll moved to our closed session.
