Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro proposed a meeting with President Trump at the United Nations on Wednesday, despite deriding the U.S. leader as an “imperialist” oppressor.
“I am willing to reach out my hand to the president of the United States and discuss these matters bilaterally, these matters involving our region,” Maduro told the General Assembly during an evening address. “Venezuela is a very friendly country and we have not forgotten the United States. Rather, we appreciate the culture, the art of the United States, and the social life of the United States. We are against the imperialists in charge of power in Washington.”
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Trump denounced Maduro during his own address, telling the assembled world leaders Wednesday that “Maduro has inflicted terrible pain and suffering” on Venezuela in recent years, where a food shortage contributed to a political crisis. Trump has imposed an array of sanctions on Venezuela in response and offered an extended attack on the ideology of the Maduro regime.
“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented,” Trump said. “From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.”
But Maduro maintained that he is the victim of an international conspiracy to justify an invasion of his resource-rich country.
“World media is trying to fabricate a migration crisis in Venezuela to justify what was perhaps being called a ‘humanitarian intervention,’” he said at the UNGA. “There is a media campaign against us which seems to go on and on, endlessly.”
Venezuelan officials have been “siphon[ing] off millions of dollars from food import contracts amid widespread starvation,” according to the Associated Press. Maduro has taken unilateral steps to sideline his domestic political opposition and silence critics, even putting pressure on professional athletes overseas who still have family within his reach.
Detroit Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera said last year that he is “sick of paying protection money against the threat that they are going to kidnap my mother” and appealed to the Venezuelan leaders not to kill his family. “I protest for truth, for the end of communism, and I am not with dictators,” Cabrera said, per an ESPN translation. “Please do not do anything to my family. That’s what I ask.”
Trump pointedly declined to shut down suggestions that he might consider a military intervention on Wednesday. “All options are on the table,” the president told reporters. “Every one: the strong ones and the less than strong ones. Every option — and you know what I mean by strong.”
Maduro charged him with reviving the Monroe Doctrine and appealed to Latin American countries to stand with him. “It was an imperial, interventionist, neocolonialist doctrine and our people rose up against it,” he said.
But Trump also signaled a willingness to meet with the Venezuelan leader. “I just want to see Venezuela straightened out,” he told reporters. ”If he’s here, if he wants to meet … it was not on my mind, it was not on my plate, but if I can help people, that’s what I’m here for.”
