Joe Biden To Talk Venezuela In Chile, Immigration In Dominican Republic

A senior official in the Obama administration told AFP on Friday that US Vice President Joe Biden will use his visit to Chile this Sunday to discuss ongoing unrest in Venezuela with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and several other Latin American leaders who also plan to attend Bachelet’s inauguration. “Venezuela will be at or near the top of all the meetings,” said the official, adding that Biden would seek to address “worry from across the region” regarding detentions of protestors “for expressing their opinion or for exercising their right to assemble”.

According to El Universal, Venezuelan attorney general Luisa Ortega Díaz said in a television interview on Friday that since the beginning of February, 1,603 people had been arrested in connection with protests across the country. Of that number, she said, 35 were released without charges and 92 are still in police custody. “We also have recorded 318 people wounded, of which 237 are civilians and 81 members of the GNB [the National Guard] or PNB [federal police],” Ortega Díaz said.

The Obama administration official said that apart from attending the ceremony of Bachelet, Biden has scheduled meetings with presidents Ollanta Humala of Peru, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, with whom he will argue that the situation “will require the mediation of a third party” – a role for which Uruguay’s José Mujica has volunteered himself if both sides call for it.

Dominican Today reports that during his visit next Wednesday to the Dominican Republic, Biden plans to discuss a recent ruling from that country’s Constitutional Court which human rights observers say could strip as many as a quarter of a million Dominicans of citizenship. The official said that the Obama administration has expressed "deep concern with the citizenship status of people who’ve lived in the Dominican Republic, including those with close ties to the country" and worry that the decision affect "several thousand people." The Constitutional Court had ordered the Dominican government to review birth records and revoke the citizenship of those whose descendants arrived in the country after 1929. The ruling has been widely condemned internationally as discriminatory toward those of Haitian descent.