Dr Rafael Caldera praised the relationship between Jamaica and Venezuela as he addressed a gathering with both members of the Opposition as well as the Government. He shared that Jamaica has set a  great example in the practice of democracy.

Friday, March 26, 1982

CALDERA PRAISES 'DEMOCRATIC' JAMAICA

FORMER VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT, Dr Rafael Caldera, yesterday assured the Jamaican people that relations between the two countries would continue to be “cordial and operative”.

Caldera, who is the current president of the World Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and a likely candidate for the next presidential elections in Venezuela in 1984, was addressing the local branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) at Gordon House in his position as head of the IPU.

Government and opposition members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, including the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Edward Seaga, and the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Michael Manley, attended.

The Speaker of the House, the Hon. Talbert Forrest, introduced Dr Caldera, and the President of the Senate, the Hon. Oswald Harding, moved the vote of thanks.

Mr Caldera said: “It is a great pleasure for me to see that relations between Jamaica and Venezuela are not only cordial, but operative, and I am able and obliged to assure the representatives of the Jamaican people that this relation will continue to be one of our important preoccupations in the future.”

He extended an invitation to the Jamaican Parliament to become a member of the IPU as he said that this country could make a solid contribution and play an effective part in the organisation, which has a membership of 100 countries.

Mr Caldera said it was an honour and a pleasure to be received by the Jamaican Parliament.

At a time when many of the most distinguished and cultured countries of the hemisphere found themselves in an “irregular” political situation that impeded them having a parliament, and many parliaments of the world, by their origin or the obstacles to which they are subjected, could not freely express the opinion and feelings of the people, the Jamaican Parliament was one of those examples that reinforced faith in liberty because it emanated freely and directly from the will of its citizens.

“Here is a free Parliament, and it is satisfying to be able to speak to its members without the least restrictions. And this proves that it is not impossible for developing countries to live in a democracy, to exercise liberty, and to practise ideological and political pluralism," Dr Caldera said.

“The same holds true in Venezuela. The poverty of vast sectors of our inhabitants does not deny them the exercise of the right of sovereign choice of their representatives.”

Jamaica had given a great example – as had Venezuela and other nations of the hemisphere – of faith in democracy, of the practice of democracy and of democratic stability.

Caldera said:

"It is an example of inestimable value for the encouragement of those other countries of the institutionality as well as a hope for those that have lost the exercise of their liberties temporarily.”

The Caribbean area was highly important and significant in the hemisphere. It had always been but was even more so since the countries that were kept under colonial regime until well into the century have become “sovereign, independent states led by men of indisputable capacity and energy, whose fundamental aim was to realise that independence fully and strengthen it by drawing closer in solidarity with the other nations of the area and the entire continent”.

In its international policy, Venezuela had been guided by the principle of pluralistic solidarity, bent on finding and defending the common interests that take precedence over differences of a regime or political ”praxis” and the idea of international social justice.

In this context of international social justice, the relations among countries must be subjected, as were the relations between individuals or social groups in the country, to social justice, which demanded of each and everyone what was necessary for the common good.

Venezuela had demanded just treatment in terms of social justice, vis-à-vis the bigger countries of the hemisphere and the world, and was also willing to recognise the obligations incumbent upon it to contribute its share to the harmonious possibility of development of those less fortunate than Venezuela, within the limits of the real means of the country.

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