A Venezuelan-sized problem for the new government in Spain
Two weeks into the mandate of the new Spanish government and it is already having to deal with its first crisis. Given the turbulent nature of Spanish politics this may come as little surprise, and given the left-wing makeup of the government, it may come as even less of a surprise to learn that Venezuela is involved.
It all began when word got out of a suspicious night-time meeting in Madrid airport between transport minister José Luis Ábalos and the vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, who is on the list officials banned from entering the EU under sanctions imposed on the government of Nicolas maduro.
Since the news broke of the meeting, the official line of explanation has changed several times.
Initially, Ábalos denied having met Rodríguez, saying that he only went to Madrid Barajas airport to pick up Felix Plasencia, the Venezuelan transport minister — who is not banned from entering the EU — and who had flown to Spain to attend a trade fair.
Under further grilling from journalists, Ábalos then revealed that he had in fact met with Rodríguez, after being informed by the Spanish Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, that she was on the plane with Plasencia.
According to Ábalos, Marlaska told him to inform Rodríguez that if she set foot on Spanish soil she would be deported. This resulted in what Ábalos characterised as an “enforced greeting” that lasted “about two minutes.”
Then, under further questioning on the TV channel La Sexta, Ábalos revealed that the encounter (the government refuses to use the word “meeting”) lasted for 25 minutes, during which time he simply reminded her that she could not enter the country. A further twist in the tale came when it was reported that the vice president spent several hours in transit at Barajas airport before traveling 8 kilometers to another terminal where she crossed passport control and boarded a commercial flight to Qatar.
All of this notwithstanding, the government still maintains that she never technically entered Spain and that Ábalos should be applauded for averting a diplomatic crisis between the EU and Venezuela.
But this hasn’t satisfied the opposition; the People’s Party and VOX announced last week that they had made a formal complaint with the Attorney General’s Office over the affair. According to the PP, Ábalos could have committed the crime of “criminal negligence” and “disobedience” by not allowing the police to arrest Rodríguez at the airport, which according to PP Leader Pablo Casado, they were legally obliged to do under European legislation. VOX, meanwhile, has requested the security camera recordings of both the landing strip of the airport and the VIP lounge where the Rodríguez reportedly waited between flights.
The controversy over the airport meeting could not have come at a worse time for the government, coinciding as it did with the visit of the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who is recognised by more than 50 countries, including Spain, as the interim President of Venezuela. To make matters worse, when Guaidó arrived in Spain he wasn’t met by Pedro Sánchez, who said his schedule couldn’t permit it, but rather by the foreign minister Arancha González Laya.
This perceived diplomatic snub for Guaidó was seized upon by the opposition as evidence of the Socialist’s muted support for Guaidó and softness towards the regime of Nicolas Maduro. Indeed, the PP has requested the creation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the relationship between the government of Venezuela and that of Pedro Sánchez, including allegations of illegal Venezuelan financing of Sanchez’s coalition partners Podemos. While previous attempts by the PP to link Podemos to illegal funding from Venezuela have proven false, they have now turned their attention to a political consulting agency that Podemos hired to advise on its campaign strategy in the run-up to the last April’s elections. The firm, Neurona Consulting, which has worked with leftist South American governments, including that of Nicolas Maduro, is under investigation in Bolivia for corruption concerning contracts it was awarded by the previous government of Evo Morales.
Podemos have always denied allegations that it has received illegal foreign financing.
Whether Ábalos’s “enforced greeting” with Delcy Rodríguez was, as the government insists, a heroic last-ditch interception that prevented a diplomatic crisis, or further evidence of murky connections between the government and the Maduro regime, remains for now unclear. What is certain, however, is that Venezuela continues to cast a long shadow of Spanish politics.
