Here’s the worst thing that Pope Francis could do during his Sept. 6-10 visit to Colombia: make another worthless call for peace and reconciliation in neighbouring Venezuela.
That’s exactly what Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is hoping for. Maduro would love to see the Pope reiterate his calls for a “national dialogue” to solve Venezuela’s political and economic crisis. It would help Venezuela’s strongman drive international attention away from his latest steps to turn his country into a full-blown dictatorship.
In recent weeks, Maduro has effectively killed the country’s National Assembly, which the opposition had won by a landslide despite widespread government dirty tricks in 2015 legislative elections. Maduro created his own super-Congress, which he calls the Constituent Assembly, whose hand-picked legislators have the power to rewrite the Constitution and to supersede the democratically-elected National Assembly.
