Like with Cuba, US seeks 'common ground' with Caracas
Ties with Caracas have been "severely strained" in recent years.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Washington hopes its outreach to Cuba can be a model for Venezuela as it seeks to turn the page on old enmities in Latin America, US Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday.
Ties with Caracas have been "severely strained" in recent years under both the late leftist firebrand Hugo Chavez and his anointed successor as Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, Kerry acknowledged.
But the top US diplomat insisted he had begun his tenure at the State Department in 2013 holding out a hand to Venezuela with a long conversation with the foreign minister at the time.
"The US remains open to further addressing our differences in attempting to find areas of common ground," Kerry told a conference of the Council of the Americas hosted at the State Department.
The US administration was "committed to moving forward on the path to normalized relations with Cuba after President Barack Obama in December swept aside 50 years of US policy to begin the process of restoring ties," Kerry said.
"This new course is based not on a leap of faith, but on a conviction that the best way to promote US interests and values while also helping to bring greater freedom and opportunity to the Cuban people is exactly what we are doing."
And he argued that "the same principle applies to Venezuela."
Venezuela and the United States have been engaged for years in a series of tit-for-tat diplomatic spats, and they have not had ambassadors in each other s country since 2010.
In March, Obama slapped sanctions on seven Venezuelan officials linked to human rights abuses, including a crackdown on anti-government protests last year that left 43 people dead, hundreds wounded and thousands arrested.
But at a historic summit in Panama earlier this month, Obama spoke briefly with Maduro for the first time, seeking to calm rising tensions.
Maduro has accused Washington of backing an opposition plot to overthrow him in a coup that he says would have involved bombing the presidential palace. The US government has dismissed the charges as baseless.
"I am confident that the administration s commitment to a new kind of relationship with Latin America will contribute significantly to our common agenda for the hemisphere, which includes the strengthening of democracy and the respect for human rights," Kerry said.
He spoke of a "transformative moment" for the Americas, adding that "we are determined to deliver on the strategic and historic opportunities that together we can create."
