The first vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Diosdado Cabello, has ruled out that there is any type of negotiation underway between the Venezuelan Executive and opposition leader María Corina Machado. "It's pure straw," he stated emphatically.
"They are trucks and trucks of straw. They arrive, they make up their own story: that they met, that there were encounters. Pure straw. That's not rudeness, it's grasses. It's their imagination working," he pointed out during a television appearance, alluding to rumors about supposed contacts.
Cabello stressed that a national dialogue process has been maintained in the country since the first term of Hugo Chávez, but he emphasized that this mechanism does not involve surrenders or invented pacts: "Chávez, coming out of a coup d'état, called for dialogue. We know how to sit down and talk, but with them nothing is planned, and with her (Machado), even less."
In this context, he insisted that "no meeting has been held in any country" between the executive vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, whom he mentioned as "acting president," and figures close to Machado: "They make up their story, they tell it to themselves, and they start repeating it."