The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela announced on Thursday that, because of the recent kidnapping by the Colombian authorities and the arbitrary expulsion of Venezuelan citizen Carlos Manuel Pino García, a staff member of the Venezuelan Diplomatic Mission in Bogota, has been decided to proceed to the application of the principle of reciprocity and to expel from the national territory the Colombian citizen Juan Carlos Pérez Villamizar, who is in the country exercising consular functions without having the corresponding accreditation of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.
This was reported by Chancellor Jorge Arreaza, who also publicized the communication with the measure from his account on the Twitter social network.
Following, the official communiqué:
“The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela reports that, because of the recent kidnapping by the Colombian authorities and the arbitrary expulsion of Venezuelan citizen Carlos Manuel Pino García, a staff member of the Venezuelan Diplomatic Mission in Bogotá, has been decided, for reasons of state security and in application of the principle of reciprocity, to expel from the national territory the Colombian citizen Juan Carlos Pérez Villamizar, who is in Venezuela performing consular functions without having the corresponding accreditation of the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry in open violation of the international conventions that rule the matter.
In that sense, citizen Juan Carlos Pérez Villamizar has a period of forty-eight hours to leave the territory of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela allows itself to remind the government of Colombia of its obligation to respect the international conventions to which it has voluntarily subscribed, especially in relation to the prerogatives that correspond to the personnel of diplomatic missions, taking care not to unduly impede the performance of the functions of the mission, as expressly established in article 38 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and also fulfill its obligations in relation to its own agents in functions abroad.
Caracas, December 20, 2018″
Jorge Arreaza M
@jaarreaza
“In the face of the arbitrary measure of kidnapping and expulsion by the Colombian authorities of the Venezuelan citizen Carlos Pino, an official of our Embassy in Bogota, we announced the expulsion of Juan Carlos Pérez Villamizar, a non-accredited Colombian consular official”.
15:10 – 20 Dec 2018
