Trump Can’t be Worse Than Obama: Venezuela President 

Washington: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said "we have to wait" to see how US President-elect Donald Trump performs in the White House and that he did not think he could be "worse" than his outgoing American counterpart Barack Obama.

"We have to wait. Regarding President Donald Trump, the big international media have speculated a lot and we're surprised by the campaign of hate that there is against (him), brutal, in the entire world, in the Western world and in the US," Maduro said on Monday.

"I want to be prudent and say, we hope, that he won't be worse than Obama," Maduro added. Maduro insisted that people must wait to see how Trump behaves "both in the domestic policy of the US as well as in international policy", and he "confirmed" that he wanted to have "relations of respect, communication and cooperation" with Washington, Efe news reported.

"We hope big changes come in world politics, one of the changes that surely will be very important will be what they call 'the Trump era'. I think that the ... changes will be marked by pluripolarity and multicentrism, the epoch of the unipolar world is over and Venezuela is in the wave of those changes," he said.

Maduro said that Obama leaves a legacy of "wars" in Africa and Asia, "he leaves a world plagued with terrorism and in Latin America three coup d'etat will be remembered," namely the ousters of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo in 2012 and Brazil's Dilma Rousseff in 2016. He also attributed to Obama "coup attempts against (Bolivia's Evo Morales), campaigns to isolate Nicaragua, coup and assassination attempts against Rafael Correa of Ecuador and all that he's done to the Venezuelan people, the economic war, the financial blockade."

Maduro said that Obama's decision to renew "the brutal executive order" in which he "declared Venezuela to be an unusual and extraordinary threat" was an "expression of regrettable hatred". Obama ordered a one-year extension of the "national emergency" declared in 2015 against Venezuela, where, he said, the situation had not improved and the government had continued to erode human rights guarantees.

--IANS