Caracas: Venezuela has said it is in no hurry to arrange a meeting between President Hugo Chavez and US president-elect Barack Obama, whose election has been hailed in Latin America as the harbinger of a new era of US-South America relationship.

"To everything there is a season, its (own) speed, and one must not be tempted to speculate. We'll wait," EFE Friday quoted Nicolas Maduro as telling reporters.

Maduro was reacting to a statement by the nation's foreign relation committee chief that the expected meeting could take place before long.

A meeting between Chavez and Obama "is going to happen much more quickly than people think," the chairman of the Venezuelan National Assembly's foreign policy committee, Roy Daza, had said Wednesday.

Maintaining that Washington must be ready to talk even to its enemies, Obama had said during the presidential campaign that he was prepared to meet controversial foreign leaders such as Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Cuba's Raul Castro and the socialist Chavez, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration.

"We're not falling into the temptation of speculation," Maduro said Thursday, emphasizing that Obama's election triumph "for the first time in the history of humanity opens up the possibility for a world without empires".

With Obama, the minister said, Latin America "must be viewed in another way" and develop "a new type of relations, on the basis of respect and equality".

Chavez Wednesday congratulated Obama in a communique in which he expressed his conviction that "the time has come to establish new relations between our countries".

He also said that "the historic election of a man of African descent (Obama's father was Kenyan) to the head of the most powerful nation in the world is the sign of the change of an epoch that has been developing from the South of the Americas and could be touching the doors of the United States."

 

Source : IANS