Celebrating Friendship

This year’s Venezuelan Week in Malaysia, which celebrates its eleventh edition, coincides with a significant fact for us: it has been thirty years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Malaysia. Three decades of meeting, of coincidences, mutual support, search for opportunities, exchanges, knowledge, promotion, highlighting the ties that unites us. Thirty years of friendship.

What has been achieved in this time is not small.  Slowly, but consistently, trade has increased. Many Malaysian vehicles travel on streets and avenues paved with Venezuelan crude oil. Many Venezuelans have computer components that were made in Malaysia. Music, dance, food, photography, painting and Venezuelan cinema have brought to these lands our way of understanding life; they have provided a fairly complete example of the cultural wealth of the country. Mutual political support in the various multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations, underscore the fact that we share much the same views when it comes to international politics. Two young countries, proud of their independent status, fighting for a new international order based on peace, cooperation and respect for sovereignty. Diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Malaysia have passed without serious problems or discrepancies.  On the contrary, it has been a positive relationship from all points of view.

But as we look forward, we note that there is much greater potential to be gained from this relationship; we have past and present, but above all, we have a future. We are pleased with our progress in these thirty years, safe in the knowledge that when the time comes, we will celebrate sixty years of diplomatic relations with a longer list of achievements, which will be more significant.

This eleventh Venezuelan week in Malaysia celebrates friendship with the 31 strings of the harp that has marked Venezuelan musician Leonard Jácome’s career and life, and who will be performing in the hall of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra at Petronas Twin Towers.  It will find rich company in the gastronomic art of chef Tamara Rodríguez, in the first Venezuelan novel translated into Bahasa Malaysia, ‘Doña Bárbara’, and in a new edition of the Simón Bolívar lectures, among other activities. Well, here's the program. Here is a renewed sign of our commitment to reinforce good relations between Venezuela and Malaysia.

Manuel Guzmán, Ambassador of Venezuela to Malaysia