"I hope that the continuity of the Working Group will be ensured,” said Augusto Santo Silva, referring to the group’s third ministerial meeting, taking place in São José, the capital of Costa Rica. “I believe that there will not be any difficulty between us in extending the mandate of the Contact Group. Because it's more and more important.

“I also think that … we will be able to decide among us … the next steps we need to take on the ground," the minister said on Monday, in comments to Lusa.

The minister was speaking in San José, where he on Monday afternoon (the early hours of Tuesday, Lisbon time) represented Portugal’s government at the first session of the two-day meeting. Portugal is participating because it has some 180,000 nationals registered at its consulates in Venezuela, and a wider Portuguese community numbering more than 300,000.

"The terms of reference of the contact group are not that the group ends after three months, but rather that after three months a reassessment of the group’s work and the group’s future be made," he said.

The group’s constitution was announced at the end of January by the European Union’s high representative for foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, with a view to, within 90 days, achieving a peaceful and democratic end to the crisis in Venezuela through the holding of presidential elections.

Its first ministerial meeting took place on 7 February in Montevideo. A second took place on 28 March, in Quito.

Seven other EU countries are also taking part in the contact group - Spain, Italy, the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France and Sweden - along with four Latin American countries: Costa Rica, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia.

Santos Silva said that the group’s continuing efforts are of major importance, because "those who bet everything on confrontation [or] on outside military intervention have repeatedly failed". There is, he argued, “only one way out of the impasse in which Venezuela now is from a political standpoint, which is everyone talking to each other, but … with a goal: that is to return to Venezuelans their ability to choose.

"Unfortunately, the situation on the ground has worsened,” he went on. “There is a political impasse that seems evident, as was seen just last week. There is this very difficult situation that … those who have political and electoral legitimacy - the National Assembly and its speaker, Juan Guaidó, manifestly do not have the ability to control the public administration, the security apparatus and the territory.

“And those who actually control the public administration, the territory and the security forces have long since lost political legitimacy," he said, in a reference to the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro.

The current ministerial meeting of the contact group, which ends today, is taking place at a time when the political crisis in Venezuela has once more intensified, with a new escalation of street protests and a face-off between the opposition, led by Guaidó as self-declared interim president, and the regime led by Maduro.