There has been speculation for several days in Colombia about which United States officials will come to Gustavo Petro’s possession, which will take place on August 7, and on Friday afternoon there was a clearer signal in this regard. “I mentioned to the president-elect that the president [Joe] Biden asked the USAID administrator, Samantha Power, to lead the presidential delegation to his inauguration ceremony,” said Jon Finer, Deputy Principal Advisor for National Security of the United States, in Bogotá, after a meeting on Friday morning with Gustavo Petro and Vice President-elect Francia Márquez.
Power, a former war journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, was a special assistant to Barack Obama on the National Security Council, and in May 2021 she was elected as the head of USAID, the powerful United States agency for the Developing. Power understands the assistance that her country provides to others as a form of “soft power,” and USAID has been one of the major financiers of several programs that support the peace process in Colombia, which the president-elect now wants to strengthen.
In an interview with EL PAÍS, when Petro spoke about his proposal for agrarian reform in Colombia, he said that “I would like to do it hand in hand with the United States. Unlike in the past, the agrarian reform is linked to the possibility of a substantial decrease in the export of cocaine.” “The United States has concentrated its effort in a very ineffective way on glyphosate and extraditions. The result has been a total failure,” he added.
Finer seems partially willing to work with Petro at this point. He said that the approach that the United States has had is “holistic” in the anti-narcotics issue, not only giving the support of the DEA, the anti-narcotics agency, to curb the supply of drugs, but they have also been supporting “the development in areas rural”. According to Finer, this was one of the points he touched on with the incoming administration today. “I think this will be a good topic for Administrator Samantha Power, when she visits next month, and it’s an area where we have common ground. All of these issues are closely related: the security situation is closely linked to the economic situation, and closely linked to our anti-narcotics efforts.”
However, faced with the possibility of decriminalizing drugs, as Petro proposes, or accepting that the US strategy has been a failure, the US official was emphatic. “The United States and the Biden administration do not support decriminalization,” Finer said. “Colombia is a sovereign country, it will make its own decisions, and those decisions will have implications. They will have implications for Colombia’s relations with the region, and they will have implications for our bilateral relationship.”
Finer, however, repeated that he knows how the new Petro administration wants to “deepen, expand” the 2016 peace agreement, signed by the Government of Juan Manuel Santos and the former FARC, in addition to complying with agreed points that have not been agreed. fulfilled so far (such as the point on rural reform). “We are committed to working with them on this,” Finer said. “Today we were able to talk about the ways in which we can provide support, especially with regard to the ethnic chapter.”
Finer also referred to relations with Venezuela, an area in which, he said, his government can find “points in common with the incoming administration.” He did not mention any opposition to Petro re-establishing diplomatic relations with its neighbors — the president-elect is going to reopen the common border and set up an embassy again in Caracas — although he clarified that, in the case of the United States, the Biden government still recognizes Juan Guaidó as president and hopes that his negotiations with Nicolás Maduro will be renewed.
“President Biden sent us here because of the value of our bilateral relationship,” added Finer, who traveled to Bogotá along with three other special delegates from the United States, a particular visit for an elected president who has not yet been installed in the Government. . Although the US delegation’s meeting with Petro was private, Finer described the conversation as “good, direct, candid, and detailed.”
“There are issues on which we will disagree,” he said about the government that will be installed on August 7. “But that’s true of any bilateral relationship the United States has, and it doesn’t seem worthwhile to me today to focus on one particular policy.” When questioned about the military support that Colombia has received for decades, Finer said that he would continue standing.
“President Biden has said that the United States relationship with Colombia is a cornerstone for prosperity and security in the hemisphere and in this region.” He added that they hope that, when the new government knows all the details of the bilateral cooperation these years, “they will see value in it.” “We understand that there may be changes, and we are ready to work with them, willing to work on a security alliance that works for both countries, and on an agenda that is common to our interests,” he added.
subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the informative keys of the country’s current affairs.
#Biden #delegates #committed #working #Petro