The Vice Minister of Multilateral Affairs of Colombia, María Carmelina Londoño, criticized this Friday (7) the “opportunistic silences” of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) on human rights violations in “three countries” organization members.
“We cannot have opportunistic silences in the face of fundamental values, which have been and will always be fundamental everywhere, such as the defense of democracy, freedoms and human rights,” said Londoño, reading the speech of Colombian Foreign Minister Marta Lucía Ramírez, inside of the 22nd Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of CELAC, opened this Friday in Buenos Aires.
In the opinion of the Colombian representative, CELAC must act “with consistency” in defending these principles and suggested, in a veiled way, the suspension of member states that violate the fundamentals of the regional mechanism, created in 2010.
These statements come in the context of international criticism of the human rights situation in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the three members of CELAC, but which were not mentioned by name by María Carmelina Londoño.
At the same meeting, the foreign ministers of Nicaragua and Venezuela criticized the “coercive” and “unilateral” measures promoted by the US government against these two countries and Cuba, subjected to a “blockade” by their northern neighbor.
Defense of the United States and Canada
Likewise, Londoño defended the importance of strengthening relations with the US and Canada, “two strategic partners” in the region that are part of the Organization of American States (OAS) and not CELAC.
The Colombian Deputy Minister of Multilateral Affairs also ratified her country’s commitment to the OAS, which she considers to be the “center of gravity of an institutional and normative heritage” of all American states.
In this sense, María Carmelina Londoño made clear her rejection of statements that suggest the strengthening of CELAC with the objective of “burying the OAS”, a position that, according to her criteria, would constitute “a big mistake” and a “great irresponsibility”.
“Current and future generations of our nations will demand the doctrinal collection and the defense of human rights and democracy that the OAS has, and will always live in the same neighborhood as the United States and Canada, to whom it seems that some in this organization want to turn the tables. back,” he said.
At this meeting of CELAC foreign ministers, Argentina achieved the necessary consensus to assume the pro tempore presidency of the bloc in 2022.
CELAC brings together more than 30 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean – Brazil abandoned it in 2020, considering that the bloc supports anti-democratic regimes such as those of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – and, according to Argentine sources, seeks to build a space for exchange political, economic, social and cultural that balances the unity and diversity of the region’s more than 600 million inhabitants.
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