Nicolás Maduro and Gustavo Petro signed an agreement to start the search for the bodies of the disappeared buried in Venezuelan territory, victims of the armed conflict and whose information was recently revealed by former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso.
This signature occurs at the end of the meeting in Brazil where 12 Latin American presidents met. Both presidents took advantage of advancing on this matter in which Colombia will help in the search for the more than 100,000 disappeared during the armed conflict and to identify the corpses, while the Venezuelan State will help the return of the remains and the delivery to their relatives, according to what he pointed out. Petro.
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“With President Maduro we have reached an agreement to allow forensic experts, perhaps even with the arrival of Salvatore Mancuso in that region. in order to find the remains and deliver them to their relatives,” said Petro.
A source linked to the process explained to EL TIEMPO that this step is important, especially to respond to the relatives of the victims, who went to the Colombian Foreign Ministry to file complaints about the disappeared but without relations with Venezuela, there was no way to coordinate the searches. in Venezuelan territory.
Neighborhood Commission
We have reached an agreement with President Maduro to allow forensic experts, perhaps even with the arrival of Salvatore Mancuso in that region.
Both countries also created the Neighborhood Commission which seeks to coordinate cooperation and integration between the two countries and which will be chaired by Foreign Ministers Álvaro Leyva and Iván Gil. The topics to be addressed will be border cooperation and development, business agreements and productivity.
Both foreign ministers must convene the commission in the shortest possible time to establish the work schedule and the follow-up that will be given to it.
It is not the first time that Colombia and Venezuela form a commission of this type. After the Corvette Caldas incident in 1987, when a Colombian vessel entered Venezuelan waters, the Presidential Negotiating Commission was created to deal with delimitation issues.
(You may be interested in: Lula and Maduro: the conclusions of the meeting between the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela)
A Neighborhood Commission was also established which was made up of representatives of the border states and met every six months. “That helped a lot to drain the problems. The last meeting was in 2007 in Cartagena and the mechanism was exhausted”, a source explained to EL TIEMPO, assuring that this new group could help to deal with the issues on the agenda.
ANA MARIA RODRIGUEZ BRAZON
WEATHER CORRESPONDENT
CARACAS
With information from Efe
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