Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia who is traveling in Europe, has canceled his participation in the Peace Summit in Ukraine, which is being held this weekend in Switzerland. Within the framework of the Bürgenstock conference he planned to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, but he has made a change of direction by announcing by surprise that he will return to Bogotá this Saturday.
The president, in the middle of a state visit to Sweden, where this Saturday he left a wreath at the grave of Olof Palme, declared that the conference is aligned with the war and its conclusions are predetermined. “We are approaching a global conflagration. For this reason, I have decided to suspend my visit to the conference in Switzerland, because Latin America does not want more war, what it wants is the construction of peace as soon as possible,” the president told reporters. “Most of Latin America and the Government of Colombia do not agree with extending the war. “We did not join political blocs for war,” he insisted on his X account, his favorite communication channel. Other Latin American presidents with whom Petro maintains good harmony, such as the Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had refused to attend due to the absence of Moscow at the forum, although the Chilean Gabriel Boric, another member of the progressive bloc of the region.
The setting of the Swiss forum is not a free forum to discuss the paths to peace between Russia and Ukraine. Your conclusions are already predetermined.
Most of Latin America and the Colombian government do not agree with extending the war. We did not sign up for…
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) June 15, 2024
At the meeting, a 10-point document presented by the Government of Ukraine will be agreed upon, which proposes the total withdrawal of Russian troops, the release of prisoners of war and the control of nuclear activities in the region. The event represents a tacit support for Zelensky, who days ago signed a bilateral defense agreement with the president of the United States, Joe Biden, with which they seek to guarantee Ukraine’s defensive capacity and bring Kiev a little closer to its goal, the full membership in NATO.
Petro has spent his entire political life defending peace in his country, where decades of internal conflict have been experienced. He has also taken this discourse to the international level, although sometimes in an ambiguous way. Just as he has condemned Israel’s invasion of Gaza from day one – a position that at first seemed undiplomatic, but which has since been joined by a large number of nations – he has not done the same with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this second conflict, much has been avoided in criticizing Vladimir Putin and he usually speaks generically of a “peace agreement” between two countries, without taking into account that one is the aggressor and the other the attacked.
This ambiguity has had one notable exception. A year ago, the president accused Moscow of violating war protocols by attacking defenseless Colombian civilians, after the attack on a restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk where former Peace Commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince were present. and the reporter Catalina Gómez Ángel, along with the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who died from the impact of the Russian missile. Abad and Jaramillo were visiting the European country as part of the Hold Up Ukraine support campaign, which precisely aimed to raise the voice of Latin America in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. That has been the most forceful statement by the Petro Government, which until then had refrained from condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
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In Stockholm, where he will fly back to Colombia, Petro signed a bilateral agreement with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson to increase cooperation on trade, environmental, and peace and security issues. This Friday, in the T forumtransforming lives, Human Security and Total Peace in Colombia, which took place in the auditorium of the Swedish Defense University, the president explained that Colombia is on the verge of a transformation that would lay the foundations for a new era of peace in the country. He insisted that this change will come if the territories can be included in prosperity and abandon centuries of exclusion for blacks and indigenous people. For that, he pointed out, investments are needed in infrastructure that connects the world with these places.
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