Gustavo Petro’s first international trip will finally be to Peru. The new president of Colombia will hold a meeting in Lima with Pedro Castillo, a president in trouble. Castillo took office a little over a year ago as a progressive politician who came to represent the historically forgotten Peru, but in this time he has barely had stability, he has changed 40 ministers – a record – and is being investigated for six crimes of corruption. However, Petro prioritizes visiting a neighboring country to show that Colombia wants to play a leading role in the region.
Colombian Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva is already in Lima, where he is preparing the bilateral meeting on Monday. Petro will return to his country the same day. The meeting is a courtesy to Peru, whose diplomacy has been annoyed at not feeling included in the new progressive axis that Petro often talks about, in which he includes Chile with Gabriel Boric, Argentina with Alberto Fernández and in which he hopes to count with Lula in Brazil when he wins the elections. The Castillo Government is being so uneven that naming it does not entail any revenue right now.
This was evidenced when the Mexican president López Obrador, Petro and the Bolivian Luis Arce joined together to sign a letter of repudiation of what they considered an “unjustifiable judicial persecution” against the Argentine vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner h. The text said that the request for 12 years in prison for alleged corruption presented by a prosecutor only sought to “remove Kirchner from public, political and electoral life, as well as to bury the values and ideals that he represents, with the ultimate goal of implanting a neo-liberal model”. The presidents endorse the persecutory thesis put forward by the ruling Peronism. Castillo was left out of the photo.
With this express visit, Petro inaugurates his agenda abroad. The president wants to lead the region. Colombia has historically been a very self-absorbed country, without much leadership in its international relations, very dependent on the US agenda. This week he has received the visit of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who showed him all his support in the search for a total pacification of the country, which involves negotiating with the ELN guerrillas and bringing the drug cartels to justice. . In addition, on September 20 he will go to New York to participate in the UN general assembly.
Petro’s gesture means adding Castillo to that progressive club, which began to form in 2018, with the arrival to power in Mexico of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), and Claudia Sheinbaum as mayor of the capital. A year later, he won the Kirchnerist Fernández, after a four-year term by the conservative Mauricio Macri. Later, the Movement for Socialism (MAS) returned to power in Bolivia with Luis Arce after a year of convulsions marked by the interim cabinet of Jeanine Áñez. In Argentina and Bolivia, the push of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (who accompanied Fernández as vice president) and of Evo Morales, who had been forced to resign by the Army and left the country amid accusations of fraud, was key. Both represent the generation of the founding fathers, rulers who from the year 2000 dominated South America, along with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela or Correa himself in Ecuador.
Next on the list was Castillo, an unknown rural teacher. With a campaign for the towns of rural Peru, Keiko Fujimori, the candidate of Peru’s elites, was imposed last year. The professor generated an enormous illusion among the most disadvantaged in the country, who saw in him someone of their own who had finally achieved power. Instability, however, has weighed him down. Improvisation and lack of control reign in his government. Right now, the continuous changes in the cabinet only underpin his continuity in power, since he offers small fees to the parties that support him. Citizen concerns have been left aside in the eternal political crisis that he is experiencing.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.
subscribe
Petro’s presidency has started in a different light. He has embarked on a total search for peace in a country immersed in continuous disputes for decades. His roadmap seems clear. The appointments in the ministries of personalities with different sensitivities have given him a margin of confidence among those who did not vote for him, almost half of the country. He will now go to Lima to shake hands with a colleague in trouble.
Follow all the international information in Facebook Y Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
#Petro #visits #Pedro #Castillo #Monday #international #trip