Nicolás Maduro receives Gustavo Petro in Caracas to stage the thaw in relations that have been practically broken for a decade
Venezuela and Colombia resumed diplomatic relations on Tuesday, broken for three years and seriously damaged for a decade. The Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, received with honors his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, at the Miraflores presidential palace, to stage the thaw between the two countries. On the table, endless issues of vital importance, from trade between the two neighbors to the migration issue or negotiations with the ELN guerrillas.
Petro landed at the ‘Simón Bolívar’ International Airport in the Venezuelan capital accompanied by a diplomatic delegation. He was received by the Venezuelan Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Farí. A military choir interpreted the Colombian anthem and then the Venezuelan one. Signs of a new time for both countries.
“It is perhaps the first meeting between presidents for many years, six years of political vacuum between two neighbors, Colombia and Venezuela,” Petro said from a military airport in Bogotá before leaving for the Venezuelan capital. “There is a lot to talk about obviously after so long,” he added.
Petro became the first Colombian president to set foot in Venezuela since 2013, when Juan Manuel Santos attended the funeral of Hugo Chávez. The leftist president, the first in Colombian history, promised when he was elected in August that he would resume relations with the neighboring country.
Contacts had been frozen since Petro’s predecessor, Iván Duque, recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” of Venezuela in 2019. But they were badly damaged from before. In 2013, after succeeding Chávez, Maduro charged the then Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, for receiving the opposition Henrique Capriles. Maduro denounced a “permanent conspiracy” against Caracas that he described as “unacceptable.”
The coming to power of Petro last August led to a rapid rapprochement by Maduro, isolated from the international community. One of the first decisions that the new Colombian president adopted with respect to his Venezuelan neighbor was to include the Government of Caracas in the negotiations with the ELN, the last great guerrilla group operating in Latin America.
It is not in vain that Venezuela will be the guarantor and one of the venues for the forthcoming negotiations between the Bogotá government and the ELN. The internal struggle in Colombia, which has lasted six decades and has the guerrillas as one of its main actors, has already left more than nine million victims among the dead, wounded and displaced.
One of the first major actions in the Caracas-Bogotá rapprochement was the reopening of the 2,200-kilometer border between the two countries for the transport of goods last September. Passage has been restricted since 2015 and completely blocked since 2019. As a consequence, trade relations have been seriously undermined. In 2008, the best year for bilateral trade, Colombia exported 6,000 million dollars and imported 1,200. Today the figure is depressing, reaching only 383 million. Migration was another of the big issues on the table. Colombia currently hosts nearly 2.5 million Venezuelan migrants, according to UN data.
Guaidó’s rejection
The great voice that was against the thaw between Bogotá and Caracas was that of Juan Guaidó, more isolated than ever in the international sphere and with a very low profile since in 2018 a large part of the international community recognized him as “legitimate” president. from Venezuela. Guaidó criticized that, with his visit, the Colombian leader “normalizes the dictatorship” and asked Petro to demand the holding of “free” elections in Venezuela, despite the fact that the Colombian head of state already recognizes the 2018 elections that gave him the Victory to Nicolás Maduro.
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