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Colombia and Venezuela advance in the reestablishment of relations with the appointment of ambassadors

2022-08-12T01:20:58.849Z


Nicolás Maduro appointed his former foreign minister Félix Plasencia, and Gustavo Petro chose former senator Armando Benedetti


Armando Benedetti, during the last electoral campaign. Juan Carlos Zapata

The governments of Venezuela and Colombia announced this Thursday, almost simultaneously, the names that will lead the reestablishment of diplomatic relations.

The decision comes on the fifth day of Gustavo Petro's presidency in Colombia, after he defended the need to make this change in foreign policy during his election campaign.

Nicolás Maduro chose Félix Plasencia, a Chavista diplomat and politician who was his chancellor between 2021 and last May.

Plasencia, who was trained as a representative of the foreign service in Venezuela, Belgium and England, has been in the diplomatic career since 1991, years before the rise of Chavismo.

For about 30 years he has been close to today's Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who is also a career diplomat.

Among other functions, he was director of protocol for the Foreign Ministry under Rodríguez, Minister of Tourism and Foreign Trade under Maduro between 2019 and 2020, and ambassador to China between 2020 and 2021.

Gustavo Petro, for his part, appointed former senator Armando Benedetti, one of the first figures from the traditional political class to support his presidential campaign.

Benedetti, son of a former Barranquilla minister, has had a long political career, in which he first supported Álvaro Uribe, then Juan Manuel Santos and now Petro.

A long-time militant of the La U Party, of which he was a senator between 2010 and 2022, for this year's legislative elections he supported candidates from Petro's Historical Pact list and was the one who managed his agenda as a candidate.

No one flew with him more across the country or was more intimate with him during the campaign.

Even before the formal possession of Petro, the two governments had already agreed to advance in the reopening of the border and the recovery of commercial exchange, and had agreed to appoint both the ambassadors that they announced this Thursday and officials consular officers, after years of irreconcilable differences during Iván Duque's term, which formally expired last Sunday with the ceremony of transfer of command.

The two capitals have also announced that they will work to improve security along a long and porous border line of more than 2,200 kilometers.

This Tuesday, the Venezuelan Defense Minister, Vladimir Padrino, had reported that, by order of Maduro, he would establish contact "immediately" with his Colombian counterpart, Iván Velásquez,

The Colombian-Venezuelan border became the busiest in Latin America, and at its peak, in 2008, trade reached 7.29 billion dollars.

“President Gustavo Petro, I will surprise you when we reach 10,000 million dollars in commercial exchange, when we benefit the more than 8 million Colombians who live on the border.

No imaginary line will separate us as brothers again, ”Benedetti reacted on his social networks after the news.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-08-12

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