Bogotá, March 23 (EFE).- The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, will travel this Thursday for the third time to Caracas to have his fourth meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, following bilateral relations were reestablished last year.
The meeting is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. local time (7:00 p.m. GMT), following Petro attends a private meeting in Bogotá on energy transition and it is likely that he will return this Thursday, since on Friday he is scheduled to travel to the Dominican Republic to attend the XXVIII Ibero-American Summit.
The one this Thursday in Caracas is a meeting to follow up on issues addressed in previous meetings, as reported to EFE by the Presidency.
With the arrival of Petro, Colombia and Venezuela reestablished the diplomatic relations broken by Maduro on February 23, 2019 as a result of the attempt of the then “interim president” of Venezuela, the opposition Juan Guaidó, to enter his country from the Colombian city of Cúcuta at the head of a humanitarian caravan, an attempt that ended in riots at the border.
Since then, in addition to diplomacy, the vast 2,219-kilometer border they share has been reopened commercially and work has begun on trade agreements and agreements of a different nature, which will continue to be discussed at this new meeting.
In their last meeting, held right on the border, in Tienditas, one of the bridges that connect the two countries, Petro and Maduro signed a commercial agreement to reach the goal of 1.8 billion dollars in commercial operations this year.
If this result materializes, it will multiply by eight the 222 million dollars of 2020, the worst year of the bilateral relationship, but still well below the record of 7,000 million dollars reached in 2008.
In previous meetings, other issues have been discussed, such as Colombia’s desire for Venezuela to re-enter international organizations such as the Andean Community (CAN) or the Inter-American Human Rights System, migration -both of Venezuelans in Colombia and Colombians in Venezuela- , the “democratic construction of America”, the environment or national security.
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