The elected president of the Republic of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, reiterated his desire to normalize relations with Venezuela with a view to contributing to the economic development of the region.
“We have to normalize relations. This is because we have been coming for years and there are complexities in many issues. The border is my main concern. Because there is strong, very strong illegality there. There are also real possibilities,” Petro said in an interview with the Colombian website Cambio.
“Cúcuta is not an Andean town far from the sea. Cúcuta is a coastal town. It is an hour from the sea, only the sea is on the other side. So, how is it that we do not take advantage of that to industrialize the territory? I mean, Due to our political difficulties between nations, it does not take advantage of an enormous territorial advantage that exists there,” Petro asserted.
Another issue that he addressed in the interview was the one referring to the Venezuelan state-owned company Monómeros, which is on New Granada soil, and which was improperly handed over by the administration of Iván Duque to former deputy Juan Guaidó, as denounced by the Venezuelan State.
In this regard, Petro pointed out: “Another immediate problem is Monómeros, because neither more nor less Monómeros, which is a company unknown to many Colombians, located in Barranquilla and which is Colombian-Venezuelan, with a Venezuelan majority, is the one that produced the fertilizers and today the fundamental problem of agriculture and hunger are fertilizers. The financial suffocation that this company has suffered has paralyzed it and we are importing fertilizers at three times the value.”
On the other hand, in the interview, the elected president advocated creating a consensus among the progressive forces of that country that want a transformation through common objectives and break with sectarianism.
He mentioned a series of urgent issues that he will attend to immediately once his mandate officially begins on August 7.
He indicated that his government intends to “break with sectarianism, both from the right and from the left, for which it is necessary to talk with all sectors and build agreements.”
“What we have achieved, and there is a conversation that is already planned with Álvaro Uribe Vélez, there is another with Rodolfo Hernández, is basically to build a climate that I would call one of peace, of dialogue, without thinking of unanimity, because that is not going to never exist in a human society,” said the president-elect.
Likewise, he referred to his tense relationship with the military and police, his comprehensive peace plan and a proposal that he will make to the United States to modify the application of extradition.
The President-elect maintained that “the National Agreement has to be generated in spaces that are not properly parliamentary, that are social, where there is also politics, obviously.”
“Those spaces in the first place; I would like them to be the regional ones to face the conflict from the outset, because the conflict we have today has regional specificities; it cannot be processed homogeneously at the national level,” he said.
Regarding peace in Colombia, Petro announced that I have asked the Catholic Church to establish the channels for a comprehensive peace process throughout Colombia.
“Comprehensive means that it is not simply with what is still considered insurgency today, but rather open to everything that means the use of illegal weapons. Well, we are going to make that official. I believe that the Catholic Church today must play a fundamental role in the construction of peace in Colombia,” he stressed.