The presidents of VenezuelaNicolas Maduro, and ColombiaGustavo Petro, reactivated on Thursday a trade agreement signed in 2011 and frozen four years ago due to the breakdown of bilateral relations.
Maduro said he was committed to a common “economic zone” with special conditions for trade, after signing with Petro the protocol that relaunched the agreement.
I share the Official Statement on the signing of the Partial Scope Agreement of a Commercial Nature No. 28 signed between Venezuela and Colombia, today #16Feb. We are marked by providence and destiny to live as sisters and brothers! pic.twitter.com/FqryTGKPmo
— Nicolas Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) February 17, 2023
“This agreement creates the bases for us to take steps in that direction,” said the Venezuelan president during the ceremony at the Atanasio Girardot border bridge, which connects the towns of Ureña (Táchira, Venezuela) and Cúcuta (Norte de Santander, Colombia). . “Cool winds are blowing here,” he continued.
“You have to fill these trade bridges, remove the barriers that may exist,” expressed in turn Petro.
“There is still a lot to do, because it is not a question of these bridges being filled only with commerce, but rather that they are filled with people (…), I am not referring to the large capital that wants to invest from one side to the other, I am referring to the little capitals” of the inhabitants of the border, added the Colombian ruler.
Maduro and Petro had their room face to face, in an act with music and typical dances, sitting on the sides of a white line that marked the border, according to a report from AFP.
Venezuela and Colombia resumed relations after the arrival of Petro to power in August, with the promise of “normalizing” the common 2,200 km border line, hit by armed groups and smuggling.
Relations between the two nations had broken in 2019, when the government of Iván Duque recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” of the neighboring country due to questions about Maduro’s re-election.
The agreement signed in 2011, following the decision of the late former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) to remove Venezuela from the Andean Community (CAN), established tariff preferences and criteria for the control of the products to be traded. It entered into force in 2012.
The protocol closed this Thursday “updates” tariffs and conditions, Maduro asserted, although none of the rulers gave further details.
The border bridges were reopened at the end of September. They had been restricted since 2015 and blocked since 2019, when Guaidó led a failed attempt to pass food and medicine sent by the United States, leaving them only for pedestrians.
Venezuela and Colombia seek to recover a commercial exchange that reached 7.2 billion dollars a year in 2008, but which plummeted to 400 million after the breakup.
The resumption of transit brought the figure to some 1.2 billion in 2022, according to estimates by the private Colombian-Venezuelan Chamber of Integration (CAVECOL) cited by the French agency.
With information from Efe and AFP.
