MADRID, Spain.- The Foreign Relations Commission of the Legislative of Peru agreed to declare “persona non grata” to the president of Colombia Gustavo Petro. The motion for it was approved this Tuesday with thirteen votes in favor, three abstentions and zero against.
The measure is due to Petro’s recent statements about Peruvian police officers, about whom he said that they “marched like Nazis against their own people.” These words were pronounced last Friday during a speech for the inauguration of new ambassadors in Colombia and after images of the Peruvian police marching during a popular demonstration emerged.
The document approved on February 14 and cited by CNNconsiders the words of the Colombian president “unacceptable”, for “constituting an offense to the Peruvian national police, to the Republic of Peru and, by trivializing the Holocaust, it also constitutes an offense to the entire Jewish people, many of whose members are Peruvian nationals.
#World • The Foreign Relations Commission, chaired by Congresswoman Maricarmen Alva Prieto (AP), approved the motion for the agenda through which it expresses its rejection of President Petro’s statements against the Peruvian Police and declares him a person not welcome pic.twitter.com/9RE9JZQi9V
– QuintoPoder.com.co (@Soyquintopoder) February 14, 2023
The Commission, chaired by Congresswoman Maricarmen Alva Prieto, also urged the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs to take the necessary steps to ensure that Gustavo Petro does not enter Peruvian territory.
At the end of last year, the Peruvian parliament had approved a motion rejecting the interference of Gustavo Petro and his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in the internal affairs of Peru.
While, in January 2023, after the Colombian ruler ruled on the eviction of protesters at a university in Lima, the Peruvian government expressed, through a diplomatic letter, its “strong protest against a new act of interference ” de Petro in matters of internal politics.
Gustavo Petro came to power in June 2022, becoming the first leftist president in the democratic history of Colombia.
