The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, assured this Tuesday that the European Union and Colombia are working on a “stronger partnership”, after meeting with the president of the Latin American country, Gustavo Petro, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
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“We are working on a stronger partnership between the EU and Colombia, which can greatly benefit from the Global Gateway“, as the EU’s plan for investments in infrastructure around the world is called, Von der Leyen said on his official Twitter account.
Colombia is one of the countries that has had a particularly close historical link with the European Union, thanks to the political, commercial and cooperation dialogue that covers bilateral, regional and multilateral issues. The country is the first trading partner of the European Union within the Andean Community and the fifth in Latin America with a volume of transactions that reached 8,305 million euros in 2020.
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In turn, the EU is Colombia’s third largest trading partner and the first source of foreign direct investment in the country. The head of the Community Executive, who accompanied her tweet with a video of her meeting with Petro, added that she had also discussed “climate and environmental objectives” with the Colombian leader.
“We must all raise our climate ambitions,” added German politics. In his speech this Tuesday at the 76th General Assembly of the United Nations, Petro called for ending the “irrational” war on drugs, which is destroying the Amazon rainforest and harming his country.
In his first speech at a United Nations General Assembly as president of Colombia, the president assured that “the war on drugs has failed” and that “the fight against the climate crisis has failed.” He accused “capital” of being the responsible for climate change and to the West of using the wars that have been taking place as an “excuse for not acting against the climate crisis”.
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In his defense of the Amazon jungle, he proposed that resources from the international community be used for this purpose, in a kind of exchange of “debt for life, for nature.”
EFE
