“I have spoken by phone with the president @LulaOficial. I extended my most sincere congratulations to him,” said the Colombian president, citing a section of the conversation as follows:
“’The relations between Colombia and Brazil will be close because we both love the Amazon,’ (Lula) told me. This is how he will be president”, added the first left-wing president of Colombia.
Lula won Sunday’s runoff election against far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and will govern the country for the third time after leading it between 2003 and 2010.
With a “Viva Lula”, Petro celebrated the victory on Sunday in the midst of a second wave of the left that seems to settle in Latin America.
The former senator and former Colombian guerrilla assumed power on August 7 with an ambitious environmental project that aspires to lead the country towards clean energy and foresees that the great powers pay for the care of the forests.
In September Petro denounced before the UN that the Amazon is being a victim of the “addiction” of rich countries for cocaine, money and natural resources such as coal and oil.
Between 2018 and 2021, Colombia lost an area of 7,018 km2 of forest due to deforestation, a little more than the extension of the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, according to the United Nations. Most of the devastated forests were recorded in the Amazon.
Along the lines of Petro, the elected president of Brazil promised on Sunday to combat deforestation, which shot up more than 70% during the four years of Bolsonaro.
He also said that he was willing to play an important role in the fight against climate change, and proclaimed that the planet needs a “living Amazon.”
The new leftist wave that is gravitating in Latin America is reminiscent of that of the early 2000s, after the right-wing and center-right parties lost power in the last elections in Honduras, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and now Brazil.
The entrance President of Colombia and Lula line up in defense of the Amazon was first published in diary TODAY.
