Petro announces Colombia’s return to Unasur five years after Duque left the organization

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced on Tuesday the return of Colombia to the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), five years after the country’s then president, Iván Duque, left the organization, claiming that it served the interests of the Venezuelan dictatorship.

Petro, in Brasília for a summit of South American leaders, has indicated that he has decided to “reintegrate the country into Unasur, ratifying the treaty approved by Congress,” according to a posting on his Twitter social network profile.

“I have requested that it be called Association of South American Nations to guarantee pluralism and permanence in time”, added the Colombian leader.

In the framework of this summit promoted by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leaders such as Argentine Alberto Fernández have called for regional unity to be a state policy in each country to achieve an organization that strengthens all countries to face “the new dimension of globalization,” reports the agency Télam.

“Unasur is not an ideological space but a space of common interests that we must develop and deepen”, said Fernández at the Itamaraty Palace, headquarters of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, where he said that “it did us no good to be divided” in the Covid-19 pandemic, referring to the difficulty of obtaining vaccines in the continent.

“First (we will have to) coordinate interests and integrate physically. It is a matter of ensuring health security.”

“We have just lived through a pandemic where we all ran around looking for vaccines.”

“We must learn from what we have lived through; the good thing is the experience we have left”, he explained.

Unasur is a regional intergovernmental organization founded in 2008 and is currently formed by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela after several countries suspended their participation in 2018.

With information from LGI

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