Colombia’s new ambassador to Venezuela takes office in Caracas

First modification: 08/30/2022 – 03:38

The arrival of the ambassadors to Caracas and Bogotá marks the reestablishment of relations between Venezuela and Colombia from this Monday, August 29.

Both countries had not had diplomatic representation since February 23, 2019 due to an escalation of tensions between Nicolás Maduro and the then president of Colombia Iván Duque, who decided to recognize the opposition Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela, a fact that triggered Maduro to break the relationships.

That was the highest point of a bond full of tensions during two decades of confrontations between the ruling Chavismo and the right-wing period that former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe began (2002-2010).

Now, with the arrival of the leftist Gustavo Petro to the Presidency of Colombia, relations between the two nations are beginning to move towards normalization.

This Monday, Armando Benedetti was received with honors at the Miraflores Palace, in Caracas, by the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Carlos Faría. Later, he met with Nicolás Maduro and other officials, including the Foreign Minister, the Minister of Communication, Freddy Ñáñez, and deputy Cilia Flores, Maduro’s wife.

From the Twitter account of the Colombian Presidency, it was said that they spoke about the urgency of “reestablishing friendship ties in an organized manner to guarantee their success.”

The new ambassador in Caracas did the same on his social networks. “…We talked about the urgency of reestablishing the bonds of friendship that should never have been broken.” And he showed three photographs of the meeting in which the gifts that both exchanged can be seen: a typical Colombian hat and a painting of the liberator Simón Bolívar.

Benedetti arrived in Caracas on Sunday, when former Foreign Minister Félix Plasencia also traveled to Bogotá to take office as the new Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia. Plasencia was foreign minister between August 2021 and May 2022 and ambassador to China between 2019 and 2021.

For his part, Benedetti, 54, was one of the first traditional politicians to join Petro’s presidential aspiration, after having reached the Senate in 2006 under the umbrella of the Democratic Center, a party founded by former President Uribe.

The challenges in trade, immigration and security

The Colombian diplomat has assured that more than eight million Colombians live from binational trade with Venezuela, so one of the objectives is to restore trade relations between the two countries.

For their part, Venezuelan industrial entrepreneurs have also expressed their desire to normalize the trade that existed for years.

This normalization is expected to boost commercial exchange, “which was close to 7.2 billion dollars in 2008,” as reported by the AFP news agency, but which collapsed with the partial closure of the border in 2015 and total in 2019.

The Colombian-Venezuelan Chamber manages projections of commercial exchanges of 800 million to 1,200 million dollars in 2022, after last year the figure was around 400 million.

The other crucial issue in the reestablishment of relations is the immigration issue. Colombia welcomes, to date, two of the six million Venezuelans who have migrated due to the crisis in their country in the last five years.

The extensive border of more than 2,000 km that both countries share is also the scene of clashes between armed groups and the Public Force of both nations, in the midst of complaints by former Colombian President Iván Duque against Maduro, who accused him of hosting on his side the border to FARC dissidents, guerrillas from the National Liberation Army (ELN) and drug traffickers.

With AFP and EFE