Colombian President Gustavo Petro last Saturday at the Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo Mauricio Duenas Castaneda (EFE)
The Peruvian government on Wednesday announced the permanent departure of its ambassador to Colombia, attributing its decision to some comments made by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, which he described as “interfering and offensive”. The executive, which has been headed by Dina Boluarte since last December, reiterated that the neighboring country’s president “persists in distorting reality” by not acknowledging that former President Pedro Castillo carried out a failed self-coup on December 7 .
Petro insured last Saturday during the XXVIII. Ibero-American Summit in Santo Domingo that Castillo should have been at the meeting, not in prison. “Today it should be here, they took it out. He’s in prison,” he introduced to Peru’s Foreign Minister, Ana Cecilia Gervasi. She responded shortly afterwards, “If Pedro Castillo isn’t here, it’s because he staged a coup. If they were, they would have a dictator.”
With the resignation of the ambassador, Peru has confirmed its tendency towards foreign policy isolation. If Congress had already declared the Colombian president undesirable, this time the executive branch made a more drastic decision. The move, the State Department added, came precisely as Petro questioned former President Castillo’s failed coup attempt last December. The statement said that Petro’s comments “seriously deteriorated the historic relationship of friendship, cooperation and mutual respect that has existed between Peru and Colombia.”
Diplomatic relations between the two neighboring countries are now reduced to economic managers, just as relations between Mexico and Peru were. At the end of February, Boluarte announced the final dismissal of Manuel Gerardo Talavera Espinar, until then Peruvian ambassador to Mexico. The reason is the same, following the statements made by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
At the time, Boluarte insisted: “I firmly reject the statements made by the President of Mexico on the internal affairs of Peru and his unacceptable questions that he repeatedly raises about the constitutional and democratic origins of my government. Mr López has decided to support former President Pedro Castillo’s coup d’état, the same one that led to the unanimous rejection of the institutions that make up Peru’s democratic order.
Tensions with Colombia have risen over the past three months amid protests against the new Peruvian government. The statement that tightened the rope the most was when Petro said the Peruvian police “marched like a Nazi against their people.” Then Congress ruled against him.
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The statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ends with a request for reassurance: “Peru wishes that the close and bicentenary bilateral relations with Colombia resume their course within the framework of mutual respect and the norms, principles and values that govern coexistence between the two state However, in all that time, Petro has not given a single sign that he is ceasing his support for now-jailed country teacher Pedro Castillo.
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