Gustavo Petro arrived in New York on the President’s plane last night. He traveled in a leather seat with a wooden table and armrests. They prepared him a room with a bed and some books in case he wanted to distract himself while driving. However, the President used the five-hour flight to prepare his speech to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which was the first act of his tour of the United States, which will culminate when he meets with Joe Biden. on Thursday. Exactly a month and a half ago, Petro told him on the phone: “I have to tell you something about Venezuela.”
Then the White House tenant on the other side of the line invited him to visit him in Washington. Biden and Petro are basically looking for the same thing, namely presidential elections in which Chavismo agree to respect electoral laws and allow the opposition to run with guarantees. Biden has approached the Venezuelan government timidly in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Petro, anything but timid, has made restoring political normality in Caracas his concern. Colombian diplomacy has spent all these months acting as a bridge between Nicolás Maduro and Biden. Petro’s walk through the neoclassical halls of the west wing will be the final confirmation of these efforts.
Dialogues between Chavismo and the opposition continue to falter. Maduro has even revealed that the elections could take place this year, complicating the whole panorama. Meanwhile, the international community, led by Petro, is looking for a solution. Maduro believes the United States has failed in its promise by not releasing Venezuelan assets held abroad, which were supposed to be used to oxygenate the government coffers, and by not lifting some of the sanctions. For its part, Washington is convinced that Chavismo has no real desire to democratize institutions. Nobody is giving up at the moment.
Petro has organized a summit of diplomats from around the world in Bogotá next week to bring these two opposing positions closer together. “With one goal: that there are no sanctions and that there is much more democracy. More democracy, zero sanctions, that is the goal of the conference in Bogotá,” he said in New York. He spoke of sanctions as Chavismo’s main demand, but then he pointed out that democracy “is the key”. “Let it be what the Venezuelan people decide freely and without pressure about their immediate future,” he added.
Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia, at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, this Monday, April 17, 2023.CRISTIAN GARAVITO (Chairman)
Before raising this matter, Petro has three days ahead of him with an agenda full of public interventions and meetings with congressmen and businessmen. This Monday he spoke for 16 minutes at the UN forum calling for a summit of the countries responsible for the Amazon rainforest in Belém do Pará, Brazil. His idea is that the 10 countries involved – he also convinced Maduro on this issue – can build a joint program that will allow the necessary flow of funds, and for this he has taken the first step by announcing that Colombia will invest more than $150 million in that fund.
Newsletter
Current affairs analysis and the best stories from Colombia, delivered to your inbox every week
GET THIS
He began his speech with a story he has told on more than one occasion, that of an indigenous leader named Roberto Cobaría of the U’wa people. He heard the activists say that extracting oil from the earth drains their blood and that doing so would have dire consequences, such as the planet going extinct. “The truth is, I learned that the indigenous peoples, their worldview, their desire for an enduring balance with nature, was absolutely spot on. They had discovered it before western science did,” he said.
In an address to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, he recalled that he had asked the IMF to swap external debt for climate action. “Governments will be able to reduce their debt, allowing for a public finance space that enables tangible climate outcomes,” he added. Petro believes that in this way states could be fiscally and financially strong and only then could they act. The world would become a decarbonized economy, with no oil, no capital accumulation. In short, an idealistic discourse that he wanted to achieve throughout his life.
In the evening, cruise coast-to-coast to reach San Francisco. At Stanford University in Palo Alto, he will give a lecture in the same room where Barack Obama gave his last speech as president. From there he will fly east again, this time to Washington, where he will wait to meet Biden. This time, without using the phone in between, they can talk face-to-face about any topic that concerns them, but especially about Venezuela, the topic that keeps them up at night.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the latest information about the country.