On Wednesday, the president was received with military honors at the Casa de Nariño presidential palace, where he held talks with his counterpart Gustavo Petro about issues of common interest such as trade, investments and care of the Amazon.
Later, both rulers attended a ceremony where seven cooperation agreements were signed on issues associated with family farming, tourism, information and communications technologies, and the promotion of good practices and defense of the rights of groups of vulnerable people.
Afterward, the leaders attended the Colombia-Brazil business forum, where more than 300 businessmen and women from both countries participated.
Lula da Silva affirmed that his visit to Bogotá represents the renewal of a fundamental partnership for the future of South America. He stressed that both countries need to build a strategic association and eliminate all obstacles that hinder mutual negotiations. “Colombia is not just any country, it is a country with 55 million inhabitants, it is a thriving country, and with extraordinary cultural wealth and extraordinary reserve potential in the Amazon,” he stated.
Da Silva also considered that despite the growth experienced in commercial exchange between both nations, there is still a lot of potential.
Gustavo Petro, in turn, defended in a joint statement, the idea that the links reach a strategic nature, driving South America as a whole towards a real rather than a rhetorical integration. “A strategic relationship means prioritizing, establishing concrete measures, that the two economies are integrated and not separated,” he explained and proposed to da Silva to create a union between Ecopetrol and Petrobras, the main oil companies of both countries, which would integrate the public and private capital of the two nations.
The union would generate green hydrogen from clean energy sources, Petro considered and proposed “to do a common clean energy project to move to the forefront of clean energy in Latin America and the world. Green hydrogen may be the oil of the future,” the president stated.
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