WASHINGTON (AFP) – United States (US) President Joe Biden said he is committed to resolving the crisis in Venezuela, after Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro asked for sanctions to be lifted on the far-left government in return for restoring democracy.
In a joint statement following a meeting at the White House on Thursday, the two leaders expressed a “shared commitment to support and contribute to the resolution of the situation in Venezuela”.
Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, told reporters that he discussed a strategy with Biden for resolving the crisis in far-left leader Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, which is deeply isolated by US and European sanctions.
“A strategy was proposed… which is to hold elections first and then lift sanctions. Or gradually as an electoral agenda is fulfilled, those sanctions are also lifted in parallel,” Petro said.
He said he and Biden had discussed a conference on Venezuela to be hosted by Colombia next week with foreign ministers from Europe, Latin America, and the US. Washington supports the lifting of sanctions for democracy, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Thursday.
“We’ve long been clear that we will-we would-review our sanctions policies in response to constructive steps by the Maduro regime and if the Venezuelan parties can make meaningful progress in Calling Colombia a “key” to the hemisphere, Biden said Petro had been “outspoken and strong” on human rights in a region with a long history of abuses and armed conflict.
The US president thanked Colombia for its handling of large numbers of refugees from neighbouring Venezuela, which has suffered years of economic collapse and violent political tension.
Petro told reporters after his talks that he had also asked Biden for help in developing a new, more targetted approach to the decades-long, US-backed military campaign against drug lords in Colombia.
The two leaders said they instructed their teams to “intensify and expand bilateral cooperation in intelligence and interdiction to dismantle the networks, pursue the true owners and enablers of drug trafficking in their jurisdictions, and counter illicit finance”.
