The meeting scheduled for this morning (Spanish time) in Bogotá between the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, could not take place due to last-minute changes in the Colombian president’s agenda.
Aragonès, who began a South American tour on Sunday in Colombia that also includes Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, was scheduled to meet Petro tonight in what would be his first meeting with a foreign president abroad.
However, a meeting with heads of other political parties on the controversial health reform that the Government has presented for approval in Congress prevented Petro from receiving Aragonès, who has finally met with the Colombian Foreign Minister, Álvaro Leyva. , and with the Minister of Finance, José Antonio Ocampo.
Petro has an agenda outside of Bogotá all day tomorrow, so it is doubtful whether he can meet with the Catalan president to address issues such as “total peace” or the environment.
“The relationship between Catalonia and Colombia is very intense regardless of the political affiliation or political sympathies of the people involved,” Aragonès said Monday at a press conference in Bogotá.
Petro, before becoming President, on several occasions showed his public support for the independence process in Catalonia, but since he was elected president he has remained silent on the issue and opted for relations with the Spanish central government, which has made numerous visits to the country, including that of President Pedro Sánchez.
“We appreciate all the gestures of sensitivity towards the situation in Catalonia,” said Aragonès, who also wanted to stay away from controversy, assuring that they want to establish “an institutional relationship between Catalan and Colombian institutions beyond political opinions and political approaches that the governments on duty have”.
In recent weeks, a controversy has been unleashed over the influence of two Catalan advisers from Petro’s entourage, whom he nationalized as Colombians: the independentista Xavier Vendrell and the businessman Manuel Grau.
Vendrell, a former deputy of the Catalan Parliament and former secretary of the organization of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), is involved in a judicial process in the so-called Voloh operation, which investigates the diversion of public funds to organize protests and other events in the independence project.
In an interview this Sunday with Cambio Magazine, Petro unmarked Vendrell with corruption and assured that the process that persecutes him “has to do with politics.” “Vendrell is one of the actors that makes the clandestine referendum on the independence of Catalonia, with the Catalan president of that time (Carles Puigdemont) and several people that I know personally and are my friends, who were the Catalan government,” he assured. .
Asked about this case, Aragonès said that it is “natural” that there may be Catalans involved in Colombian politics, just as there are parliamentarians and councilors in Catalonia of Colombian origin. “For our part, we have no say in the decisions made by the Colombian government,” he concluded.
