Far-left President of Colombia Gustavo Petro arrived in Beijing on Monday to meet with Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping in order to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), according to official press releases.
Petro landed in Beijing in the early morning hours of Monday for a week-long visit to the Asian nation in the company of his daughter Antonella. Petro will represent the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) regional bloc at the upcoming fourth Ministerial CELAC-China meeting on Tuesday.
Petro, who presently chairs CELAC’s yearly rotating pro-tempore presidency, will be joined at the event by other far-left presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Gabriel Boric of Chile. Xi will deliver a speech to kick off the forum.
The Colombian Presidency officially announced on Monday that Petro will meet with Xi on Wednesday to “talk about investments and purchases of Colombian products,” and he plans to meet with other Chinese regime officials in addition to his participation at the CELAC-China gathering.
Petro kicked off his visit with a stop at the Great Wall of China, where he confirmed his plans to have Colombia join the BRI, a program in which China offers predatory loans to poor countries.
“We are going to sign the Silk Road. Both Latin America and Colombia are free, sovereign, and independent. And the relations we establish with any people in the world — north, east, west, or south — must be based on conditions of freedom and equality,” Petro said. “To that extent, we have decided to take a deep step forward between China and Latin America.”
The far-left president published a video on his social media accounts where he prefaced that he was “a bit tired of climbing the Great Wall of China,” and explained what he intends to achieve during his official visit to China as head of state and as CELAC’s pro-tempore chairman. Petro said that the CELAC-China meeting will be followed by a CELAC and European Union gathering at a later date, and stated that he requested the United States hold a similar meeting with CELAC.
“And in this, Colombia still plays a much more important role as the heart of the world, because its inter-oceanic condition with Panama allows us to cross the lines of the largest world trade to the north, to the east, and to the west, and allows us to lay the optical fibers for the whole world,” he explained, “communicate with the whole world… condition for peace and condition for the development of science and the possibility of being like the Latins ad astra.”
The Petro-Xi meeting will occur roughly a week after Petro’s former Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva revealed in a letter that Petro disrespected Xi by refusing to speak to him during a lavish banquet on the occasion of Petro’s visit to China in 2023. Leyva asserted that the incident — and several others involving other heads of state — are evidence of Petro’s drug addiction problems, something the former minister first claimed in a previous letter.
“You [Petro] ignored him [Xi]. As if he were not present. It was up to me to take [your] place. For two long hours, I talked with President XI Jinping. In the meantime, ten courses were served in the style of official Chinese banquets,” Leyva wrote in the letter.
“With Xi Jinping, I had the pleasure of talking about his family and mine. About local politics, his vision of the world, and the future of international trade. Once again, I saw you in very bad shape, President Petro,” he continued.
Various Colombian trade associations have reportedly criticized Petro’s intention to have Colombia join BRI in recent days. Bruce Mac Master, president of the National Association of Colombian Businessmen, questioned why Colombia wants to do this at this time, and “in exchange for what?”
“What justification does it have from the point of view of international strategy these days? How does it affect the relationship with our commercial allies who buy most of our exports? Hopefully these aspects are taken into consideration when discussing or considering the issue,” Mac Master said last week.
María Claudia Lacouture, head of the Colombian American Chamber of Commerce and former commerce minister, expressed her concerns over the Colombia-China BRI deal in a Sunday interview given to the magazine Semana, where she stressed, “the relationship with China has not been reciprocal nor has it generated commensurate benefits for Colombia.”
Lacouture described the BRI deal as a gesture of “strategic alignment with a country that does not operate under the principles of a market economy,” and further stressed that the decision “must be weighed rigorously, without compromising its productive fabric or its historical relations.”
On Friday, days before departing to China, Petro proposed to export Colombian onions to China — leading to a barrage of criticism and ridicule due to the fact that China is the world’s second top onion producer. Former Colombian Minister of Finance José Manuel Restrepo was among those who criticized Petro over his “profound ignorance of value chains and international logistics.”
“This gives a reading of infinite clumsiness because what the president is looking for is, eventually, to open a bigger crack in the relationship between Colombia and the United States, perhaps to use it politically,” Restrepo told Semana on Monday.
“What is President Petro looking for? To put at risk a diplomatic relationship of more than 200 years that we have with the United States and with the first trade and investment partner? To put jobs at risk?” He continued. “Politically, a measure of this nature is incomprehensible because it ends up affecting the most vulnerable in society and the generation of income in the economy.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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