CARACAS (AP) — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Thursday signed a partial agreement that establishes the legal framework that will govern recently reactivated bilateral trade relations, interrupted for nearly seven years due to political tensions.
The Partial Agreement, in essence, updates a series of rules and procedures related to preferential tariff treatment, sanitary and phytosanitary standards or the dispute settlement mechanism inherent in the development and increase in trade in goods and services, among other common economic activities.
The original agreement was signed more than ten years ago by the governments of Caracas and Bogotá.
It is a “partial agreement which is a further step towards integration, which in my opinion should never have been suspended”, said Petro during the Atanasio Girardot bridge inaugurated on January 1, nearly seven years after completion of the construction works. “There is still a lot to do,” he stressed.
The bridge, known as Tienditas and which cost $32 million, was funded by the two countries to speed up vehicular traffic, saturated in the first two binational bridges that connect Colombia’s Norte de Santander department to the Venezuelan state of Táchira, about 750 kilometers to the west. of Caracas.
Maduro, for his part, stressed that the legal instrument puts the two countries on the “path of work, productivity and economic and commercial growth”.
Maduro added, without giving details, that the agreement also lays the groundwork for the creation of a special economic zone between Venezuela and Colombia.
With the coming to power of Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president, in August 2022, diplomatic and commercial relations with Caracas were restored. His predecessor Iván Duque (2018-2022) called Nicolás Maduro a “dictator”.
Colombia was part of the bloc of 50 countries that came to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who in 2019 declared himself interim president when he was head of the National Assembly, arguing that Maduro had been re-elected in 2018 in fraudulent elections.
International support for Guaidó has declined significantly over the years, and even his former opposition allies in the Assembly ended the interim government in December.
Bilateral trade resumed last September, when the passage of freight vehicles through the Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander bridges was opened; but trade has been sluggish in part due to the lack of a legal backbone to accompany the reactivation of the relationship.
With the opening of the third bridge in the area, it was agreed to allow the permanent passage of international cargo and passenger transport, despite the fact that the latter was initially postponed.