World

Colombia’s Gustavo Petro met on Tuesday with his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro, in the first talks at presidential level since the neighbors reestablished diplomatic ties after a three-year break.

The meeting in Caracas of the two leftist leaders marked a watershed warming between the once-estranged neighbors.

Petro, a former M-19 leftist insurgent who was sworn in as Colombia’s first leftist president in August, called for Venezuela to be brought back into a regional trade alliance and a human rights system.

“We want to invite Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru to accept the reintegration of Venezuela in the Andean Community as a member with full powers,” Petro said after meeting Maduro at the Miraflores Palace.

Venezuela left the regional trade bloc in 2006.

Petro also called for Venezuela to be pulled back into the human rights convention of the Organization of American States, a hemispheric alliance.

Maduro said he was “very receptive” to the idea.

Venezuela severed diplomatic relations in 2019 after increasingly strained ties with Petro’s predecessors Juan Manuel Santos and conservative Ivan Duque — who Maduro even accused of orchestrating plans to assassinate him.

The final straw came when Duque backed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido — recognized by dozens of countries as the victor in 2018 elections claimed by Maduro.

It was the first visit by a Colombian president to Venezuela’s capital since 2013.

– Visit could ‘normalize’ violations –

Since Petro succeeded Duque in August, Colombia’s first ever left-wing president has moved to mend relations with Venezuela’s populist leftist government.

Caracas and Bogota formally reestablished diplomatic relations on August 29 by sending ambassadors to each other’s capitals.

Guaido on Tuesday criticized Petro’s decision “to visit the dictator Maduro… and to call him ‘president’.”

It was an “action that could dangerously normalize human rights violations… and the worst migration crisis in the world,” he wrote on Twitter.

More than seven million Venezuelans have left their country since 2014, according to the United Nations.

Some 2.5 million find themselves in Colombia, as part of an open-door policy followed under Duque, in support of Guaido.

Maduro, after the talks, called for “new steps toward a total opening” of the two neighbors’ shared 2,200-kilometer (1,370-mile) border, a frontier that has been infested with armed groups fighting over lucrative drug resources and routes.

In September, Colombia and Venezuela reopened the border to vehicles transporting goods — considered the first step toward resuming commercial relations worth about $7.2 billion in 2008 but only $400 million last year.

A string of recent leftist victories in South America meanwhile appear to have placed Maduro in a stronger position.

On Monday he said he had spoken to Brazil’s president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to “resume the binational agenda of cooperation” all but paralyzed under the government of far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and the pressure it placed on global energy supplies — also brought about behind-the-scenes efforts by the United States to engineer at least a minimal warming with Venezuela, a major oil producer.

Five police officers were killed, several more wounded and prison guards taken hostage Tuesday in the latest wave of attacks in a deadly gang war consuming Ecuador, authorities said.

President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of exception and nightly curfew in two coastal provinces, Guayas and Esmeraldas. The move allows the government to limit freedom of assembly and movement. 

Officials said organized crime groups launched nine attacks with explosives and firearms against police and oil installations in response to a transfer of inmates from Guayas 1 prison.

The prison, in the southwestern port city of Guayaquil, is one of the main scenes of a series of prison massacres that have left about 400 inmates dead since February 2021.

“We have had reactions” of “organized crime” in Guayaquil and in the northwestern oil port of Esmeraldas, Interior Minister Juan Zapata told reporters in the capital, Quito.

These included car bomb attacks and a bombing at a bus terminal.

In the early morning hours, two police officers died when their patrol car was attacked by people with firearms in Guayaquil, according to police.

Three more officers were gunned down later in the day in the port and the nearby city of Duran, police said.

A separate attack on a police station there left two officers injured. 

In Esmeraldas — the same city where two headless bodies were found hanging from a pedestrian bridge on Monday — inmates took eight guards hostage, according to the SNAI prison authority.

All were later freed, it said, without giving details about the guards’ condition.

A video circulated on Twitter appeared to show two guards with explosives tied to their bodies and a man claiming to be an inmate denouncing what he called prison corruption. AFP could not independently verify the video.

“If war is what they want, war is what they’ll get,” said the man, his face obscured, adding: “We will use these guards.”

– ‘Find the perpetrators’ –

The SNAI had earlier announced on Twitter that it was moving about 200 inmates from Guayas 1.

It said the transfers were necessitated by required maintenance to cell blocks.

But according to the purported hostage video, the move was the reason for the events at Esmeraldas.

“Given the events in Esmeraldas and GYE (Guayaquil), we activated our tactical and investigative units to maintain order and find the perpetrators,” the police said on Twitter. 

Once a relatively peaceful neighbor of major cocaine producers Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has seen a wave of violent crime that authorities blame on turf battles between rival drug gangs believed to have ties to Mexican cartels.

Hundreds of inmates have been killed — many beheaded or incinerated — as the fighting spilled into Ecuador’s hugely over-populated prisons.

Civilians have increasingly been caught up in the bloodshed, which has included a spate of car bombs.

The violence has claimed 61 police lives since last year.

Ecuador has gone from being a drug transit route in recent years to an important distribution center in its own right, with the United States and Europe the main destinations.

The murder rate in Ecuador nearly doubled in 2021 to 14 per 100,000 inhabitants, and reached 18 per 100,000 between January and October this year.

In 2021, law enforcement seized a record 210 tons of drugs, mostly cocaine. 

So far this year’s seizures total 160 tons.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday “authorized” the transition to a new government, without acknowledging his defeat to leftist rival Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro, 67, broke two days of silence after his razor-thin loss to Lula on Sunday, which sparked protests from his supporters across the country and fanned fears he would not accept the outcome.

In a speech that lasted just over two minutes, the far-right incumbent neither acknowledged defeat, nor congratulated Lula on his victory.

Bolsonaro started by thanking the 58 million Brazilians who voted for him, before commenting that the roadblocks erected by his supporters across the country were “the fruit of indignation and a feeling of injustice at how the electoral process took place.”

“Peaceful protests will always be welcome,” he said, adding that people should not be impeded from coming and going.

“As president of the Republic and a citizen I will continue to comply with our constitution,” he said, before handing the podium to his chief of staff Ciro Noguiera, who said Bolsonaro had “authorized” the “start of the transition” process.

Lula’s Workers’ Party announced Tuesday that his vice-president-elect Geraldo Alckmin would lead the transition process which would begin on Thursday. Lula will be inaugurated for his third term as president on January 1.

– No concession call –

Bolsonaro’s appearance, however succinct, capped two days of tensions over how he would respond to such a narrow loss after months of alleging fraud in the electoral system.

“Anyplace else in the world, the defeated president would have called me to recognize his defeat,” Lula said in his victory speech to a euphoric sea of red-clad supporters in Sao Paulo on Sunday night.

Bolsonaro remained silent even as key allies publicly recognized his loss, including the powerful speaker of the lower house of Congress, Arthur Lira.

Federal Highway Police (PRF) on Tuesday reported more than 250 total or partial road blockages in at least 23 states by Bolsonaro supporters, which they were attempting to disperse, in some cases firing teargas at demonstrators.

Protesters wearing the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag, which the outgoing president has adopted as his own, said they would not accept the outcome of the election.

“We will not accept losing what we have gained, we want what is written on our flag, ‘order and progress’. We will not accept the situation as it is,” Antoniel Almeida, 45, told AFP at a protest in Barra Mansa, Rio de Janeiro.

On Monday night, Judge Alexander de Moraes of the Supreme Court ordered police to disperse the blockades immediately. He was acting in response to a request by a transport federation that complained it was losing business.

– ‘Strength of our values’ –

Bolsonaro became the first incumbent president in Brazil not to win re-election in the post-dictatorship era after a four-year term in which he came under fire for his disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which left more than 680,000 dead in Brazil.

He also drew criticism for his vitriolic comments, polarizing style and attacks on democratic institutions and foreign allies.

Bolsonaro used his brief speech to reflect on his time in office and said the victory of a majority of right-wing candidates in Congress “shows the strength of our values: God, homeland, family, and liberty.”

“Our dreams are more alive than ever. Even in the face of the system, we overcame a pandemic and the consequences of a war,” Bolsonaro said, referring to Russia’s war against Ukraine, which has reverberated around the globe with rising prices and concerns of a major food crisis. “I was always labeled undemocratic and unlike my accusers, I always played within the limits of the constitution.”

– Lula gets to work –

The post-election drama follows a dirty and divisive election campaign between Bolsonaro and Lula, who returns to office in a dramatic comeback.

Brazil’s president between 2003 and 2010, Lula crashed into disgrace in a corruption scandal that landed him in jail before his conviction was thrown out due to bias from the lead judge. However, he was not exonerated.

The election outcome showed just how polarized the country is between the two very different leaders.

Lula scored 50.9 percent to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent — the narrowest margin in Brazil’s modern history.

With a massive to-do list, Lula leaped into action, meeting Argentine President Alberto Fernandez in Sao Paulo and holding a series of phone calls with US President Joe Biden, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and others.

Four of The Avengers swooped into a dangerous Lima neighborhood over the weekend, when Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor and the Black Widow broke down a door and arrested several wanted drug dealers.

The four “superheroes” were in fact members of a special Peruvian police squad pretending to be doing promotion for a Halloween concert, the police said in a statement on Tuesday.

The operation, dubbed “Marvel” after the comic book publisher of The Avengers, saw four officers dressed as superheroes walk nonchalantly down a street in the San Juan de Lurigancho neighborhood of Lima on Saturday.

Upon arriving at a specific house, Spider-Man and his friends whipped out special equipment and broke down a steel door, allowing 10 backup police members to enter and arrest three men and a woman.

The occupants, taken by surprise, at first thought it was a Halloween joke, according to police.

“In this building an entire family was dedicating themselves to the micro-commercialization of drugs. The drugs were going to be sold in a park nearby,” said police Colonel David Villanueva.

Police seized 3,250 small packages of basic cocaine paste — a crude extract of coca leaf — as well as 287 bags of cocaine and 127 of marijuana. 

One kilo of cocaine paste sells for roughly $380 in Peru, while a kilo of cocaine hydrochloride, the purest form, sells for about $1,000.

A senior official in President Joe Biden’s administration was visiting Ukraine on Tuesday to vow continued support, a week before congressional elections in which some Republicans have vowed more scrutiny of billions of dollars in war aid.

Karen Donfried, the top State Department official for Europe, is visiting Ukraine through Wednesday and will hold talks with officials from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s cabinet.

“The focus of her trip is to underscore unwavering and enduring US support for Ukraine as it defends its freedom and territorial integrity from Russia’s brutal war,” the State Department said in a statement.

She is also meeting personnel at the US embassy in Kyiv, which has remained operating despite stepped-up Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital including its power and water supplies.

The US Congress committed $40 billion for Ukraine in May with support across party lines as the country fights back against Russian invaders.

Kevin McCarthy, who stands to become House speaker if the Republicans win next week’s election, recently warned there would be no “blank check” for Ukraine if his party is in control.

Ukraine enjoys backing from much of the Republican base although hard-right lawmakers close to former president Donald Trump have voiced criticism.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited Kyiv on September 8, will also voice support for Ukraine in talks this week with counterparts of Group of Seven industrialized nations in Muenster, Germany.

Howard Solomon, a deputy to Donfried, said the G7 will discuss ways to support Ukraine with the onset of winter amid the Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure.

“I think there’s a lot of common positions and solidarity — and I think among populations as well, even within Europe, within the United States — in terms of the need to support Ukraine’s heroic efforts to stand up to this invasion,” he told reporters.

In Muenster, Blinken will also participate with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in a forum on the future of democracy.