Almost a week has passed since The Hague’s ruling in favor of Colombia in the lawsuit with Nicaragua over sovereignty in the maritime platform that surrounds the islands of San Andrés and Providencia; however, there are still disputes over who owns the credit for the historic victory.
Among the most striking disputes are that of President Gustavo Petro and former President Iván Duque, who have left messages on social networks that fuel the controversy. In the most recent chapter, the current head of state published on July 19 on his Twitter account:
“They didn’t do it in two centuries, we do it now. For the first time Colombia does not lose in territorial negotiations. We knew how to defend our sovereignty. They lost the Mosquito coast, they lost Panama, they lost the Monks, they lost the Amazon jungle, they lost 75,000 km2 of the Caribbean Sea. We defended the continental maritime platform and we won. San Andrés y Providencia will be Colombian and Raizal”.
The message published by Petro was interpreted by many as a declaration of victory over the ruling in The Hague, something that former president Iván Duque did not like, who responded to his successor with a list of essential actions within the lawsuit in which his administration made important contributions to the national victory against Nicaragua.
In his response, Duque begins by emphasizing: “Demagogic rhetoric is answered with facts,” alluding to Petro’s speech about the victory against Nicaragua. The former president made a list of details in front of the audience in the extended platform case.
The former president’s first point is that nothing is improvised in hearings and that a lot of preparation is needed for victory so that nothing is improvised. As a second item, Iván Duque highlighted: “The two legal questions to which the Court reduced the hearings do not arise out of nowhere. They come from the fact that Colombia raised these two issues and put them from the counter-memorial consistently in all its writings.
Duque went on to point out that Colombia’s role was excellent and that the strength of its arguments in the written stage of the process led the Court in The Hague, for the first time, to reduce a hearing to just two legal issues raised by the Respondent State. “In other words, in the written stage, Colombia reconsidered the case with Nicaragua to avoid entering a delimitation of continental shelves,” added Duque.
The former president highlighted that the texts read at the hearings by the Colombian lawyers maintain the arguments and the strategy and reminded Petro that these texts had been prepared by agents Manuel Cepeda and Carlos Arrieta since 2021.
“In the end there are always adjustments, but the essential that led to Colombia’s victory was cooked and ready to serve long before,” Duque Márquez declared.
Finally, the former president put an end to the discussion, took credit from Gustavo Petro and even himself and gave it to the lawyers. “The victory belongs to the Colombian institutions and the heroes are: Cepeda, Arrieta, the Navy and the Foreign Ministry,” concluded the former president of Colombia.
As if that were not enough, Iván Duque attached a link that redirects to the page of the International Court of Justice, where all the background information on the case between Colombia and Nicaragua over the maritime platform is recorded, which began in 2013, when the president was still Juan Manuel Santos.
Among the background are the actions carried out during the term of Iván Duque between 2018 and 2022, with the support of what he argues in his Twitter post. with Infobae