The Vice President of Colombia, Francia Márquez, as part of her tour of Africa, this Friday asked her South African counterpart, Paul Mashatile, for her country to be the guarantor of the peace talks that Casa Nariño is holding with the Liberation Army guerrillas National (ELN).
“We have a commitment to peace. We know that you have all the experience of peace and reconciliation (…) We want you to accompany us in these dialogue processes,” Márquez proposed to Mashatile at their meeting in Pretoria.
Márquez has said that the fact that South Africa can participate as a guarantor country in these dialogues would be “of great importance not only for Colombia, but for the Latin American and Caribbean region.”
For his part, Mashatile has accepted the proposal and has announced that South Africa is “committed” and “definitely involved” in the efforts of the government of President Gustavo Petro to bring peace to Colombia.
Márquez will be in South Africa for the next two days, after a small stopover in Gabon, where he met with his counterpart Rose Christiane Ossouka Raponda, with whom he talked about consolidating diplomatic, cultural, tourist and commercial ties, Colombian media reports.
“My ancestors left these lands 400 years ago as slaves and today I return as free, without shackles, and as vice president of the Republic of Colombia,” she said upon landing in Libreville.
After passing through South Africa, he will travel to Kenya –where it is scheduled that this Sunday I spoke about racial justice and the climate crisis at the United Nations headquarters– and Ethiopia, where he will inaugurate the Embassy in Addis Ababa, which will mean the fourth Colombian diplomatic mission in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The visit to the African continent, which will conclude on May 18, is the highest level carried out in almost three decades by any Colombian government.