Brazil has asked the US to meet with South American countries to discuss regional unease over a new deal giving the US military access to bases in Colombia, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said on Friday.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva made the request to US President Barack Obama in a half-hour telephone conversation early on Friday, he said.
Lula reiterated Brazil’s concerns over the US being given access to seven bases in Colombia under a recently negotiated deal, and told Obama he wanted guarantees the US military would limit its actions there to Colombian territory.
Two anti-US neighbors of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, have expressed fears that the bases might be used to stage an invasion of their countries.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said “the winds of war” were blowing over the region because of the bases.
Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile have all voiced concern, too.
Amorim has said he believed the size of the US presence to be installed in Colombia appeared too big for the anti-narcotics operations they were ostensibly to carry out.
Lula told Obama it “would be very important” if he could attend a summit of Unasur — the South America forum grouping Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guayana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela — to discuss the matter.
The next Unasur meeting is scheduled to take place in the Argentine ski resort town of Bariloche next Friday.
It was called to specifically address the concern over the bases, raised at the last Unasur summit in Ecuador early this month.
Obama said he would “look at possibilities” with his team and thanked Lula for the suggestion, Amorim said.
The US White House issued a statement saying only that Obama spoke with Lula on “issues of mutual interest and concern in the Americas.”
It concluded that Obama “looks forward to seeing President Lula next month at the Pittsburgh G20 Summit and continuing to strengthen our partnership with Brazil.”
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton early this week said she expected the bases agreement to be signed very soon with Colombia. A preliminary accord was struck last week.
Clinton told reporters in Washington after meeting Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez on Tuesday that the deal was purely a bilateral matter focused on confronting “narco-traffickers, terrorists, and other illegal armed groups in Colombia.”
Clinton said that there would be no permanent increase in US troop levels in Colombia, where 800 US soldiers and 600 US contractors are already based.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
RSS