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China and Colombia have upgraded their relationship to a “strategic partnership” in a sign that Washington’s principal ally in South America is orienting itself towards Beijing.
Colombia’s first leftist president, Gustavo Petro, met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Wednesday on his maiden state visit to the world’s second-largest economy.
“We [China and Colombia] have become good friends and partners for win-win co-operation and common development,” Xi told Petro on Wednesday, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
The signing of the “strategic partnership” agreement leaves Guyana as the only South American country not to have the designation from Beijing.
Petro, who took office in August 2022, said on Wednesday that better ties with Beijing were an example of “the good relationship that Colombia has to build around an increasingly multipolar world”.
China has been seeking closer ties with South America in recent years. In June it signed a free trade agreement with Ecuador, while Beijing-backed Cosco is building a controversial megaport in Peru.
But gaining a foothold in Colombia — a staunch US ally at the centre of the American continent, with access to the Caribbean and Pacific — is particularly attractive to Beijing, analysts said.
“It would help with the distribution of products and technology services, among other Chinese interests,” said Parsifal D’Sola, executive director of the Andrés Bello Foundation, a think-tank working on Chinese-Latin American relations. “And given Colombia’s historical ties to the US, it would be a diplomatic win for China.”
Petro’s visit to China followed a diplomatic spat with Israel and the US over his comments likening the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to that of Jews during the Holocaust.
The US and Israel both condemned the…
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