The chancellor of Argentina, Diana Mondino, tried this Thursday to reduce the tension with Colombia and Mexico, opened after statements by Javier Milei, and argued that the opinions expressed between presidents do not imply the breaking of any diplomatic relationship, although she supported the saying of the head of government.
“We would have to see why we should apologize. (President Gustavo) Petro was indeed a terrorist,” he stated in relation to the accusations made by the Argentine president to his Colombian counterpart, according to the local Argentine newspaper La Nación.
In statements made this Thursday to the Todo Noticias (TN) channel, the Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship denied that “relations with Colombia have been broken” and that the Executive has received any official communication about the expulsion of Argentine diplomats , which the Colombian Government would have ordered.
“In the diplomatic world there are several stages, but here it is the president of a country who does not like what the president of another country says. But there are things that go beyond this. Relations between countries are very long-term, much superior to that the presidents of each country may have,” he indicated.
Mondino stressed that, “regardless of whether the president does not like what others think with data, it is not an issue that will affect long-term relations.”
The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, called his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, a “terrorist murderer”, and the Mexican, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “ignorant”, in an interview with the US channel CNN en Español, which will be broadcast on Sunday, but of which a preview was released this Wednesday.
Bogotá demanded an apology
Colombia demanded an apology from the president, something that the chancellor questioned, while requesting: “Let’s calm this down because it is not an issue that has to escalate in any way.”
“The Colombian people and the Argentine people have worked together; we have a lot of trade between the two countries,” he recalled.
Mondino asserted that it is not “an issue of the State, but of people,” since, he stated, “the Twitter accounts (today X) are personal.”
“We have to lower the decibels of this because it leads to nothing,” he added.
CNN published a preview of the interview with Milei on its website, where it stated that the Argentine ruler, who took power on December 10, said about Petro that “not much can be expected from someone who was a terrorist murderer.”
This Thursday, the Colombian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the Government “repudiates statements made by Mr. Javier Milei, president of Argentina (…) in which he expresses himself in a degrading manner against the first president of the Colombians, the respected Mr. Gustavo Petro”.
Milei, leader of the far-right party La Libertad Avanza, has already expressed harsh criticism of López Obrador and Petro in the past, just as he has confronted the governments of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua and the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with whom he is at the opposite end due to his ideological thinking.
jc (efe, La Nación, Clarín)
