Mexico City, (EFE) .- The Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, celebrated this Thursday the “big step” that represents the rapprochement between the leaders of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, and Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who met Tuesday to restore relations between the two countries.

“The important change that this meeting of the presidents of Colombia and Venezuela, of the peoples, of the neighboring countries, brothers, has meant, has been a big step,” said López Obrador during his morning press conference.

Petro and Maduro met on Tuesday in Caracas to stage the restoration of relations between the two countries, broken for nearly four years.

López Obrador said this would promote the integration of the region, as he has offered since Mexico assumed the temporary presidency of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2020.

“We have to move towards the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean, but also think about integration with North America, with Canada, with the United States, the integration of America, everything as the European Economic Community has become the European Union”, reaffirmed on Thursday.

The rapprochement between Petro and Maduro has provoked reactions in the United States, where the State Department said on Wednesday that it respects Colombia’s sovereignty in deciding its foreign relations, but recalled “violations of the rights of the ‘man’ that occurred in Venezuela.

But the Mexican president said that in Washington, with President Joe Biden, “little by little” there is a change in policy.

Furthermore, he asserted that “unbeatable conditions exist” for American integration now that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won presidential elections in Brazil last weekend.

For this reason, he called for the convening of a new Summit of the Americas, like the one the United States organized last June in Los Angeles, in which he did not participate due to the exclusion of Cuba, the Nicaragua and Venezuela.

“We would like to see a new all-America summit convened soon and without excluding anyone to talk about these issues,” he said.

jamieth