The Diplomat in Spain

Juan Manuel Santos./ Picture: El Universal

Eduardo González. Madrid

Today, Colombia’s president, Juan Manuel Santos, is meeting the King Felipe VI and the president of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, in the first stage of a tour that will take him to several European countries trying to get support for the trust fund, whose promotion is led by Spain in the European Union to help the armed post-conflict.

After his stay in Spain (which will include the granting of a doctorate honoris causa by the University Camilo Jose Cela), Santos will go to Belgium, where he will meet the Prime Minister, Charles Michel, and leaders of the European Commission; Germany, to meet the Chancellor Angela Merkel; Portugal, to meet the President, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, and the Prime Minister, Pedro Passos Coelho; the United Kingdom, where he will be received by the Queen Elizabeth II and the Prime Minister, David Cameron; and, finally, France, where he will meet the President, François Hollande.

According to the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs, María Ángela Holguín, the president will not ask for concrete economic sums. He will focus on the consolidation of the trust fund of the European Union and on explaining the details of the great reform projects necessary to guarantee the peace. This is going to be “a marathon tour” where “I am going to meet six heads of State and two monarchs in five days”, the president stated last 27 October to the television programme Agenda Colombia.

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Spain committed itself to be “generous” and Margallo will travel to Colombia in the second half of November

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Last 8 October, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel García-Margallo, announced during a joint press conference with Holguín that Spain had started the procedures before the EU “to channel a fund helping to go through the post-conflict in the best possible way”. Margallo will visit Colombia in the second half of November to support the peace process and settle the details of the Spanish aid. The secretary of State for International Cooperation and Latin America, Jesús Gracia, announced in an interview to the agency Efe that the Spanish Government will help finance the post-conflict “generously”, although he did not specified the numbers.

According to Holguín in her last visit to Madrid, the objective of the trust fund is to develop a series of projects that will require important investment, such as a rural reform helping to give land to dispossessed farmers and to reinstate demobilized guerrilla fighters. “We have not started quantifying yet”, she affirmed. It will “probably be a high sum of money, but we cannot say how much”, she added.

The Peace Committee of the Colombian Parliament has calculated at 35,000 million euros the support for the investments needed within the next ten years in order to guarantee a stable and lasting peace in Colombia. According to Holguín, the negotiations about the trust fund should produce concrete results before the peace negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC in its Spanish acronym) conclude, which are taking place in Havana at the moment.

During his television interview, Santos explained that the president of the United States, Barack Obama, “is very interested in helping as well” and so he told him three weeks ago in a telephone conversation to express not only his political, but also his economic support, to the peace process, “something that I thanked him enormously”.

Last week, the Colombian Government and the European Union announced the signing of ten agreements to promote projects in order to build peace valued at 14.4 million euros. These projects will be executed throughout two years in four regions of Colombia within the framework of the programme Nuevos territorios de paz (New territories of peace), promoted by the Government with the support of the EU. The resources will be channelled through community associations and NGOs working in the regions affected by the armed conflict.