Blinken In Colombia With Pledge To Shift Away From Security Focus

Bogota, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Oct, 2021 ) :US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Wednesday with Colombia's right-wing leader after promising to broaden US relationships beyond security funding in the struggle to promote democracy.

President Ivan Duque, who has come under fire over a deadly police crackdown on protests, welcomed the top US diplomat at the Casa de Narino palace in Bogota for two days of talks that will focus on key priorities of President Joe Biden -- climate change and migration.

Blinken will meet ministers from around the region in Bogota amid a sharp rise in the number of desperate Haitians who are making a long trek from South America to the United States.

Duque was a close ally of former US president Donald Trump and has so far not been able to meet Biden, who faces pressure from left-leaning lawmakers in his Democratic Party to suspend assistance to Colombia on rights grounds.

Colombia for decades has been a top recipient of US military assistance, including in its decade-long campaign against FARC rebels.

In a speech in Ecuador earlier in the day, Blinken said that the US record on security assistance in Latin America has been "mixed." "That's because often we tried to fix the problem by relying too much on training and equipping security forces, and too little on the other tools in our kit," he said at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, with the green Andean foothills behind him.

"We focused too much on addressing the symptoms of organized crime, like homicides and drug trafficking, and too little on the root causes. We're working to correct that imbalance."He acknowledged the long shadow of US support for dictators, saying, "There were times when we supported governments in the Americas that did not reflect the choice or the will of their people and did not respect their human rights."