Buenos Aires, March 11 (NA) – The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, assured this Wednesday that his country, Brazil, and Mexico did not receive any invitation to participate in the regional 'Shield of the Americas' summit, convened by the president of the United States, Donald Trump. 'We must rescue the Latin American and Caribbean integration above the ideological differences between governments,' added the Colombian president, who has criticized the coalition for bringing together countries in the region with no experience in combating drug trafficking. Petro responded this way to statements by Trump to international media in which he affirmed that those three countries had indeed been invited to the summit but decided not to attend. The Colombian president considered that 'there is again a broken phone,' and said that turning an anti-drug trafficking alliance 'into an ideological alliance is a substantial error.' The leader insisted that 'the anti-drug trafficking alliance must be of all the countries of the Americas without exclusion,' according to what the Noticias Argentinas agency learned. For this reason, I maintain my invitation to President Trump to meet in Cartagena, Colombia,' Petro concluded. The 'Shield of the Americas' summit took place last weekend in Doral, Florida, where the presidents and representatives of Argentina, El Salvador, Ecuador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Bolivia, Trinidad and Tobago, Chile, and Honduras attended.
