Borrell hopes that his trip to Latin America will reverse the lost weight of the EU

The high representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, said he hopes his trip to Latin America, the first since he took office and which has led him this week to Peru and Brazil, serve to “reverse the trend” of weight loss in the EU in the region.

“China in particular is now the first trading partner of many countries in the region and has invested heavily in recent years, not only economically, but also politically,” Borrell wrote on his blog.

“I have often stressed that Latin America has not been sufficiently present on the EU’s radar. I hope that this trip will begin to reverse the trend, before the summit between EU and Latin American leaders that we will hold in early December ”, he continued.

The former Spanish minister recalled that since 2015 a summit of this type has not been held and regretted the weight loss in Latin America, despite the fact that European companies have “invested more in Latin America than in China, Russia, Japan and India combined. ”.

In this sense, Borrell assured that Peru, “the country most affected in the world by COVID-19”, will be the one to which the EU increases its financial support the most.

And as he did during his visit to Peru, he insisted on the EU’s support for President Pedro Castillo.

“The electoral result was very tight, which led part of the opposition to question his legitimacy as president. These elections, however, were supervised by an Electoral Observation Mission, which concluded that the elections were free and fair and that the election of Pedro Castillo is legitimate, “said the head of European diplomacy.

Borrell ended his trip in Brazil, from where he expressed his conviction that the environmental policies that the country’s government is carrying out will help ratify the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur, which both blocs signed in 2019.

Despite the signature, achieved after twenty years of negotiations, the ratification process could not be concluded because several European countries, mainly France, as well as the European Parliament, consider that the deforestation of the Amazon by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is contrary to the Agreement of Paris against climate change.