Trump welcomes Colombia’s president to the White House

The meeting with the Colombian President comes just one day before Trump’s first foreign trip, where he will travel to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican before attending the G7 and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Taormina and Brussels, respectively. “We have made tremendous progress in the last 100 and some odd days, tremendous progress”, the president said.

President Donald Trump on Thursday denied ever asking FBI Director James Comey to back off his agency’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian Federation, and the role played by former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Republicans control both the Senate and House of Representatives, but were lukewarm to Trump’s initial “skinny budget” plan for fiscal 2018, released in March. He cited the eradication this year alone of of 15,000 hectares of coca fields, which is the amount eradicated last year. “We have to all work together”.

“In the late 1990s, Colombia was almost a failed state, devastated by conflicts with drug cartels and terrorist groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)”.

Publicly, Trump gave no such commitment during a joint news conference with Santos in the White House East Room.

Trump may also seek Colombia’s help stemming the flow of drugs into the US from Latin America.

“No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly”, he said on Wednesday to the United States Coast Guard Academy.

In describing conversations with skeptical members of Congress, Pinzon has argued that the rise in cocaine is precisely why the USA can not pull back support from Colombia now.

In April, an unannounced encounter at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida between the USA president and two former Colombian presidents who oppose the agreement with the FARC, Andrés Pastrana Arango and Álvaro Uribe, heightened fears that the administration would reverse US policy and end USA support for Colombia’s peace. But his comments were shallow, brief, and vague, insinuating a lower level of interest compared to his focus on the war on drugs. “I think we have a very divided country because of that”, Trump said.

President Donald Trump and his backers are explaining the seemingly never-ending blitz of bad news rocking the White House by trying to turn attention to the anonymous sources disclosing embarrassing and damaging information. Since then, the peace deal has been strongly challenged in Colombia by a conservative opposition party, and was even voted down in a plebiscite.

“For a long time our nations have had a strategic alliance”, Santos said. Aerial fumigation briefly reduced Colombia’s coca crop, but the spray planes were grounded in 2015 amid concerns that the herbicide might cause cancer. The ruling was later partially reversed amid a storm of worldwide criticism.

Special correspondent Kraul reported from Bogota, Colombia.

Complicating U.S. support for terms of the agreement has been the worrying boom of cocaine cultivation and production in Colombia since the implementation of Peace Colombia.

Yesterday, Trump did take a stance on specific eradication tactics outside of offering a blanket statement of support. Trump said he acted because Comey, who had been overseeing the Russian Federation investigation, “wasn’t doing a good job” leading the agency, calling him a “showboat” and a “grandstander”.

His stated objectives in fighting cocaine distribution center on the end results as opposed to on-the-ground factors in Colombia. Colombians are concerned that the long-term relationship could suffer amid the “breakdown of institutional processes” in Trump’s Washington, said Gabriel Silva, a former ambassador to the U.S. The U.S. has provided aid to Colombia for at least six decades, with this being dramatically stepped up after the Clinton administration’s Plan Colombia counter-narcotics program.

When questioned how the Colombian leader would stop the flow of drugs across the border, Santos urged for more collaboration. “Our alliance was strengthened”.