Colombia yesterday planned to launch a formal protest against Venezuela for allowing its warplanes to cross into Colombian airspace, amid a border crisis between the neighboring South American countries.
The Colombian Ministry of National Defense said that two Venezuelan military aircraft entered the country’s airspace through the Alta Guajira zone on Colombia’s northern border with Venezuela on Saturday afternoon.
It said the planes flew nearly 3km into Colombia and then flew over an army unit.
The ministry did not describe the types of aircraft detected.
Caracas accused Bogota of inventing the incursion to scupper a potential meeting between the presidents of both countries intended to resolve their diplomatic and border crisis.
“There is no evidence of the alleged airspace violation of our neighboring country, beyond an invention to prevent a presidential meeting,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez wrote on Twitter.
“We are concerned about the trend in the Colombian government of inventing incidents that do not exist in order to affect relations,” she said.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Sunday: “I have ordered @CancilleriaCol [the foreign ministry] and @Mindefensa [the defense ministry] to launch a formal protest tomorrow against Venezuela for violating our airspace.”
The foreign ministers of Colombia and Venezuela met in Ecuador on Saturday in an attempt to resolve their differences.
While they agreed to renew diplomatic contacts after ambassadors were withdrawn, they failed to find common ground on a meeting between the two country’s presidents.
However, Rodriguez said Maduro had ratified a proposal for an “immediate meeting” with Santos “to address the serious humanitarian exodus from Colombian and cross-border crimes.”
Venezuela has deported some 1,500 Colombians living in Venezuela since the crisis began, and 20,000 others have fled in fear, according to the UN.
Bogota and Caracas have been in a spiraling row since Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro closed part of the border last month, blaming Colombian paramilitaries for an attack on a Venezuelan anti-smuggling patrol.
Maduro accused Colombia of waging an “attack on Venezuela’s economy,” a reference to the rampant smuggling of heavily subsidized goods out of country.
In 2010, troops were rushed to the border after the Colombian president accused Venezuela of giving safe haven to leftist Colombian guerrillas.
The crisis was defused when Santos took office.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
The Philippine Coast Guard yesterday said it deployed aircraft to issue radio warnings to a Chinese research ship in a disputed area of the South China Sea “swarming” with vessels from Beijing’s so-called maritime militia. The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 33 (向陽紅33), which is capable of supporting submersible craft, was operating near a reef in the contested Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島), which Taiwan also claims, the Philippine Coast Guard said. The Chinese ship was deploying a service boat toward the Spratly’s Iroquois Reef on Wednesday when it was spotted by a coast guard plane, “confirming ongoing unauthorized [marine scientific research]
RSS