SECRETARY BLINKEN: Hello, everyone, and a real pleasure to be here with the vice president and foreign minister of Colombia. Marta Lucia, wonderful to see you. We have been working very closely together for these past several months, including a very good visit to Washington a few months ago.
And that’s just evidence of the very strong and important partnership between the United States and Colombia, a leader on democratic values and on human rights, working together in the region, an example to the world with the truly historic peace accord, and a lot on our common agenda now to include also our work on counter-narcotics, and of course, on climate change as we head to the COP26. So wonderful to be with you today and with your colleagues.
FOREIGN MINISTER RAMIREZ: Thank you, Secretary Blinken. Of course, as you have mentioned, for Colombia, it’s so important to have this very close relation with the United States as allies. We have to defend democracy. We have to defend values. We have now this challenge to recover the economy from the – this COVID-19, but we also know that in order to have the prosperity and wealth for the entire world, we need to strength these values of democracy; of course, market economy. We need to work together in order to strength the multilateral system, WTO, which is an important forum for us to work on. And I would like to congratulate you for your leadership during this OECD conference that bring us a big opportunity to have a closer relation between Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
Let me mention that we feel that this inter – and this transatlantic dialogue between United States and Europe must include Latin America. Latin American economies are important in order to provide not only natural resources, but a lot of capacity from the inhabitants and population, who has a lot of – are important to — for this future. So thank you very much — SECRETARY BLINKEN: I agree.
FOREIGN MINISTER RAMIREZ: — for your leadership and for this time to share together.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone.
