Colombia made a commitment on Thursday to increase its aid to Honduras in the security area, especially for its fight against organized crime, the presidents of the two countries, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Porfirio Lobo of Honduras, announced at the end of a meeting in Bogota.
Colombia made a commitment on Thursday to increase its aid to Honduras in the security area, especially for its fight against organized crime, the presidents of the two countries, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Porfirio Lobo of Honduras, announced at the end of a meeting in Bogota.
“We identified those areas where we’re going to continue collaborating with Honduras, because, as we’ve said so many times, to the extent that Honduras or any country in the region is successful in the fight against drug trafficking, we also benefit,” Santos declared to the press following a working lunch with Lobo.
“The important thing, and I repeated this to President Lobo, is our complete and total readiness to continue helping, to increase that aid,” the Colombian said, specifying that Honduras’s intelligence units would be strengthened.
“We’ve come specifically to deepen our strategic cooperation with Colombia in the security area (…) We want to see how the coordination of all the agencies responsible for this area is structured,” the Honduran head of state, for his part, declared upon arriving in Colombia.
“It’s been a very productive meeting,” he said later, after meeting with the Colombian president: collaboration with Colombia “is part of a tradition on an issue as sensitive for us as the fight against common and organized crime and drug trafficking.”
Santos recalled that “cooperation with Honduras is not new” and specified that nearly 420 members of the judicial police and senior police officers have already been trained by Colombia.
Lobo arrived in Bogota late in the morning, accompanied by a sizeable delegation of high-ranking officials, including the president of Congress, Orlando Hernández, the defense minister, Marlon Vasco, the security minister, Oscar Álvarez, and the head of the Joint General Staff, General René Osorio. He planned to leave the country immediately afterward.