Colombia accuses Peru of fully annexing a disputed island in the Amazon river

Bogota, Colombia (AP) – Colombian President Gustavo Petro aroused a border controversy old decades with Peru on Tuesday when he accused him of fully annexing an Amazon island which has been administered by Peru for decades, but whose legal status is in dispute.

Peru maintains that it has the island of Santa Rosa on the basis of treaties of about a century, but Colombia disputes this property because the island had not yet emerged from the river at the time.

In a message on X, Petro declared that Peru had acted “unilaterally” in June when his congress adopted a law which improved the legal status of Santa Rosa by converting it into a district of the Province of Loreto of Peru.

The island faces Leticia, a Colombian city of around 60,000 people located in one of the most well -preserved bands in the Amazon. It is used by many tourists as a launch point for trips to the largest tropical forest in the world.

“The Peruvian government has just appropriated by law,” Petro wrote on X, adding that the actions of Peru could block access from Leticia to the Amazon river. “Our government will resort to diplomacy to defend our national sovereignty.”

In his message, the president explained why he planned to organize a celebration in Leticia on Thursday to mark one of the national holidays which commemorates the independence of Colombia against Spain. The Colombian government generally celebrates the holidays of August 7 in the province of Boyaca in the center of Colombia, but farmers are currently blocking the roads of this part of the country to protest against environmental regulations that prohibit agriculture in high altitude areas.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru declared in a statement that the treaties signed by the two countries in 1922 and 1929 granted control of Peru of Santa Rosa and other nearby islets.

“Peru firmly complies with its obligations under international law and valid bilateral treaties,” according to the press release.

Colombia says that the treaties could not attribute the property of Santa Rosa because in the 1920s, the island was not yet emerging from the largest river in the world. Instead, Colombia says that the treaties determine that the border between the two countries should be fixed along a line that follows the deepest points along the river bed.

Like many rivers, the Amazon slowly changes its course over time, and erosion or changes in the weather can create or submerge the islands.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia said on Tuesday that “for years”, it insisted on the need to create a bilateral commission which will attribute the property of the islands which emerged between the countries of South America during the last century.

The island is mainly made up of forests, agricultural land and a small village known as Santa Rosa in Yavari, which has less than 1,000 inhabitants, according to the last census of Peru.

Santa Rosa was previously classified as a community in the Yavari district of the province of Loreto of Peru.

In June, the Peru Congress voted to transform Santa Rosa into its own district, a decision that could facilitate the transfer of funds for education and health care, and allow the modest village to lift its own land taxes.

“We have a diversified economy that is based on trade and tourism”, the mayor of Santa Rosa, Jack Yovera, told Peruvien Network RPP in June, when the law to transform its community into a district was debated by Congress.

“But there are many basic needs that have not been met,” said Yovera, who explained that as a young man, he had to go to high school in the Colombian city of Leticia, on the other side of the Amazon river, due to the absence of an appropriate high school in Santa Rosa.

The border dispute also surfaced last summer, when an official of the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs attended a meeting between the political leaders of Leticia and Santa Rosa and said that Peru occupied the “irregularly” island.

Yovera left the protest meeting.

Later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia published a statement saying that it “regretted” the incident and that the situation of the island of Santa Rosa should only be discussed by high -level officials of the two governments.