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МИД РФ: представители руководства стран Латинской Америки посетят РФ для участия в ПМЭФ

МИД РФ: представители руководства стран Латинской Америки посетят РФ для участия в ПМЭФ

Director of the Latin American Department at MFA of Russia also emphasized that Russia would continue its intensive political collaboration with Latin American and Caribbean nations.

Leading Latin American and Caribbean public officials and businessmen are to visit Russia to take part in the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), according to Director of the Department of Latin America at MFA of Russia Alexander Schetinin in his TASS interview.

“We have reached agreement about visits by Latin America representatives to Russia,” the diplomat noted. “We hope the traditional political collaboration between Russia and Latin America will continue.” In particular, he specified that “top-level contacts between our nations will be timed to coincide with SPIEF.” “To develop our trade and economic ties, we’ll invite business captains,” he assured.

In particular, Mr. Schetinin stated that “Latin Americans are eager to form a Russian–Latin American economic forum, a sort of business platform.” “This could be done as part of the SPIEF,” he went on to say. “They are highly interested. Let it be an exclusive development: Latin America as a region with its ideas and proposals – a forum inside the forum.”

Intensive collaboration

Mr. Schetinin underscored that Russia would continue its intensive political dialogue with Latin American and Caribbean nations this year, as well as collaboration in different areas, including the sphere of meeting new challenges and averting new threats.

“The relations between Russia and Latin America are stable, positive and developing,” the diplomat remarked. “They are quite diversified as it is. Spaking about the main trends, this year we’d rather deepen and expand the positive developments in our cooperation that we have achieved over the last 2–3 years.”

“Above all, this is a rather intensive political collaboration at different levels,” the MFA departmental director explained. I believe it will gather further momentum this year.” “This includes our collaboration on counteracting new threats and challenges,” he continued. “We maintain close cooperation with Latin American nations in this area, including practical collaboration on personnel training for the law-enforcement agencies of Latin America nations on special courses opened by our Drug Control Service in Nicaragua and Peru.”

“We’ll definitely continue trade, economic, scientific, technological, and investment cooperation,” said Mr. Schetinin. “Of course, we face objective difficulties caused by the volatile global markets. But we positively assess the development of cooperation with the region as a whole – above all, because we are not focusing on trade turnover as such, however important that might be, but on long-term collaboration connected with mutual investments and technological cooperation in such areas as energy, biotechnologies, mechanical engineering and IT technologies,” the departmental director noted.

Visa-free zone

The diplomat also stated that Russia and the Latin American and Caribbean Region must become a visa-free travel zone – this should be the main goal.

“We certainly have some practical priorities where we’d like to see advancements this year,” he stated. “In particular, we’ll go on working on forming a mutual visa-free travel zone between Russia and the Latin American / Caribbean Region.”

We already have visa-free travel agreements with most Latin American and Caribbean nations but we’d like to sign similar agreements with the few remaining countries, to shape a mutual visa-free travel zone between Russia and the whole of the Latin American and Caribbean Region. We’ll keep advancing towards this ultimate objective.”

For more detail, see the TASS site:

http://tass.ru/ekonomika/2650296

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