Colombian President Gustavo Petro proposed adding as “observers” to the Ibero-American summits African countries associated for various reasons with Ibero-America, including the “Saharan nation”, which he considers the victim of “injustice”.

Petro began his speech at the Santo Domingo summit with a call to “build bridges with the African continent”, for example, to include Portuguese-speaking countries in the orbit of this kind of forum and, without explicitly mentioning the Arab Democratic Republic of the Saharawi (SADR) of the Polisario Front.

“It’s a question of form, but obviously also a political one,” the Colombian president suggested at a forum that also included King and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on the Spanish side and on the Portuguese side. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and Prime Minister António Costa.

The status proposed by Petro is not new, as the Ibero-American community has already been considering an Associate and Advisory Observer since 2009. The list consists of twelve countries, including Morocco, which was approved as an observer in 2010.

Gustavo Petro’s request came at the summit, which also includes Pedro Sanchez, a year after the Spanish premier rejected Spain’s traditional position as the administering power of Western Sahara and conceded to the Moroccan route, which intends to govern the territory as an autonomy.

A shift that was accompanied by an apparent rapprochement between Sanchez and the Moroccan government, while trade relations with Algeria collapsed despite the great energy interconnection that united both countries and which Spain had to supply from other sources after the diplomatic crisis.