U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to Brazil and Chile this month for meetings with leaders in both countries amid rising tensions in Latin America. The State Department said Thursday that Rice would travel to the area from March 13 to 15, 2008. “The Secretary will visit Brasilia where she will meet with President Luis In?cio Lula da Silva and Foreign Minister Celso Amorim to discuss a broad range of bilateral and regional issues, including our cooperation to advance biofuels. The Secretary will also visit Salvador da Bahia,” deputy spokesman Tom Casey said in statement. “In Santiago, Secretary Rice will meet with President Michelle Bachelet and Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley to discuss issues of mutual interest, particularly the deepening of our bilateral relationship through partnerships between U.S. and Chilean institutions, such as the partnership between Chile and the State of California,” the statement said. Casey said the visit “will underscore the United States' robust relationship with these two strategic regional partners,” but it also comes as tensions grow in the region in the wake of a Colombian raid against a Marxist rebel camp in Ecuador. The weekend raid, which Ecuador condemned as a violation of its sovereignty, has sparked a mini-regional crisis. Ecuador and Venezuela have sent troops to their borders with Colombia in response. In the United States, President George W. Bush has reiterated his support for conservative Colombian president and U.S. ally Alvaro Uribe. But tensions seem likely to continue rising, with Nicaragua announcing on Thursday that it too has severed diplomatic ties with Colombia in response to the raid against rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
