Bogota, May 26 (RHC)—Colombia´s President Juan Manuel Santos has announced that next week his country will formally join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

In a televised address to the nation from the Nariño Palace, Santos said the entry will be made official in Brussels.

“Colombia will join NATO in the category of Global Partner. We will be the only country in Latin America with this privilege”, he said.

Santos, who will leave office this year, will meet next May 31 in Brussels with NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, to finalize the accreditation of the South American country as part of the military alliance.

On December 2016 the Colombian Executive had informed that NATO had accepted the request to establish an agreement and thus agree to a "greater" military cooperation with that organization, following the Peace Agreement signed in Havana.

At that time, the neighboring government of Venezuela rejected the announcement as an "attempt to introduce external factors with nuclear capacity" in the region.

At the beginning of 2017, then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodríguez denounced that with that decision, Colombia could be violating the Tlatelolco agreement, adopted in 1969 with the purpose of establishing the denuclearization of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In addition, Colombia is part of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and one of the essential principles of the bloc states that its members "cannot be part of any type of military and warlike organization such as the North Atlantic Treaty. "