In Bogotá, President Gustavo Petro has not yet made any statement on the matter. The message: “We have you surrounded in the North and in the South.”Įnjoying this article? Click here to subscribe for full access. Get briefed on the story of the week, and developing stories to watch across the Asia-Pacific. Joseph Humire, an expert in transnational threats in the Western Hemisphere for the Center for a Secure Free Society, argues that the two balloon incidents represented a message to the United States.

The Pentagon claimed that the balloon in Latin America was deployed by China for surveillance purposes.

The Colombian defense establishment insisted that the balloon represented “no threat to the sovereignty of the country, nor to the air security of the region.” The balloon was spotted near the cities of Valledupar and Cartagena, heading further toward the Southeast into Brazil.Īs with the Chinese balloon that flew over the United States earlier this month, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, argued that the balloon was used for “research purposes” and blamed weather conditions for the incident. On February 3, a large unidentified balloon floating at an altitude of 55,000, now confirmed to have originated from China, was detected in Colombia’s airspace through Colombia’s National Air Defense System.

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