Colombia: At PEC launch president lauds Plan Colombia, calls for its extension.

(From BBC Monitoring International Reports)

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has said his government has a three-pronged approach to building up trust in Colombia: improved security, greater transparency and economic and social reactivation. He was speaking in Bogota on 1 April during the launch of the Colombian Business Project (PEC), designed to help 800 small and medium-sized businesses to increase their sales to create new jobs, which is financed by the US government through USAID. President Uribe welcomed PEC, said it showed that Plan Colombia is multi-faceted and not just a fumigation programme to destroy drug crops, and called for Plan Colombia to be extended beyond its current 2005 deadline. The following is the text of Uribe's speech, as published by Colombian Office of the President web site on 2 April:

The Colombian government and the US embassy have presented the Colombian Business Project (PEC [Spanish: Proyecto Empresarial Colombiano]) to offer advice to small and medium-sized companies. The idea is, with 800 of them, to increase …