Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González Sanz was in town to make good on a plan unveiled last year to open a permanent embassy in Jakarta, as the Latin American nation seeks to expand ties with Indonesia and the wider Southeast Asia region.

Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi hosted her Costa Rican counterpart in Jakarta on Sunday for talks ahead of the reception to inaugurate the embassy on Tuesday, some 32 years after first establishing formal diplomatic relations with Indonesia.

Retno said the Costa Rican Embassy would be the 104th foreign representative office to open in Indonesia and just the 12th among Latin American and Caribbean nations that have chosen to consolidate their physical presence.

“This embassy will serve to facilitate various efforts to strengthen Indonesian-Costa Rican bilateral relations,” she said following a closed-door meeting.

At the outset of this year, the foreign minister touted Latin America as a priority for Indonesia to explore new economic opportunities, as part of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s push for economic diplomacy.

The top diplomats from both countries were initially supposed to talk at the Forum for East Asia-Latin American Cooperation (FEALAC) meeting in South Korea last week, but Minister Retno cancelled her attendance because of a fresh outbreak of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

In 2015, Costa Rica’s deputy foreign minister, Alejandro Solano Ortiz, visited Retno in Jakarta to discuss an array of issues, including the proposal for Costa Rica to open an embassy here.

The Indonesian minister also said the new embassy bolsters Jakarta’s reputation as the prime diplomatic capital of ASEAN. The Costa Rican Embassy in Singapore previously did duty as the country’s outpost to Indonesia.

Minister Sanz is to meet with ASEAN Secretary-General Le Luong Minh at the ASEAN headquarters in South Jakarta.

“It is a very important step forward for a small country like Costa Rica that has to be very selective because of a lack of resources [about] where we have a diplomatic presence and Indonesia was a natural step forward in the direction of having a closer relationship with East Asia,” Sanz said in his press statement.

Both sides agreed to strengthen trade ties, buoyed by a 97 percent increase of trade from 2015 to 2016, even though trade is relatively small in terms of volume and value. Among the most lucrative of sectors they can explore is energy. Indonesia has the largest geothermal reserves in the world, with the state recording 29 gigawatts (GW). The nation now produces a total of 60 GW of electricity from various sources.

Costa Rica is well-known for its highly diversified and environmentally friendly energy mix, with more than 99 percent of its electricity produced by renewable sources, Minister Retno said.

Besides trade, the two ministers also discussed cooperation in education, infrastructure and connectivity and disaster risk management.

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