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Colombia’s presidential race will decide if it goes the way of Venezuela

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“My political awakening came in the late 1960s when I saw my father cry over the death of Argentine revolutionary leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,” recalls Gustavo Petro, former “urban guerrilla” and hard-left candidate who could become Colombia’s next president — and turn the country into another Venezuela.

The runoff presidential election set for June 19 is a virtual tie, per the latest Colombian polls. The May 29 first round saw Petro win 40.3% of votes and Rodolfo Hernandez, an eccentric, “anti-establishment” 77-year-old real-estate magnate, social-media campaigner and political outsider, win 28.1%. Many media profiles compare Hernandez with Donald Trump.

Petro is running on a classic “Soak the rich” platform, which — oddly for a Latin-American leftist — he’s coupled with a trendy eco-platform of spurning fossil-fuel extraction and protecting Colombia’s “biodiversity.” In sharp contrast, his political hero Che Guevara while Cuba’s industries minister in 1960 pushed “accelerated industrialization” as among his top projects, after mass murder.

Petro and his backers are confident of victory when more of Colombia’s youth (which mostly sat out the first round) vote in the crucial runoff. Those “skulls full of mush” could indeed offer the needed margin.

But Hernandez and his backers are sure that — as more than 50% of the vote went against Petro in the first round, with conservative former mayor of Medellín Federico Gutiérrez getting 23% — those voters will congeal around Hernandez.

With a race too close to call, that nail-biting you hear issuing up from the south comes from Colombian conservatives (for lack of a better term) who aren’t thrilled by the thought of a former “urban guerrilla” — “terrorist” is the term Americans usually apply when these same types ply their trade in the Mideast and wear a keffiyeh — assuming their nation’s presidency.

Petro is running against the political outsider Rodolfo Hernandez.
Petro is running against the political outsider Rodolfo Hernandez.
Photo by RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP via Getty Images

Petro doesn’t go out of his way to renounce his former membership in the Cuban-trained M-19 urban-guerrilla group, which disbanded in 1990. In fact he can be found on YouTube openly boasting that his fellow guerrillas were trained by Cubans and often in Cuba itself: “Fidel Castro greatly helped the M-19 movement in its actions in Colombia.”

Among the most notorious of the M-19’s “actions” during its heyday was the storming and capture of Colombia’s Palace of Justice (equivalent to our Supreme Court) while taking 300 hostages including 40 judges. The full-scale battle to free the hostages left more than 100 dead. Petro exults that he was in police/military custody at the time so can’t blamed for it. But he blames the government, not the terrorists, for most of the resulting casualties.

Interestingly, while an “urban guerrilla,” Petro took the nom de guerre  “Aureliano,” after the main character in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the famous novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who ranks among the most shameless and groveling celebrity apologists for the Stalinist Castro regime — which given the competition is really, really saying something.

Alongside his soak-the-rich platform, Petro campaigns on scaling down the nation’s long battle against the multifarious drug/terrorist/communist groups that have plagued Colombia for decades. His solution is to cut a deal with the ELN (National Liberation Army) similar to the one Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos cut in 2016 (in Havana) with the much more notorious FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).

But in fact Santos’ “treaty” with FARC is now widely viewed as a simple surrender that gives the group a legal cover to engage in its historic activities, which according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report from a few years ago consist of facilitating from 40-50% of the world’s cocaine supply.

Petro wants to cut a deal with the communist group ELN, which has connections to Venezuela's President. Nicolas Maduro.
Petro wants to cut a deal with the communist group ELN, which has connections to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
EPA/ERNESTO MASTRASCUSA / POOL

The ELN is suspected of strong ties to Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuelan regime, of which Navy Adm. Craig Faller, head of US Southern Command, said in 2019: “I don’t think I’d even call them a regime. It’s a mafia. It’s an illicit business that [Maduro’s] running with his 2,000 corrupt generals. It’s ruining the country.” He noted illicit narco-trafficking through Venezuela was up 40%.

An incident the US media studiously buried during President Barack Obama’s last term points to the links Colombia’s drug/terror gangs — which Petro presumes to co-opt — still maintain: In February 2015, Colombian authorities found 99 missile heads, 100 tons of gunpowder, 2.6 million detonators and more than 3,000 artillery shells hidden under rice sacks in a ship bound from Red China to Cuba that docked in the port of Cartagena, Colombia.

Most Cuba-watchers immediately guessed what was up. And crackerjack Colombian (not CNN or New York Times, heaven forbid!) reporters quickly investigated and exposed the Castro regime’s terror-sponsoring scheme. In brief: Chinese manufacturer Norinco sent the arms to Cuban company Tecnoimport — but the ship stopped in the Colombian ports of Cartagena and Barranquilla, where the FARC is based.

Colombia’s ace newspaper El Espectador also reported that many Norincomanufactured arms had already been captured from FARC guerrillas over the prior 10 years. This proliferation of Cuba-smuggled Chinese arms to the terrorist FARC got so bad that in 2007-08, the Colombian authorities sent a diplomatic protest note to the Chinese. 

“Why did I distance myself from him?” Petro publicly wondered at Hugo Chavez’s 2013 funeral. In fact, that “distancing” was not noticed by many Colombians. But Luis Miquilena, who served as Chavez’s justice minister for three years before finally resigning in disgust, offers a possible — and very justifiable — motive for it: “Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba’s Castro brothers,” he remarked from exile in 2014. “They have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country. This is the darkest period in our history!”

And that was eight years ago. Since then, Cuba’s grip on Venezuela has only tightened. If Petro regrets “distancing himself,” from such a sniveling Cuban satrapy, God help Colombia if he takes the presidency.

Humberto Fontova is the author of “Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.”



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