Gustavo Petro is hardly a champion of human rights.
Gustavo Petro is hardly a champion of human rights.
O n April 20, President Biden welcomed his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, to a meeting in the Oval Office. Biden thanked Petro for his “outspoken and strong commitment to peace and human rights,” while Petro emphasized that “democracy, freedom, and peace” are common interests for both administrations. Unfortunately for the Colombian people, these claims are gravely mistaken. Gustavo Petro has always been and remains an apologist for terrorist violence, a defender of naked authoritarianism, and a threat to freedom and the rule of law. Biden’s failure to treat him accordingly, whether out of ignorance, carelessness, or malice, does a great disservice to all Colombians who actually hold the values he claims to espouse.
As I have written elsewhere, Petro’s political life dates back to the late 1970s, when he joined the nationalist and socialist April 19 Movement (M-19) terrorist organization. M-19 was responsible for seizing Colombia’s Palace of Justice in 1985 in collaboration with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, a deeply traumatic episode for the nation that caused the deaths of 100 innocent people, including half of the country’s sitting supreme-court judges. While M-19 was demobilized and its members pardoned in 1990, Petro has not atoned for his role in it. During his failed presidential run in 2018, he proudly tweeted an image of the M-19 banner on a mast at one of his rallies, claiming that there was “nothing to fear in Colombia’s best ideas.” Indeed, during his meeting with Biden, Petro claimed, with a broad grin on his face, that April 19 was a very important day for Colombia, for Latin America, and for himself, vindicating the founding myth of a terrorist organization from the comfort of the White House.
I have also previously documented Petro’s long history of openly praising left-wing authoritarians in nearby countries. He referred to Hugo Chávez as “a great Latin American leader” in 2013 and exalted Fidel Castro as a second Simón Bolívar in 2016. Additionally, as president, he has consistently defended Peru’s Pedro Castillo, a former far-left president who attempted a coup d’état against the legislature and courts in December 2022. He has also advocated the removal of all sanctions against Venezuela’s Maduro regime, including those directed against known human-rights abusers and collaborators with drug cartels. Indeed, Petro himself may have received cartel funds for his victorious 2022 presidential campaign — his son and brother are both under judicial investigation by Colombia’s independent Office of the Attorney General on those grounds. Regardless of the outcome of these investigations, it is increasingly clear that many of Petro’s decisions, including his purge of the upper echelons of Colombia’s armed forces and suspension of forced eradications of coca-leaf plantations, have emboldened the country’s narco-terrorist groups. Likewise, his government’s arbitrary pardoning of criminals including thieves, extortionists, and urban terrorists, rising to 6,342 in Bogotá alone, reveals a general hostility towards the rule of law itself.
While Biden’s effort to uphold the historic U.S.–Colombia alliance is laudable in the abstract, this alliance has always been predicated on American opposition to gravely corrupt Colombian governments when they have emerged. In 1996, when then-president Ernesto Samper was credibly suspected of receiving funds from and furthering the aims of the Cali Cartel, the country’s most powerful drug cartel at that time, the Clinton administration did not hesitate to decertify Colombia, thus limiting the U.S. aid that it could receive on the grounds that its commitment to fighting organized crime was seriously compromised. At the time, a U.S. spokesman emphasized that the decertification was “a vote of no-confidence for [Samper], not the country.” Two years later, the Colombian people elected Andrés Pastrana, whose conservative administration brought Colombian–American relations to a new high and laid the groundwork for many of the improvements that Colombia has seen since then.
On April 17 of this year, former president Pastrana wrote an open letter warning Biden that Petro’s disrespect for the country’s institutions and ineffectiveness against drug-fueled terrorist organizations are once again driving Colombia “to the edge of narcocracy.”
President Biden would do well to heed Pastrana’s warning. The current situation may not call for Colombia’s decertification — at least, not yet. But to treat Petro with warm compliments as a fellow defender of peace and human rights is an egregious affront to those Colombians, such as myself, who continue to demand a modicum of decency from our political leaders.