“My political awakening came in the late 1960s when I saw my father cry over the death of Argentine revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara.” (Gustavo Petro, former “urban-guerrilla,” and hard-left candidate currently in a dead heat to win Colombia’s Presidential elections on June 19th.)
As we go to press Colombia’s run-off presidential election set for June 19 is “too close to call” or a “virtual tie” according to the most recent Colombian polls. The first round on May 29th saw Gustavo Petro win 40.3 percent of votes and Rodolfo Hernandez, an eccentric “anti-establishment” 77 year-old real estate magnate, social media campaigner and political outsider, win 28.1 percent. 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 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 “Minister of Industries 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 run-off. Those “young-skulls-full-of mush,” could indeed offer the needed margin.
But Hernandez and his backers are confident that—as over 50 per cent of the vote went against Petro in the first round, with conservative former mayor of Medellín Federico Gutiérrez getting 23 % --those voters will all congeal around Hernandez for the run-off.
But as already mentioned, right now the race seems “too close to call.”
That nail-biting you might hear issuing up from the south comes from Colombian conservative (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 mid-east and wear a keffiyeh) assuming their nation’s presidency.
Gustavo Petro doesn’t go out of his way to renounce his former membership in the Cuban-trained M-19 urban guerrilla group, which was disbanded in 1990. In fact he can be found on a YouTube openly boasting how 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,” he says. “In addition, it must be admitted that many M-19 troops were trained in Cuba itself.”
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 resulted in over 100 deaths. Petro boasts that he was in police/military custody at the time of the infamous incident, 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 Marques, 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 currently active ELN (National Liberation Army) similar to the one Colombian President 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 FARC a legal cover to engage in its historic activities, which according to a report by the DEA from a few years ago consists of facilitating from 40-50 per cent of the world’s cocaine supply.
The ELN is suspected of strong ties to Maduro’s Venezuelan regime, of which Navy Adm. Craig Faller, head of U.S. Southern Command , said in 2019: "I don't think I'd even call them (Venezuela) a regime. It's a mafia. It's an illicit business that he's (Nicholas Maduro) running with his 2,000 corrupt generals. It's ruining the country…Illicit narco trafficking through Venezuela is up some 40 percent.”
An incident studiously buried by the U.S. media during 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 over 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:
*The arms were from a Chinese manufacturer named Norinco and the recipient was a Cuban company named Tecnoimport.
*But the ship stopped in the Colombian ports of Cartagena and Barranquilla (where the FARC is based.)
*Colombia’s crackerjack newspaper El Espectador also reported that many Norinco-manufactured arms had already been captured from FARC guerrillas over the previous 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?” publicly remarked Petro while attending Hugo Chavez’s funeral in 2013. In fact, that “distancing” was not noticed by many Colombians. But Luis Miquilena who served as Hugo Chavez’s Minister of Justice for three years before finally resigning in disgust offers a possible—and very justifiable-- motive for that elusive “distancing:”
“Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba's Castro brothers,” remarked Miquilina from exile in 2014. “They (the Cubans) 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 8 years ago. Since then Cuba’s grip on Venezuela has only tightened. If Petro regrets “distancing himself,” from such a sniveling Cuban satrapy—then God help Colombia upon his presidency.