Colombia: Ex-Guerrilla Marxist President Restores Ties to Socialist Venezuela Regime

Presidential candidate Gustavo Petro speaks after his defeat by conservative rival Ivan Du
LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images
Frances Martel

The government of Marxist ex-guerrilla member President Gustavo Petro in Colombia sent an ambassador to Venezuela on Sunday and accepted his counterpart representing the socialist regime of dictator Nicolás Maduro, restoring ties broken under the previous conservative president over the illegality of Maduro’s leadership of the country.

The restoration of ties with the Maduro regime – cutting relations with the poorly organized, but legal, administration of Venezuelan President Juan Guaidó – is one of the first promises Petro has kept since taking office in early August. Petro went ahead with restoring ties to the Maduro regime despite the fact that the socialists had threatened to launch a “Ukraine-style” invasion of Colombia as recently as this March.

Maduro ruptured ties under Petro’s predecessor, conservative President Iván Duque, and recalled diplomatic staff in 2019 after Guaidó attended a concert on the Colombian border, referring to Duque as a “fascist.” Colombia, like most free states, had previously recognized Guaidó as the nation’s president.

Maduro stopped being the nation’s legitimate president in 2019 after “winning” an election with a record-low turnout and myriad irregularities that most of the world’s free states recognized as a sham. The Venezuelan National Assembly swore Guaidó in as interim president in 2019 to replace Maduro as the nation’s constitution requires when a “rupture in the democratic order,” such as a rigged election, occurs.

The cementing of a political friendship between Maduro’s narco-terrorist regime and that of Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M19 Marxist guerrilla who has claimed in the past that sugar is a “much more harmful drug” than cocaine, has triggered global concerns of a drug and crime boom in the region during the upcoming years of Colombia’s first-ever left-wing presidency.

Colombian Ambassador to Caracas Armando Benedetti arrived in the Venezuelan capital on Sunday and formally received credentials from Maduro – despite the fact that Maduro is not legally president of Venezuela. As the socialist dictator continues to occupy Miraflores, the presidential palace, and controls the armed forces, Guaidó has not been able to exercise any presidential powres in three years, save for appointing ambassadors to states that recognize him as president.

Benedetti emphasized the restoration of trade between one of Latin America’s strongest capitalist economies and the socialist wasteland across Colombia’s border, promising, “we will seek an economic zone, extensions of taxes, and legislation that will allow the Colombian government to invest in works that impact development in the region,” according to Maduro’s VTV propaganda news network.

Benedetti also promised an in-person meeting between Maduro and Petro by the end of the year, according to Colombia’s Semana magazine.

Félix Plasencia, the Maduro regime ambassador to Colombia, arrived in the nation’s capital Bogotá on Sunday.

“Time to work, lots of work,” Plasencia told the Cuban communist state network Prensa Latina in a video republished by the Colombian Foreign Ministry. “Ambassador Benedetti got to Caracas already, we are working in coordination, together, to do things right, to make everything better and rescue the good tradition of contact between brotherly nations and countries that are fundamental for Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The Maduro regime’s tone towards neighboring Colombia, which has taken in millions of Maduro regime refugees in the past decade, shifted dramatically after Petro declared victory in an election he had claimed was rigged hours before being told he had won it. In March, the head of Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) Diosdado Cabello had threatened an invasion of Colombia in remarks defending Maduro regime patron Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I’m not an expert on the matter, but the more time passes, it is worse for the Ukrainian Nazis because the de-Nazification will be from the root,” Cabello, who also hosts a show on state television, told an audience at the time. “Someone said, why not take the opportunity and de-cocainize Colombia to see what’s left?”

Cabello was referencing Putin’s repeated claims that invading Ukraine was necessary to “de-Nazify” the country, presumably by removing its democratically elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky has vehemently denied accusations of being a Nazi, noting that he and his family are Jewish.

Diosdado Cabello is believed to be one of Venezuela’s most prolific drug traffickers. Reports for decades have identified him as the head of the “Cartel de los Soles,” a transnational cocaine trafficking operation based within the Venezuelan armed forces.

“The Venezuelan dictatorship is one more link in the chain of transnational terrorism. Its corrupt structures are the handmaidens of drug cartels,” former Colombian President Iván Duque told the United Nations General Assembly in 2019. “Its followers are adherents of a mafia and fuel the violence in Colombia. The dictatorship gives refuge to murderers and child rapists – and those who ignore these facts are, by their silence, accomplices of the dictatorship.”

Colombia is the world’s largest cultivator of coca crops, used to produce cocaine. The 2022 United Nations World Drug Report found that 61 percent of the world’s cocaine originates in Colombia. It also revealed that, during the time frame covered (the year 2020), cocaine production globally hit record highs, largely fueled by an increase in efficiency in Colombia: drug cultivators need fewer hectares of land to produce more crops.

“The global area under coca bush cultivation remained basically unchanged in 2020, at 234,200 ha [hectares], 5 percent below the peak in 2018,” the report read. However, “potential cocaine manufacture grew 11 per cent in 2020, compared with the previous year, reaching a new record high of 1,982 tons (adjusted to 100 per cent purity).”

Among many far-left campaign promises, Gustavo Petro vowed to end previous conservative governments’ attempts to curb illegal drug cultivation in the country. He reiterated his commitment to ending anti-drug policies during his inauguration speech in early August.

“Of course, peace is possible if we change, for example, our policies against drugs, seen as a war for a preventative policy in developed countries,” Petro told the Colombian people.

Petro mysteriously stopped attacking Colombia’s election administrators as liars immediately after winning the presidential election. The former mayor of Bogotá, the nation’s capital, won after losing the prior race in 2018 to his predecessor, Iván Duque, who left office on Sunday as one of the most unpopular presidents in recent memory due to a poor — and often violent — response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

“Helicopters and planes, frigates, they are not only useful to bomb or shoot,” he told his nation, “they are also good for creating the first infrastructure of preventative health of the Colombian people.”

Petro had previously suggested replacing coca crops with cannabis rather than attempting to direct farmers away from growing drug plants entirely.

Petro had been equally assertive in calling for the restoration of ties with one of the world’s most powerful narco-regimes.

“We have made an immense error: breaking, precisely, relations with our neighbor,” Petro said last week of the two countries, disregarding that Maduro announced the rupture of relations with Colombia first, rather than vice versa. “Independent of political regimes, the political processes that each society follows, a relationship between neighbors should never be broken… the damage is tremendous.”

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