By Nehomar Hernandez*
(Opinion) It had been said that the election of Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia would generate dire consequences not only for that country, but for the entire region.
The presence of the former guerrilla in the Casa de Nariño opened the doors to the creation of a powerful territorial bloc integrated with the dictatorially governed Venezuela by Maduro, in order to accommodate any number of criminal activities in the joint space of both nations.
However, things have gone much further: Petro, far from just wanting to establish a geopolitical alliance with Maduro and his evil regime, has actively dedicated himself since his arrival at the Colombian government palace to fulfilling the duties of a Foreign Minister of Chavista tyranny.
The move is clear: flatten the ground so that the full assimilation of the Venezuelan regime in the region, and probably in the entire world, takes shape. No matter how criminal this is, no matter how dictatorship it is.
Read also: Check out our coverage on Colombia
Thus, the Colombian leftist leader has even been recognized by the Biden Administration in the United States as a possible effective bridge so that the White House can eventually improve its relations with Caracas, broken definitively when Donald Trump in 2019 decided to support opposition leader Juan Guaidó and the constitution of his interim government, alternative to the Chavista one.
The development of events has been so fast that this week the president of France, Emmanuel Macron -one of the main international supporters that Guaidó had in his day, by the way- posed smiling and relaxed with Maduro in the breaks of an event sponsored by the United Nations (UN) to discuss climate change in Egypt.
The main topic of conversation has supposedly been that of the vaunted and repeated ad nauseam resumption of the dialogue and negotiation table that the Venezuelan electoral opposition holds with Maduro in Mexico, for the purpose of holding such presidential elections in 2024 It goes without saying that in them, for a change, Chavismo has everything to “win”.
And this did not come out of nowhere.
The issue was probably brought up by Petro himself, who also appeared at the summit on Thursday to meet with Macron.
The international press has reported on the meeting, stating that one of the main issues discussed there was precisely that of Venezuela and the Chavismo-opposition “negotiation”.
The Colombian president has thus carved out a role for himself along the lines that a character like José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero once played.
Although Zapatero has been an effective Chavista lobbyist, brilliant when it comes to creating international deals to legitimize the “dialogues” and “elections” that Maduro pulls out of his hat from time to time, Petro surpasses him because he is an incumbent president who He is also the head of state of the country that, due to geographical proximity and for historical reasons, has more common ties with Venezuela.
THE QUESTION ARISES HERE: WHY IS THE COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT SO WILLING TO PLAY THIS ROLE?
Although an unsuspecting analyst could allude to merely ideological reasons, given that Petro and Maduro come from that great leftist international crime family that is the São Paulo Forum, the thing seems to go far beyond the field of the neighborhood of ideas.
In the practical field, Maduro has great possibilities of helping Petro in his “total peace” process, especially with the terrorists of the National Liberation Army (ELN), who have turned Venezuelan territory into their second home, importing different areas of the country their criminal activities.
It cannot be forgotten that Caracas and Havana are playing a key role in the fiction of the abandonment of arms that the guerrilla group is advancing.
The Colombian president is interested in sheltering himself with the same false epic that Juan Manuel Santos built in 2016 during the pacification process of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which eventually even earned Santos the Nobel Peace Prize.
Six years later, that operation’s results are known worldwide; what is being done with the ELN will probably end up the same as that botched job.
In this way, it must be made clear that the interests pursued by each actor largely orient the Petro-Maduro relationship.
While for the recently inaugurated president of Colombia, Maduro is a great supporter who could help “resolve” the armed conflict (and thereby ascend to the Olympus of international public opinion), for the Venezuelan tyrant Petro (who has become a sort of the star of the world’s leftist press) is the best instrument at hand for leading its operation of “normalization” and international money laundering.
Win-win.
* Venezuelan journalist (Universidad Central de Venezuela) and Master in Political Science (Universidad Simón Bolívar).
He is currently working on his doctoral thesis in Political Science and hosts the radio program “Y Así Nos Va”, on Radio Caracas Radio.
With information from La Gaceta