The United States has managed in just fourteen short years to alienate every nation south of the border in what can only be called one of the most inept foreign policy blunders in American history.
Tonight, the nation of Colombia has elected Gustavo Petro President of the country and this just means that the hard shift to a neo-Marxist Latin America bloc is almost complete. From the Financial Times tonight:
Leftist Gustavo Petro wins Colombian presidency
Excerpt:
Petro, a 62-year-old former mayor of Bogotá making his third bid for the presidency, promises a radical overhaul of the economy and nothing short of a social revolution, with far greater spending on education and healthcare.
His proposals, which include bans on oil exploration, open-pit mining and fracking, have unnerved investors who say they could stymie one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. Colombian assets and the peso are likely to weaken on his victory.
To say this is a total disaster for twenty eight years of failed US foreign policy in the region is an understatement. An article in The Economist, hardly the torch bearer for conservatism highlighted this point with their own graphic on the subject back in March of this year:
To provide some background on the new “reformed guerilla” who has become President of a close US ally in the region, he was a member of the M-19 revolutionary group. They were a pro-Communist anti-US urban based terror group which numbered in the thousands and were responsible for the seizure of the US Ambassador to Colombia in 1979 when the group seized the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogota. After 61 days the ambassador was freed and the group was provided safe passage to Cuba in exchange for the hostages.
After the group failed to gain as much popularity as FARC, they began more radical activities eventually working with the Medellin Cartels. This excerpt from an August 28, 1988 article by the Washington Post highlighted their activities:
On Nov. 6, 1985, M-19 took over the five-story marble Colombian Palace of Justice in downtown Bogota. It is one block from the Colombian congress and two blocks from the presidential mansion. Colombian soldiers besieged the building for 27 hours, then stormed it with grenades and gunfire. All 35 rebels died, along with 12 of the 24 supreme court justices.
We have learned from the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence sources that the crime was motivated more by greedy drug lords than ideological fanatics. The Medellin cartel wanted to harass the supreme court and destroy government files on cartel members who faced extradition to the United States on drug charges. A siege by a terrorist group would provide just the right cover.
The sum paid to M-19 for its services, $5 million, was pocket change for the cartel, which makes as much as $7 billion a year supplying the United States and Europe with cocaine. About 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States comes from the Medellin cartel.
THE MEDELLIN CARTEL/M-19 GANG by Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta
Obviously there is little if any record of the new President rebuking these activities although I am sure as he cozies up to the extremists running the Biden junta he will pay lip service to them if confronted.
The traditional foreign policy elites continue to demonstrate incompetence, failure, and worse, an insane inability to create rather than avoid expanding global conflict. With Ukraine burning, Iran about to have a nuclear war with Israel, China probably invading Taiwan, Libya still in disorder, all of the Sahel region in Africa at war with Islamist rebels internally, and new conflicts popping up by the day, to see Central and South America move further into the old non-aligned/Chinese sphere of influence is a nightmare far beyond the capabilities of the amateur hour currently in Washington, DC.
The State Department, Defense Department, and Intelligence agencies all need a good cleaning out, but sadly this will not happen in most of our lifetimes or until global conflict is on our doorstep.
That conflict appears to be arriving in the very near future.
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