Republican Senator Marco Rubio published this Thursday a harsh column against President Gustavo Petro in which he says that under his mandate Colombia went from being the main ally of the United States to a “leftist facilitator of drug cartels and terrorists” and asks to condition aid to the country until crop eradication is restored, including fumigation.
(See here: The US suspends monitoring of coca crops in Colombia: these are the reasons)In his column, Rubio quotes this newspaper and its exclusive on the suspension of monitoring of illicit crops and says that it was a move to please Petro in his failed strategy to appease the drug cartels under Total Peace.
“Colombia has gone from being the United States’ strongest ally in our region to a leftist enabler of drug cartels and terrorists. Clearly this is a turn for the worst. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden is making it easy for him to overturn. He just read the recent headlines in the media. Last week, the newspaper EL TIEMPO revealed that the Biden Administration stopped monitoring coca crops in Colombia by satellite for the first time in decades. This does not make common sense because the illegal coca industry in Colombia is actively expanding. But surely this move will please Petro, who has ordered his military to painstakingly eradicate coca by hand, thus reducing the eradication rate by 90 percent.”, says the senator in the newspaper El Americano.
The subtext here, Rubio continues, “is that Petro seeks to appease the cartels as part of a failed bid, as well as the ELN terrorist group to negotiate a ‘total peace.’ President Biden, in turn, seeks to appease Petro to satisfy progressive activists and socialist sympathizers within his State Department, thereby turning a blind eye to coke production.”.
For the senator, the decision is a huge and unwarranted departure from status quo. “Between 2000 and 2020, the United States invested more than $10 billion to help the Colombian government crack down on drug traffickers and terrorists. This bipartisan plan, called Plan Colombia, produced measurable benefits. Even the progressive Obama administration admitted that he ‘transformed a nation on the brink of collapse into a strong institutional democracy with historically low levels of violence.’ Appeasement, on the other hand, threatens instability and insecurity,” says the senator from Florida.
For this, the drug cartels and the terrorists “they take advantage of weak crime policies, not to quit their war but to illicitly enrich themselves. In this, they are aided by the Petro tax scheme, which is sinking the national economy. Since the national government and the market provide neither order nor prosperity, more people will resort to illegal means to acquire them.”.
Rubio then returns to the charge and says that the suspension of monitoring is bad news for Colombia and for the United States, that it has invested billions of dollars to make Colombia a “strong and reliable ally in trade, the fight against drug trafficking and terrorism, and that it will suffer more cocaine addictions and overdose-related deaths”.
The senator asks not only to resume satellite monitoring of coca crops, but to condition all future aid on the resumption of crop eradication and aerial spraying.
“Petro supporters will surely object. But common-sense Democrats support these measures. They know the alternative is to do nothing, to turn a blind eye as violence and crime escalate to appease a would-be socialist dictator. That is the path that President Biden has chosen. But is it the right way? The answer is obviously not, and Congress can and should course correct”, concludes the Senator.
SERGIO GOMEZ MASERI
EL TIEMPO correspondent
Washington
On Twitter @sergom68
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