Gallego and Moreno, the two Colombians on whom control of the Senate in the United States may depend

In addition to defining the name of the next occupant of the White Housethe elections next November in USA They will also determine control of the powerful US legislature, currently led by Republicans in the House of Representatives and Democrats in the Senate.

Another fierce battle that both parties will fight over these seven months and that everything indicates will be resolved by the narrowest of margins. In the middle of that dispute there are two Colombian-Americans, located on opposite ideological shores, and who will probably make the difference between winners and losers.

Is about Ruben Gallego, born in Chicago, but of a Colombian mother, and Bernardo Morenobrother of the former president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Luis Alberto Moreno, originally from Bogotá, but living in the United States since he was 5 years old.

Moreno, with the support of the former president donald trumpwon – and handily – the Republican nomination to represent the party in November for one of the Senate seats that corresponds to the state of Ohio (in the US, each state has two senators), when he will face Democrat Sherrod Brown , who currently occupies this seat in the Upper House.

Gallego, for his part, is a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for one of the Arizona Senate seats. Although the state's primary elections are in July, Gallego is already the virtual winner as he has full support from the establishment and has no serious rivals after Senator Kyrsten Sinema (a Democrat who later became an independent) announced in January that she would not will seek re-election.

As things stand, Gallego would face Kari Lake in November, who leads the race in the Republican Party and has the backing of Trump.

The truth is that the result of those two races – Gallego in Arizona and Moreno in Ohio – could well determine the majorities in the Senate. Although Democrats currently have power in the Upper House, their majority is pyrrhic (51 seats – including Sinema and Brown – against 49 for the Republicans).

Given the conservative nature of these two states, Republicans believe that they hold the key to their return to power. On the other hand, in the case of the Democrats, their survival also depends, in large part, on the outcome of these two races.

Hence how transcendental Gallego and Moreno will be in these 2024 elections. From the outset, a victory for either of them would be historic, since it would be the first time that a Colombian reaches the US Senate. And in the process he would crown him as the national who has gone the furthest in the politics of this country.

Likewise, it is unusual that control of a body as powerful as the Senate is in the hands of two Colombian-Americans.

However, the most anecdotal thing about the case is that these are two radically opposite people, although both have their origins in the same country.

Gallego, 44, is a firm defender of President Joe Biden and a faithful representative of Democratic ideology on issues such as the right to abortion, gender diversity and the cause of immigrants.

Moreno, on the contrary, is today a thoroughbred Trumpist who, although he denigrated the former president in the past (he compared him to Adolf Hitler at some point), is one of those who think that the elections were stolen from Trump in 2020, he catalogs the undocumented immigrants from criminals and opposes abortion “without exceptions.”

And their life stories are also contradictory.

Gallego's is, in some ways, an epitome of the American dream. According to what he said in an interview with this newspaper, his grandfather migrated to the United States in the 70s looking for new opportunities. Initially He traveled alone to New Jersey, where he took a job in a shoe factory. Over time he brought his wife and children, among whom was his mother, who later, many years later, married a Mexican.

From that union Gallego and three other brothers were born. But his father soon abandoned them and it was his mother – along with his grandparents – who supported him and pushed him to study in Harvard, university from which he graduated thanks to scholarships and the financial support of his maternal family.

After leaving this educational center, he enlisted in the Marines shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001 and ended up fighting in the Iraq War between 2003 and 2004.

A conflict that changed his perspective and led him to get into politics. First as a councilman and congressman in Arizona and then as a representative to the House, a position that he still holds and where he arrived in 2015.

From this position he has supported the approval of resources for Colombia and the peace agreements that were signed with the FARC in 2016.

Moreno, for his part, is the son of a renowned Colombian surgeon (Bernardo Moreno) who was director of the ICBF during the Misael Pastrana government (1970-1974).

The family emigrated to Fort Lauderdale (Florida) in 1972, when he was 5 years old, and initially settled in an apartment they already had in that city. In interviews he has given, Moreno has indicated that he comes from a wealthy, upper-class family. In fact, in one of them he said that his mother chose to move to Florida because she disagreed with the privileges with which her children were growing up, surrounded by service employees and luxuries.

A somewhat ambivalent story since in other press articles he has described his departure from the country as forced by security conditions and in search of better horizons. He even equated himself at one point with the cause of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro's regime.

In any case, there is no doubt that they had a hard time since their father initially had to work as a surgical assistant, since he did not have a degree to practice medicine in the United States, while their mother dedicated herself to real estate, creating over the years a successful real estate business.

At age 18, Moreno officially became a United States citizen and later enrolled at the University of Michigan. After his degree he went to work at General Motors and from there he went to Boston, where he was manager of a Saturn car dealership. From both work experiences he got the idea that would make him a successful businessman.

In 2005 he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he bought his first high-end car dealership, which he later expanded into a large company, Collection Auto Group, which brings together many dealerships in the area and of which he was president. for more than a decade.

In 2019, however, Moreno sold part of his venture to dedicate himself to Ownum, a company dedicated to cryptocurrencies. From that sale, according to the media in the United States, he would have made at least “a couple of hundred million dollars”which would have helped him finance a first candidacy for the Senate in 2022 – which he lost to JD Vance, current senator – and the current 2024 campaign.

In a certain sense, Moreno's story is another version of the same dream: that of an immigrant child who came to the United States and, thanks to his talent and business acumen, ended up a millionaire and now aspiring to one of the most powerful positions. in the country.

In any case, these are two Colombians who have come very far, even along paths that today have them on opposite corners.