The management of the Colombian Defense Minister, Diego Molano, has raised numerous criticisms. Every week he is surrounded by a new controversy and threatens to become a stone in the shoe for the Government of Iván Duque. If last week the ministry was designated by the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) of faking a cyber attack to improve its image during the wave of protests against the Government, the most recent episode had a diplomatic scope. The official, who was accompanying the president on Monday on his visit to Israel, pointed to Iran, a country with which Bogotá has had relations since 1975, as an “enemy”, in the framework of a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Hezog.
“Here we have a common enemy and it is the case of Iran and Hezbollah that operate against Israel, but also support the Venezuelan regime,” said Molano, highlighting the exchange of information and intelligence that it develops with the military forces and the Ministry of Defense. Defense of Israel. While the Foreign Ministry avoided commenting, President Duque, who has met with the main Israeli authorities to seal an economic and diplomatic alliance, had to rectify it within hours. “In the particular case of Iran, Colombia has maintained diplomatic relations and it is clear what the terrorist threats are,” he added, recalling that Bogotá does consider Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian militia, as a “terrorist organization.” However, the umpteenth controversy of the minister had already taken flight.
Molano is a member of the Democratic Center, the government party founded by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Duque’s political mentor. “There is a very serious coordination problem within the Government, because it is not the first that the president has to go out to correct an official,” points out the political scientist and internationalist Sandra Borda. In diplomacy, he points out, to reach that point of hostility manifest difficulties are required, while the relationship between Bogotá and Tehran is flowing normally. “Diego Molano has never had contact with international issues, and he acts at the point of a very primitive intuition”, values the professor at the University of Los Andes. The great paradox, he concludes, is that the Defense Minister has become an uncomfortable official for the Executive due to this effort to ingratiate himself with his party and be tough at the point of statements.
Molano took office in February, amid a climate of deteriorating security that includes the murder of social leaders, environmentalists and former FARC combatants who signed the peace agreement five years ago, as well as a string of massacres and repeated episodes of police brutality. Since then it has harvested multiple storms, and not even the recent capture of Dairo Antonio Úsuga, alias Otoniel, chief of the Gulf Clan, provided a lasting respite.
Security has been one of the great banners of Uribismo, the political current created around the former president, the most staunch opponent of negotiations with the defunct FARC guerrilla. Therefore, points out the analyst Yann Basset, any defense minister of this government is going to be surrounded by controversy. “It is a ministry that has a lot of pressure, that has the Democratic Center on top of it, that sometimes wants to meddle in these defense matters. There is also a lot of prevention on the part of the opposition and civil society, so it is a position by nature very controversial, complicated and delicate, ”says the professor of Political Science at the Universidad del Rosario.
The security policy to quell the wave of protests of the so-called national strike had already caused both the opposition and the protesters to demand his departure last May. In a failed attempt at a motion of censure, the opposition senator Iván Cepeda exhibited episodes such as the attack by armed civilians against indigenous protesters, without the police intervening, or the aggression of dozens of uniformed human rights defenders. Molano easily overcame that legislative challenge, in the midst of a social outbreak that did take away the Minister of Finance and the Chancellor.
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The attempts at a motion of censure against the three defense ministers that Iván Duque has had since he assumed power in August 2018 continue to pile up. Molano arrived as a replacement for Carlos Holmes Trujillo, who died in January due to covid-19, and this in turn had assumed after the resignation of Guillermo Botero before the imminent approval of a motion of censure, after having concealed the death of eight minors in a bombing against FARC dissidents. Molano himself had already faced his own scandal in March over the denunciation of the death of several minors in another bombing against dissidents, when he referred to those victims of forced recruitment as “war machines.”
“The common denominator of all defense ministers is that they are part of a government that decided to destroy the peace and that works a friend-enemy dialectic; He declares an enemy to anyone who opposes him and acts accordingly. It is a ministry that is not of Defense but is for internal warfare, ”says opposition senator Roy Barreras, protagonist of the legislative debate that cost Botero his job. “To the ineptitude is added the ignorance about international relations and the minimum prudence that a defense minister must have,” he lashes out at Molano for what he describes as “enormous irresponsibility” and “a huge diplomatic error.” The legislator anticipates that he intends to file a new motion of censure in the next few hours, although he realistically rules out that it is approved by Congress, where the Government, ten months after handing over power, maintains the majority.
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