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BOGOTA, Colombia — It’s one of many United States’ few enduring alliances in an often-turbulent Latin America, one constructed round a decades-long partnership combating the nation’s drug cartels.
However Gustavo Petro’s election as Colombia’s first leftist president is prone to take a look at the U.S.’ particular relationship with a serious non-NATO ally like by no means earlier than.
In the course of the onerous fought contest, Petro, a former guerrilla, took purpose at pressured coca eradication and extradition — centerpieces of the U.S.-backed drug battle — in addition to a free commerce settlement with the U.S. he blames for impoverishing Colombian farmers
It stays to be seen whether or not he can implement his progressive agenda amid a fractured congress and opposition from highly effective elites.
However simply his promise of sweeping change in a rustic that has lengthy been a bulwark of regional stability has many in Washington on edge — even when tracks the left’s resurgence all through Latin America and was embraced by tens of millions of Colombians fed up with monumental inequality and social injustice.
“Our mixed efforts to fight transnational crime are over,” stated Kevin Whitaker, a retired U.S. diplomat who served as ambassador in Bogota from 2014 to 2019. “There’s little question that he’s going about this in a really completely different method.”
However whereas Whitaker is skeptical of Petro’s motives and effectiveness as a pacesetter, he stated he couldn’t be in additional settlement along with his marketing campaign’s overarching focus: boosting the presence of the state, not simply safety forces, within the long-neglected countryside.
“If he is ready to clarify his plan to the U.S., and bridge the deep urban-rural divide that has lengthy been Colombia’s greatest problem, then it doesn’t need to be a conflictive relationship,” stated Whitaker.
The U.S. helped Colombia pull again from the brink in 1999 with the launch of Plan Colombia to counter drug trafficking and the guerrillas who funded their insurgency by the transport of cocaine. Since then, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have supplied greater than $13 billion in army and financial help to Colombia — vastly greater than some other nation in Latin America.
Petro, 62, through the marketing campaign criticized the linchpins of that bipartisan technique.
On extradition, he stated his authorities would prioritize truth-telling and compensation for the victims of highly effective felony teams reasonably than sending capos to the U.S. to face justice. Yearly, below particular presidential order, Colombia extradites dozens of drug traffickers charged within the U.S.
He additionally attacked the pressured eradication of coca — the bottom ingredient of cocaine — for criminalizing in any other case law-abiding peasants and proving ineffective in reining in a file harvest. As a substitute, he would favor increasing crop substitution applications that present credit score, coaching and land rights to rural farmers.
All of Petro’s objectives, nonetheless admirable, face large obstacles.
Within the U.S., a big paperwork consisting of a whole lot of federal legislation enforcement brokers has constructed up round shut cooperation that will likely be troublesome to unwind, says Whitaker.
Petro can also be prone to face stiff resistance from contained in the Colombian armed forces, whose affect has expanded enormously on the again of U.S. help and coaching.
Then there are the criminals themselves, who’re unlikely to face by idly if their income are threatened. Regardless of being enshrined in a 2016 peace accord with the nation’s largest insurgent teams, voluntary crop substitution accounted for lower than 1% of the 130,147 hectares of coca fields eradicated in 2020 — an indication of simply how tenuous the state’s presence stays outdoors city facilities.
“A big dialing again of the safety part would strengthen the arms of the felony actors and could be a degree of friction with the U.S.,” stated Cynthia Arnson, a fellow on the Wilson Middle in Washington and a longtime observer of Colombia.
In different areas, reminiscent of commerce and Venezuela, Petro may additionally conflict with the U.S. His marketing campaign platform requires the creation of “sensible tariffs” to guard Colombia’s countryside from agricultural imports allowed below a decade outdated free commerce settlement with the U.S.
On Venezuela, he would re-establish relations with Nicolas Maduro’s socialist authorities — a transfer prone to anger many Republicans in Congress and unsettle the practically 2 million Venezuelan migrants who’ve sought refuge in Colombia.
To this point, Petro has averted fueling any discord. In a 40-minute victory speech, he didn’t point out the drug battle as soon as and his solely reference to the U.S. was a name for dialogue to collectively tackle local weather change — a precedence for the Biden administration.
“It’s time to sit down down with the US and speak about what it means the truth that they, like no different nation within the Americas, are the supply of greenhouse gases that we soak up in our Amazonian jungle,” he stated.
The U.S. has been equally restrained, touting the truth that Petro’s victory got here on the two hundredth anniversary of the day Colombia turned the primary former Spanish colony to be acknowledged as an impartial state by the U.S.
“We sit up for persevering with our robust partnership with President-Elect (Petro) and constructing a extra democratic and equitable hemisphere,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated in a message posted on social media on election evening. The following day, he known as Petro the subsequent day to supply his congratulations.
However whereas Petro, a former senator and mayor of the capital, Bogota, has been a fixture of politics for many years, the U.S. has had solely restricted contact with him through the years.
That partially displays what, till lately, had been the restricted prospects for the left within the socially conservative nation. However the 2016 peace deal lifted many activists’ fears and breathed life into new calls for by youthful Colombians much less burdened by the bloody battle. Petro, after dropping the 2018 presidential contest, then skillfully rode the wave of discontent, benefiting from protests through the pandemic that paralyzed the outgoing conservative authorities of Iván Duque and laid naked the results of inequality worse than some other nation in Latin America besides Brazil.
Throughout Petro’s sluggish rise, U.S. officers described him alternately as a radical “populist” within the mildew of the late Venezuelan chief Hugo Chavez, in response to a 2006 secret U.S. Embassy cable printed by pro-transparency group Wikileaks, or “pragmatic,” in response to one other report despatched two years later.
Whichever management fashion he embraces as president stays to be seen. However Petro has already made clear that in distinction along with his predecessors, he’s prone to look much less to Washington and search nearer ties with fellow leftists in locations reminiscent of Mexico, Chile and Argentina.
The chance for the U.S. to affect the path of his authorities has additionally been restricted by the departure earlier this month of Ambassador Philip Goldberg to take up his new project in South Korea. The Biden administration has but to appoint a alternative.
“It’s past disappointing that the Biden crew has not nominated an envoy to shepherd U.S. coverage by this crucial transition interval,” stated John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama who additionally served as a diplomat in Colombia through the hunt for Medellin cartel boss Pablo Escobar within the Nineteen Nineties. “They will’t blame Republican obstructionism within the Senate for this one and they might do properly to announce a nominee ASAP.”
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Goodman reported from Cleveland, Ohio
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