Missed Opportunity

Let’s be honest. Biden met with Petro to make it seem to his electorate that he is doing something about the delicate issue of Venezuela.

Gustavo Petro and his team wasted a very important opportunity to repair relations between Colombia and the United States, succeeding, instead, in involving Colombia in Washington’s intense bipartisan conflict. I am writing this piece in front of the United States Capitol, where this week I have been gauging perspectives on the Colombian leader’s visit to the United States.

The reactions from the Republican Party have been blunt. Sen. Marco Rubio described our president as an “Agent of Chaos”; Rick Scott said that Gustavo Petro is only concerned with narcotics terrorist Nicolás Maduro; while representative María Elvira Salazar, after her meeting with the Colombian delegation, concluded that our leader is a socialist. Great.

The most vehement reaction, however, came from member of Congress Mario Díaz-Balart, chairman of the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, who stated, “The actions and comments from Colombia’s new president have put the largely successful U.S.-Colombia relationship in jeopardy. I will not permit U.S. taxpayer dollars to support a government in Colombia that sustains the Maduro regime.” Alarming.

Never in our country’s recent history has the visit of a Colombian president to the U.S. Capitol resulted in such grim reaction.

The fire was lit by the head of state himself, when he identified progress in the gradual lifting of sanctions against Venezuela as his main objective, so that Maduro will guarantee the minimum of conditions for free elections to be held in his country. A dumb move.

Venezuela is a topic that generates strong feelings, mainly among legislators in Florida. Maduro is met with the same level of disdain as Fidel Castro, in a country where present levels of Venezuelan and Colombian migration are high. If you wanted to win votes in that part of the country, your best bet would be to take a hard stance against anything remotely related to the radical left.

People in Florida have experienced first-hand the fallout from the failed reparation of relations with the Cuban regime attempted by President Barack Obama. The strategy, rather than creating conditions for prosperity, strengthened the dictatorships of Castro and his accomplices and led to the largest exodus of Cubans in the country’s history, which is still ongoing. Extending an olive branch to dictators and criminals always ends in betrayal and exploitation.

For this reason, it is difficult to make sense of the Colombian delegates’ poor understanding of the American political game. Our representatives’ innocence and absence of vision has resulted in newer and stronger opposition from the Republican side and no new friends on the Democratic side — the side of President Biden. In fact, the visit has created a dangerous and negative precedent for friendships in the U.S. Congress.

Given the United States’ line of thinking and political tactics, it is also difficult to understand the strategy of the Colombian team in facilitating a meeting between their leader and Salazar, who has always been a strong critic of Petro and Maduro. They subjected the head of state to an unnecessary ordeal, the equivalent of President Biden’s visiting Colombia and Petro to organize a public meeting with Maria Fernanda Cabal Molina and Fabio Valencia Cossio, members of the Colombian Congress known for their conservative views.

In the public meeting between the two heads of state, Biden appeared cheerful and smiling as always. “Uncle” Joe, as he is referred to here, is a man of good character, from whose expression it is difficult to decipher unhappiness or anxiety. The endless labyrinthine responses of the Colombian head of state must have sounded like music to his ears on a day when leading U.S. news sources suggested that the White House was obstructing investigation of his son, Hunter Biden.

What, then, did we Colombians gain from this visit? Nothing. Obviously, they want us to sell the idea that neutralizing the situation in Venezuela will bring huge benefits to this country, which is true. However, this should not lead the discussion of two presidents whose countries who are facing serious issues at home.

Some have suggested that because of this, Petro is more important on a regional level than Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. I doubt it. Furthermore, if this is the goal, I am worried that we are in a battle of personal egos rather than in a search for the permanent solutions required for solving problems faced by real people. The last time someone made such a declaration from the presidential office, they won a Nobel Prize and left Colombia with a poorly-funded peace process, no compensation for victims and guerrilla-fighters-turned-senators living the high life. This is not to mention a country inundated with cocaine and other narcotics.

Let’s be honest. Biden met with Petro to make it seem to his electorate that he is doing something about the delicate issue of Venezuela. Given its increasingly difficult relations with China, the United States needs to both obtain raw materials from Latin America and upset Beijing’s growing influence in the region. The problem for the American president is that he must do this without generating more anger in an electorate already extremely sensitive to the subject of Maduro.

In other words, Colombians were treated like convenient idiots, and we lost bipartisan support that took us decades to build. Petro’s visit to Biden was a disaster. I wish they would listen.