Former Terrorist Gustavo Petro of Colombia Cuts Ties with Israel

Gustavo Petro is a former terrorist. He used to be a commander in Colombia’s left-wing guerrilla group, the famously violent M-19; now he is the President of Colombia. During his rule, he has run the economy into the ground. But at least his leftist heart is pure, as demonstrated by his decision to cut off diplomatic ties with Israel and instead to open an embassy to the “state of Palestine” in Ramallah. More on the egregious Petro can be found here: “Hatred from the Casa de Nariño: Colombia severs ties with Israel – Opinion,” by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Jerusalem Post, May 23, 2024:

On the morning of May 1st, May Day, Gustavo Petro, the one-time guerrilla leader and the first leftist president ever of Colombia, spoke to the press from his office in the Casa de Nariño, the executive palace in Bogota, and proudly announced that the South American nation was severing diplomatic ties with the State of Israel. The unilateral move came as an extreme response to Petro’s anger over the war in Gaza and his calls that Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders were genocidal. To emphasize their country’s outrage, Bogota has now announced that they are opening an embassy in Ramallah. Unsurprisingly, the Colombian President was silent over the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and said nothing about the murders, rapes, mutilations, and abductions perpetrated by the terrorists that horrible day. Gustavo Petro’s edict marked a dangerous new trend sweeping across the Americas. Leftist leaders and politicians who champion women’s rights, gay rights, and religious freedoms, have formed a toxic marriage with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s fundamentalist proxies in the Middle East to open a new front against Israel in a hemisphere far from the Jewish state’s shores.

It’s not surprising that the leftist former guerrilla leader would take the side of Hamas, for in the popular imagination, Israel is a country of “white oppressors” and the Palestinians are “brown,” and therefore are to be counted as among the “oppressed” of this earth. For Petro, Hamas is seen as a legitimate “resistance” group; he has never mentioned, much less condemned, its long history of terrorism. He has not uttered a syllable about the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Perhaps he is one of those who thinks that those atrocities never happened, but are a product of the febrile imaginations of Israeli propagandists.

The fact that President Petro was siding with terrorists did not surprise the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Petro was a former high-ranking officer in M-19, one of the most dangerous terrorist groups at war with the Colombian government in the violent 1980s. But he wasn’t just a trigger puller—he was leadership. He played an integral role in the planning and execution of some of the most heinous terrorist attacks perpetrated in Colombian history, including kidnapping and murder, including the 1985, seizure of the Colombian Palace of Justice and an ensuing standoff that killed over 100, including 11 of Colombia’s top judges. Petro was arrested and imprisoned, and like all allegedly reformed revolutionaries, he turned to politics. He served as the mayor of Bogota before being elected president in 2022….

Petro was not just a commander in M-19, but he was responsible for several of its bloodiest attacks, including the seizure of the Colombian Palace of Justice, in which more than 100 people died, including 11 of the nation’s senior judges. Yet somehow Petro, once caught, was sentenced neither to death or to a long prison sentence; he got off with a 19-month prison sentence.

Colombia was not the first country in Latin America to sever diplomatic relations with Israel, but it is a much larger, and more important country than the two countries — Belize and Bolivia — that preceded it in cutting ties to the Jewish state. And Colombia has a long history of close defense ties with Israel, with security, military, and intelligence cooperation. Israeli high-tech security solutions help Colombia to safeguard its borders. The ties between the security and intelligence services of Israel and Colombia have until now been unusually close. One wonders if they will survive Petro’s cutting of diplomatic ties.

In the view of Latin American left-wingers, such as Gabriel Boric of Chile, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Israel — with its “white” population, and its close alliance with the leader of the capitalist camp, the United States — is not entitled to any sympathy. The Palestinian narrative has been accepted by the left everywhere in Latin America. It goes like this: Jews came to “Palestine” from Europe; they have no connection to what they call the “Land of Israel,” unlike the Palestinians, who can trace their lineage back to the Canaanites. The Jews stole the land and expelled its real owners, the Palestinians. Ahistorical nonsense, but apparently not sufficiently so for the leftists who swallow this stuff.

Gustavo Petro may have failed as a leader in Colombia, with crime rampant and the economy in a nosedive, while both he and his son are involved in corruption scandals and campaign financing scandals, respectively. Only one-quarter of the country now supports Petro. But under such circumstances, what better way to divert the public’s attention from the painful condition of the country, than by virtue-signaling his support for the most fashionable of political causes for the international left — the Cause of Palestine, with those Palestinians brutalized, we are expected to believe, by the “apartheid colonial-settler genocidal state” of Israel.

In cutting ties with the Jewish State, Petro threatens Colombia’s national security by endangering the supply of Israeli-made weapons and spare parts, that Bogota has long relied upon. “Aside from the United States, Israel is one of Colombia’s most important defense allies,” Juan Carlos Ruíz Vásquez, a former adviser to Colombian defense leadership and professor at Bogota’s Universidad del Rosario, told The Washington Post.

Will those defense ties continue after Petro has cut diplomatic ties?

Three-quarters of Colombians want Gustavo Petro out as president. Even before the next election, due to take place in 2026, he may be forced out by a groundswell of political protests staged by those who are no longer willing to wait until 2026. If he is thrown out of office, his successor will no doubt listen to his country’s generals, who can explain to him how valuable Israel had been as a defense ally before Petro had cut ties. He will likely reestablish both diplomatic ties, and with them, the military links between Colombia and Israel that were once so helpful to Bogota, and, with the wretched pro-Palestinian Preto gone, will be again.