Colombia’s President-elect Gustavo Petro and his Vice-President Francia Marquez after learning Sunday’s presidential election victory. LUISA GONZALEZ (REUTERS)
The first consequence of Gustavo Petro’s victory in the Colombian presidential elections for the Venezuelan opposition will be the termination of the functions of Juan Guaidó’s “Ministry of Foreign Affairs” on Colombian territory. The so-called interim government has boasted recognition from more than fifty countries around the world, most notably Bogotá, from 2019 to date, in addition to Washington’s declared support. Now it will be forced to remove the Colombian government from the list: a change – a loss – of great importance, the result of the folly displayed by US foreign policy for many decades, not only in relation to our America .
The United States isn’t alone in being off the rails; They kept him company, and the Harvard faction of the Venezuelan opposition elite is an example. Always more attentive to the decisions of the State Department than to what might happen in Magdalena Medio or in Quibdó, neither Guaidó nor his advisors ever considered the possibility that Gustavo Petro or some Apollonian figure from the hitherto unfortunate liberal center could achieve the presidency from Colombia.
“The first duty of a Venezuelan politician is to understand very well what is happening in Colombia,” I heard Carlos Andrés Pérez say one afternoon, a frontier worker who twice became Venezuela’s president. “Because where it leans, listen carefully to me, where Colombia eventually leans, so will all of South America.”
Pérez left the presidency to retire at his home after a 1992 Rabula court sentenced him to house arrest. Today Pérez is hard to beat; I saw him and I still hold him in high esteem because for all his flaws he was a thorough Democrat and a true Republican. For this reason, when I think of his words, I think of Bolívar, the archetypal “son of the unfortunate Caracas” and the first Venezuelan politician who, at a certain point, had to seek refuge in New Granada, just like Rómulo Betancourt did in the 19th century . .
Protocol rhetoric inevitably stops at the flattering idea of sister nations. With the ease of TV stars, Venezuelan politicians invoke the Arepa anthropological community. Those who are just a little more enlightened fill their mouths with Pantano de Vargas and Boyacá. “We’re very similar,” it’s often said, but it’s not true. Every unfortunate Latin American country has its own way, forgive the Tolstoyazo.
Gran Colombia was nothing but an arbitration imposed by the need to win a war; an “illuminated illusion,” as Luis Castro Leiva, our unforgettable historian of ideas, put it. The spread of the pernicious Bolívar cult shows the Colombian and Ecuadorian varieties that Hugo Chávez turned inside out like a sock to transform a conservative and militaristic theology into a populist and military ruse.
Today’s Colombia is a far cry from the country with which we traded half the debt of the Revolutionary War and to which we said “well then, brother” in 1830. It is the third most populous nation in our America, after Mexico and Brazil: 50 million inhabitants, of which 22 million are poor. Fortunately, it has institutions that we Venezuelans would have liked to have had in 1992.
Its president is a man of the left with a biography that can only be Latin American: an insurgent who adopted Aureliano as his nom de guerre before criticizing arms. For three decades, as Humberto de la Calle points out, Petro adhered to the democratic rules enshrined in the constitution he helped enforce, until he eventually presided over Colombia and won a very free election.
Colombia, gentlemen, I am speaking of the country that is generously welcoming almost two of the more than six million Venezuelans who have walked into exile in the last five years. I want many of you luckier than them to understand this before you tweet wildness and predict disaster from Miami or Madrid.
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