He wants to establish himself as a regional leader, capable of returning democracy to Venezuela and changing the course of the global fight against climate change and drugs, to fight them in a different way than his predecessors. At the domestic level, he aspires to launch a range of negotiations with the different criminal gangs in order to achieve his electoral promise of “total peace.”
For all these purposes, Gustavo Petro would like to have the support of the United States, a key player in the southern hemisphere, although it has lost influence in the last decades in favor of Russia and China. Especially, in relation to his Venezuelan neighbor.
“It is a meeting of two different people who have some points in common on the international agenda,” Gustavo Petro told a group of journalists this Thursday in Washington, about his meeting with Joe Biden. “Undoubtedly, the climate issue is one on which we have a common agenda.” On Wednesday he met with representatives of the Democratic Party in a meeting in which they discussed “how to unite North American progressivism with Latin American progressivism around a new economy that has to be the one that overcomes the climate crisis, there is a point there.”
As for Venezuela, “zero sanctions” is the wish that is repeated in government circles as a mantra when referring to those that Washington imposed on the Chavista dictatorship. To achieve this, Petro placed all diplomatic efforts in the hands of the Colombian ambassador to the United States, Luis Gilberto Murillo. Skilled politician, former Minister of the Environment under Juan Manuel Santos, and a great connoisseur of Capitol Hill, he has spent eight months convincing US legislators of the benefits of Petrista’s objectives. And he already has a group of Democrats who welcome his proposals.
Another goal for Petro on his US tour, which kicked off on Monday, is to convince academia and like-minded politicians of his desire to completely eliminate coal, gas and oil exploitation to save the planet. At Stanford University, he reiterated that the sum of capitalism and energy needs, satisfied with fossil fuels, are the root of the climate change that the world is suffering and that leads, he assures, to the annihilation of Humanity.
Regarding drugs, apart from the co-responsibility that Colombian leaders have always claimed, under the premise that Colombia provides the dead and Western countries the consumption, Petro advocates the policy of legalizing narcotics instead of criminalizing crops and production.
“These 50 years show an absolutely disastrous balance, both here, in the United States, and in all of our Latin America. Democratic degradation is capital, the number of deaths is counted in the millions, the number of prisoners almost reaches tens of millions “, claimed President Petro.
What he will not raise on this occasion, despite what he defended in August of last year, shortly after taking office, is his intention to shake up the figure of the extradition of drug traffickers, widely used in past administrations. “Drug trafficker who negotiates with the Colombian State with legal benefits and commits to definitively stop drug trafficking, will not be extradited to the United States,” he told Rahul Gupta, director of the National Drug Control Policy Office of the House in Bogotá. White.
Petro took advantage of his stay in Washington to speak at the installation ceremony of the Permanent Council of the OAS (Organization of American States) and put controversial issues on the table. He asked to change the Democratic Charter of the organization “for the strengthening of human rights” and to integrate Venezuela and Cuba.
And he again showed his rejection of the arrest of Pedro Castillo, an extreme that has cost him harsh replies from his Peruvian counterpart, Dina Boluarte, given the interference in the politics of another country. He has also been declared persona non grata by the Parliament of said nation. “Isn’t there a president imprisoned without a judicial sentence and without his political rights, that is, contrary to the Democratic Charter?”, he criticized once again.
With all his movements, Petro continues trying to get recognition by the leadership of Latin America, at least that of the socialist countries, as Hugo Chávez achieved in his day at the cost of distributing huge amounts of petrodollars, or the first and charismatic Lula da Silva.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
