Far-left president of Colombia Gustavo Petro claimed on Tuesday that the United States is engaging in “ethnic discrimination” of illegal migrants and accused it of being responsible for the Venezuelan migrant crisis by imposing human rights sanctions on the socialist regime.
Petro described the sanctions as a “blockade” on the country.
The socialist president made his remarks in a speech at the United Nations’ ongoing meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16), hosted throughout this week in the Colombian city of Cali.
Since the early 2010s, Venezuela is experiencing an unprecedented migrant crisis in the region described as the worst in the Western Hemisphere, rivaled only in size to that of Syria and Ukraine. Those countries are in a state of war, unlike Venezuela, whose migrant crisis is the direct result of the collapse of the country’s socialist system under the authoritarian regime led by dictator Nicolás Maduro.
According to U.N. estimates, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled their country — roughly 27.5 percent of the country’s 28 million population.
Petro, a former member of the Marxist M19 guerrilla with friendly ties with Maduro, did not attribute any responsibility to the dictator or his socialist regime for the Venezuelan migrant crisis in his speech. Instead, he claimed that the crisis is the result of an alleged U.S. “blockade” which, according to him, backfired, leading to a surge of U.S.-bound Venezuelan migrants.
“The Swedes are scared of the Syrian migration and there are 200,000 of them. Three million Venezuelans passed through here and we are not scared, because we consider them our brothers,” Petro said. “And they continued south and now they are going north, to the United States, which was the one that devised to blockade Venezuela. Victim of their own invention.”
The Colombian far-left president continued his accusations against the United States by claiming that it engages in “ethnic discrimination” of migrants akin to that of the times of slavery. According to Petro, migrants only serve the United States when they work 18 hours, but not “when they talk about rights.”
“The blockade is not a boomerang that is thrown against a people to kill them and returns to the people of the one who threw it. Then they become fascists because they do not want those migrants, neither Haitians, nor Cubans, nor Venezuelans, nor Colombians, nor Latin Americans in the United States,” Petro said. “They are only good at working 18 hours of forced labor, but when they talk about rights they are no good and should be expelled.”
The “blockade” that, according to Petro, Washington allegedly maintains against Venezuela, refers to sanctions imposed by the United States — under the administration of former President Donald Trump — on the Venezuelan socialist regime in response to an extensive list of human rights violations committed by the regime against its own people. According to Petro, it is the U.S. sanctions, and not the Maduro regime, that have pushed a “part of the society literally starving in a land that is one of the richest in the world.”
In reality, the Venezuelan migrant crisis started several years before the United States imposed sanctions on Maduro, members of his top brass, and specific Venezuelan state-owned companies such as PDVSA, Venezuela’s flagship oil company. PDVSA was sanctioned in January 2019, years after the country’s collapse.
By 2014, Venezuela’s socialist economy was already experiencing a severe collapse, with widespread shortages of even the most basic goods and out-of-control inflation that pulverized the value of the local currency, the Venezuelan bolivar.
Maduro responded to the widespread shortages — all caused by socialist policies such as steep price controls — by implementing a strict weekly ration system managed through fingerprint scanners and other draconian forms of control. The collapse of socialism led to a dramatic 2,889 percent increase of Venezuelan migration between 2012 and 2015.
Maduro also deployed the Bolivarian National Guard to “watch over” the lengthy lines people had to stand in to get their rationed goods — with widespread cases of abuse committed by the military officials.
Much like Petro’s recent claims, the socialist Maduro regime — which has openly denied the existence of a migrant crisis and even mocked it in the past — repeatedly describes the U.S. sanctions as the cause of the country’s unprecedented exodus, abstaining from taking any responsibility for the disastrous socialist policies that caused the nation’s migrant crisis in the first place.
The Biden-Harris administration temporarily lifted sanctions on PDVSA and other state-owned companies between October 2023 and April 2024 in a failed effort to entice Maduro to allow a “free and fair” presidential election.
Maduro, upon receiving the generous U.S. sanctions relief package, instead increased his brutal repression throughout the sanctions relief period, held a highly fraudulent election on July 28, and proclaimed himself the “winner” without showing any voter data to substantiate his claims. Maduro unleashed a unprecedentedly brutal crackdown campaign against dissidents that left 27 dead and more than 2,400 detained — including dozens of minors who have been victim of torture.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.