CARACAS, Venezuela – Colombia’s far-left President Gustavo Petro traveled to Venezuela on Tuesday to meet with socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, the first official encounter between both heads of state after the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between both countries in August.
Maduro had decided to break all diplomatic ties between Venezuela and Colombia in February 2019 following then-President Iván Duque’s recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. Guaidó had been designated as interim president in January 2019 as a result of Maduro holding sham elections in 2018 and his refusal to step down.
Petro’s visit marks the first time in nearly ten years that a Colombian head of state visits Venezuelan soil after Juan Manuel Santos visited Venezuela in 2013 during the funerary proceedings of late dictator Hugo Chávez.
During the roughly two-hour encounter – which Maduro described as “a fruitful first meeting, truly auspicious, with good results” – both Petro and Maduro discussed several topics pertaining to the full reopening of the Colombian-Venezuelan border, trade, binational security, and migration — without actually addressing the causes of Venezuela’s ongoing migrant crisis, the worst crisis of its kind in the region and second only to Ukraine’s.
“We are two countries that have a mark in history for brotherhood and understanding. Our common destiny is between our peoples,” Maduro said in a joint statement.
Petro, Colombia’s first far-left president, began his remarks at a joint appearance by saying that it is “unnatural – in more human terms, I would say, unhistorical – that Colombia and Venezuela separate.”
The Colombian president also availed himself of the opportunity to attack the war on drugs by stating that what it has “left us today is democratic destabilization, a million deaths in Latin America and territories that have really been lost, both for societies as well as states, even plunging entire countries into crisis along these trafficking routes.”
His criticism of the war on drugs during the joint statement with Maduro comes a little over a month after Petro denounced it during his U.N. General Assembly speech in September — defending the alleged lack of danger posed by cocaine, a drug that he has continuously described to be “less poisonous” for humanity than coal or oil.
Petro’s support for the legalization of cocaine is of high significance given the Maduro regime’s status as one of the world’s most profitable transnational cocaine trafficking organizations.
U.S. federal prosecutors have indicted Maduro and members of his regime as drug traffickers and for leading a drug-trafficking organization of high-ranking Venezuelan officials known as the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).
The U.S. Department of State is offering a $15 million bounty for information leading to Maduro’s arrest and/or conviction. The Department of State is also offering $10 million bounties for information that can lead to the arrest and/or conviction of both Diosdado Cabello, socialist party strongman and current head of the regime-controlled National Assembly, and Tareck El Aissami, Maduro’s current oil minister, who has also been accused of having ties to the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
On 2015, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, both nephews of Maduro’s, were arrested by DEA authorities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, while allegedly attempting to transport 800 kilograms of cocaine belonging to Colombia’s Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist organization into the United States — since then, they have been commonly refered to as the narcosobrinos (“narco-nephews”).
The pair were convicted of the crime, but the Biden administration granted clemency to both of Maduro’s narco-nephews in October and released them as part of a prisoner swap with the socialist regime in exchange for seven imprisoned American oil workers.
“We are going to rebuild even the relationships that existed at the intelligence level to be able to hit not so much the drug trafficking worker who is out there, but rather the owners of capital,” Petro claimed, “who are the ones who have almost never been hit, who are dangerous for political stabilization.”
Petro claimed the rethinking of the war on drugs demanded “a great Latin American conference of presidents to reexamine the failure [of the war on drugs] that we have committed in the last five decades.”
Maduro and Petro also discussed the return of Venezuela to the Andean Community (CAN), which Maduro described as “good news for South America.”
The Andean Community is a free trade bloc composed of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru that Venezuela was part of from 1973 until 2006, when Hugo Chávez decided to withdraw Venezuela in protest after Colombia and Peru signed free trade agreements with the United States.
“Now we want to invite Chile [which is currently part of the Andean community as an associate member], Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru to accept the reinstatement of Venezuela in the Andean Community as a member with all powers, with all its rights and duties,” Petro said.
The Colombian president continued by stating that he had requested Venezuela rejoin the Organization of American States’ Inter-American human rights system (IACHR), which Hugo Chávez had decided to withdraw Venezuela from in 2010 after the organization published a report denouncing the deterioration of democracy in Venezuela. Chávez, on live television, described the then-head of the organization Santiago Canton as “executive excrement.”
Prior to his encounter with Maduro, Petro had already requested the socialist dictator return to the IACHR in September. Maduro responded to Petro’s request by saying that he is “very receptive” to the request.
“On the steps of a reconsideration of the Inter-American Human Rights System, I have been very receptive, and it will be so in the coming weeks in relation to this interesting issue raised by President Gustavo Petro,” Maduro said.
Reports published on Tuesday indicated that an unnamed U.S. A Department of State spokesman told the Spanish EFE news agency that the United States had asked Petro, a former Marxist M19 guerrilla member, to “promote democracy and accountability in Venezuela.”
“Venezuelans deserve the same opportunities that Colombians and other peoples of the region have to democratically elect their leaders,” the unnamed spokesman said to EFE. The spokesman also told EFE that leftist President Joe Biden “appreciates Colombia’s collaboration towards a political solution in Venezuela.”
The Biden administration has continuously pressured the Maduro regime to hold “free and fair” presidential elections in 2024 while pushing for both members of the socialist regime and members of the Venezuelan “opposition” to resume negotiations towards such a goal.
Petro went on to declare that Latin America is today a “beacon of world democracy,” an assertion he made while sitting next to Maduro, the head one of the three dictatorships in the region, and whose regime is being investigated by both the United Nations Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court for human rights violations and crimes against humanity.
In February, during his presidential campaign, Petro had opted to initially distance himself from Maduro by stating that the socialist dictator belonged to the “politics of death,” seeking to put space between his far-left presidential campaign promises and the once-celebrated Bolivarian Socialism.
Maduro responded by accusing Petro of being part of a “failed and cowardly” left alongside Gabriel Boric and Petro Castillo, Chile and Peru’s leftist presidents, who had also criticized Maduro in an effort to ideologically distance themselves from the socialist dictator. Petro then responded to Maduro via Twitter, suggesting he stop his insults.
“We will continue in these discussions, debates and meetings of a brotherhood that should never have been broken,” Petro concluded the joint statement, shaking hands with Nicolás Maduro.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.