Elections are to embrace either Colombia, or castrochavism

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The elections for Colombia’s President for 2022-2026 are a historical milestone that will determine the next twenty years of that country’s and Americas’ history. In an election for the survival of the nation in which the very nature of Colombia and the radical effects in the life of Colombians are at stake, this forthcoming 19th of June, Colombians will decide between the newcomer Rodolfo Hernandez and Castrochavist Gustavo Petro. The existing situation of the peoples from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua testifies that this election is to choose between freedom or subjugation, between democracy and dictatorship, between Colombia and Castrochavism.

Results of the first electoral round this past 29th of May surprised everyone with the bursting appearance of Rodolfo Hernandez on the electoral stage as the candidate that will dispute the presidency with Gustavo Petro. In all elections, throughout the region, Castrochavism or 21st Century Socialism, has never had a candidate with an absolute majority in the first electoral round -Petro doesn’t have it either- reason why he uses a strategy to promote the multiplication of candidates to divide the democratic option and to apply the deception of presenting minorities as absolute majorities, as shown in the recent cases of Peru and Chile.

Once the results of the first electoral round were known and accepted, there has been an attempt to present candidate Rodolfo Hernandez as a populist when, in-fact and truly, he is a “newcomer”, in other words “a candidate that was not expected to win” because he is “a person that is not seen as part of a concrete group or organization”. The one that is most adversely affected with the appearance of Hernandez is Petro who now finds himself compelled to turn his campaign into an intense, direct or indirect, “dirty-war” against his unexpected opponent. One of the predominant weapons of Castrochavism against democratic leaders is the “assassination of their opponent’s reputation” and since they did not expect Hernandez to burst into the electoral scene, they had not “taken care” of him.

To rehash what is at stake in the elections for Colombia’s next President, we only have to note the unquestionable and self-confessed fact that Gustavo Petro is the candidate of 21st Century Socialism, or Castrochavism, a group led by Cuba’s Castroist dictatorship that has expanded in this century thanks to Venezuela’s resources given by Hugo Chavez that have turned Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua into dictatorships. Today, all of these States have political prisoners, persecuted and exiled, prosecuted by despicable managers of injustice and all of these countries are in crisis.

For decades, Colombia is a main objective of the Cuban dictatorship that organized, sustained, and protected -amongst other crimes- guerrillas and narco-terrorist groups comprised by; Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC in Spanish), the National Liberation Army (ELN in Spanish), the 19th of April Movement (M-19) of which Petro is a member. Towards its objective Cuba uses Venezuela’s territory and its dictatorial regime as its main forward launching post and used Ecuador’s territory when Correa was there. Today Cuba’s dictators protect, inside Cuban territory, the highest command echelons of the ELN who are sought by the Colombian judicial system while it intervenes in the elections with Petro as its candidate.

The concoction of dictatorships of the 21st Century Socialism starts with democratically elected presidents who, through the use of schemes to manipulate people, such as; referendums, constituent assemblies, functional oppositions, and friendly business entrepreneurs -who may later be persecuted, deprived of their possessions and be jailed- begin to change “from inside of government, wrecking and systematically and progressively supplanting democratic institutionalism until they totally control all”.

Beyond the application of 21st Century Socialism’s methodology to wreck institutionalism and the economy, in Colombia’s case the election of Petro as president implies the immediate control of the military and police who have successfully worked against narcotics’ trafficking, guerrillas, and organized crime and whose dismantling is vital for Castrochavism that has turned Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua into narco-States. Living proof is Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro who has an outstanding international arrest warrant and a bounty of $15 million dollars for his capture as member of the narcotics’ trafficking “Cartel de los Soles”.

The peoples from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are the victims and are living proof of their nation’s destruction, poverty, famine, persecution, and all types of human rights violations executed by the regimes with “State-Terrorism”, the Castrochavist regimes who have standardized and aligned their methods of government with those of the Cuban dictatorship.

The upcoming election of Colombia’s president is confronting the Colombian nation with transnational intervention disguised as humanist or progressist. It is an election for the survival of Colombia against Castrochavism, because if the latter prevails, the free and successful Colombia we know today will be on the brink of its downfall.

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas