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Colombia’s President Iván Duque Falls into Traps of The Castro-Chavista Agenda

Duque, El American

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Let us remember that numerous protests took place in Colombia at the end of 2019 until the first bimester of last year, although not consecutive, all of them against Colombia’s President Iván Duque. Yet, what is significant about these is that they were extremely violent and coincided with a sort of synchrony with the protests of the same destructive and chaotic nature that occurred in both Ecuador and Chile.

For this reason, thug Diosdado Cabello — the number 2 of the Venezuelan narco-tyranny-neo-communist regime — assured that it was a “Bolivarian breeze”. This statement was key since the synchronicity of the protests in the aforementioned countries clearly showed that it was the materialization of an agenda, a sort of plan articulated and financed from Caracas by the Castroist left. That is to say, Sao Paulo Forum and Puebla Group in collusion with their internal operators in Colombia, such as the FARC guerrillas and the “Human Colombia” of the former M19 guerrilla, Gustavo Petro. It is worth noting that the M19 is still in force and has become a cell of urban terrorism.

This new cycle of protests in 2021 began when President Iván Duque, clumsily, dared to present before the Colombian Congress a tax reform project, which he called “social solidarity transformation.” Possibly, he was the only head of state in the world who dared to do so in the midst of the Chinese virus pandemic.

Logically, Duque’s initiative sought to increase the State’s fund-raising capacity to guarantee free education for the most disadvantaged social groups, promote the youth employment project, and attend to the health sector contingency.

The truth of the matter is that Colombia’s economy, like the vast majority of countries in the world, has experienced a severe contraction as a result of quarantines or restrictions, followed by the closing of businesses and layoffs of workers. In short, it has suffered a true economic debacle in addition to the health crisis. Therefore, Duque’s tax reform proposal, no matter how much he sweetened it, was not well received by the vast majority of the Colombian population.

This generalized discontent became the perfect breeding ground for the Castro-Chavista leftists to take advantage of the strike and peaceful demonstrations to turn them violent and vandalistic. A sort of savage hordes that razed everything in their path in Bogota, as well as in Medellin, Manizales, and Cali. Finally, a defeated Duque succumbed to the demonstrators by withdrawing the bill from Congress and accepted the resignation of his Minister of Finance.

But this leaves important conclusions. First of all, while it is true that peaceful protesting is legitimate and proper for any democratic system that prides itself as such. However, it is absolutely unacceptable for a handful of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, to destroy private or public property as part of their demonstration. Even less, to attack law enforcement with firearms, since the use of violence is a monopoly of the State and whoever exercises it against the Public Force constitutes a crime, for which they must be submitted to Justice.

Secondly, looking beyond the very regrettable and sad situation Duque’s Colombia is living in today, we observe that the mafias entrenched in the state apparatuses of Cuba and Venezuela (cartelized in political spaces such as the Sao Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group) are not interested in a situation of peace and normality.

This would allow — as it should be — the democratic governments of the region and the rest of the free world to exercise all diplomatic, political, and economic mechanisms that would enable them to liquidate the actions of these governments that are no more than powerful actors of transnational organized crime that tyrannically control the political power in Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, thus configuring clear cases of narco-praetorians-neo-communist.

Finally, by focusing attention on conjunctures and not on structural problems such as those already mentioned, the strategic agenda of Castro-Chavismo is fully favored, as Carlos Sanchez Berzain summarized it very well: “to retain power at all costs, destabilize and conspire against those who point out its dictatorship, politicize its criminal acts and negotiate where Cuba, who is the head of this gang, appears as mediator.”

The challenge for liberal democracy is to defend itself and act decisively and directly against the “mafiocratic” model that has emerged from Havana.

Nahem Reyes is a PhD in history from the Andrés Bello Catholix University and associate member of the American Studies Center of the Central University of Venezuela. // Nahem Reyes es doctor en Historia de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello y miembro asociado del Centro de Estudios de América de la Universidad Central de Venezuela.

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