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THE MIAMI Anti-Communist Forum made up of Latin American activists and exiles, declared on Tuesday “persona non grata” the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, for recent comments in which the president “offends” Colombians who leave poverty or emigrate to Miami.
In an interview broadcast initially in Colombia in November 2021 by the local channel Canal Capital and whose excerpts have been recently retaken on social media, Petro questioned that “the poor, when they stop being poor and have, then they become right-wing, (…), and the problem comes because if they stop being poor to live like in Miami, then humanity ends” (sic), a comment that this organization labeled as “aberration” and “disastrous political hyperbole.”
Petro “should retract, on behalf of so many Colombians who have come to Miami and have made their life and home here,” those comments made and collected in the networks, said today to EFE, the Nicaraguan opposition poet and writer Ariel Montoya, president of the Anticommunist Forum.
Montoya also charges against another comment by Petro in which the Colombian president asks: “And what do those people do when they stop being poor?” to which he responds: “Buy a car. And that’s where humanity ends.”
“It’s brand nonsense for a president to say something like that, it’s crazy,” exclaimed Montoya, leader of this organization founded in 2019 and composed of half a hundred members based in the United States and Latin America.
“It is not only offensive to Colombians, it is also offensive to Latin Americans, emigrants and Americans,” he asserted and recalled that about 1.5 million Colombians reside in the United States.
“We clarify to (Petro) that the right is not bad because even with the mistakes made, it has never dragged entire peoples to hunger, death, and despair as the left, socialism or communism, ideological segments to which he has always belonged,” the statement said.
Montoya called on the mayors of South Florida to clearly and emphatically reject Petro’s words: “What Petro says should drag the attention of the mayors,” he said.
For all this, for “offending one of the most prosperous and humanitarian cities in the United States and maintaining misguided economic policies unworthy of a president,” the Anticommunist Forum declares Petro “persona non grata.”
