Colombia votes for "bad luck" by choosing a "former" Marxist to lead them.
The Axis of El Vil gets a new member: (tip to Instapundit):
On June 19, Colombians elected former Marxist guerrilla Gustavo Petro as their next president.
We spent decades helping Colombia defeat the major Marxist insurgent group that began fighting in 1964 (although violence goes back longer).
And then Colombian voters reward the Marxists after that long effort to defeat them and a close-up view of Venezuela under their kind of rule? WTF?
But after getting the main insurgent group to agree to stop fighting, this 2022 outcome was the effing peace plan, after all:
I can't find an article I read that did give me pause about the deal. I think it died as a saved tab in a Windows update restart. Amnesty is one thing, but the deal that our government also pushed also had the Colombian government paying for FARC radio stations to enable the rebels/drug dealers to transition to a legitimate political party.
Why should the government (and people) of Colombia pay to have the rebels wage war by other means, I wondered? By all means, the amnestied rebels should have the freedom of speech that other Colombians have, but why subsidize that which the government fought for so many decades to defeat?
Colombians narrowly rejected the deal. The "revised" deal did not go to the voters. Which was probably the major revision.
Which worried me five years ago:
A rose by any other name: "Colombia's FARC former guerrillas relaunched Friday as a political party, changing their logo of rifles for a red rose after disarming to end a half-century civil conflict." I hope that Colombians aren't fooled by a bunch of "former" narco-communist terrorists wearing suits.But the Colombians were fooled. Let's see how long the peace deal terms protecting opposition groups in statute last under a new "former" Marxist guerrilla.
Still, maybe this time they'll try that "true" communism I hear so many great things about. But when Columbia runs into a horrible string of "bad luck" the way Venezuela did under communist lunatics, we'll know it wasn't the "true" version, after all.
NOTE: My most recent war coverage is here.
