While Latin America’s Silent Majority Sides With Israel Over Hamas War, Colombia Goes Off the Deep End

As the Israel-Hamas war plays out, Latin America largely watches from the sidelines. Five left-wing countries — Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and now Colombia — are pro-Hamas. The two heavyweights — Brazil and Mexico — sit on the fence.Although videos of pro-Palestinian protests in Latin America get global television air time, a silent majority of 12 Latin American nations supports Israel. In the October 7 attack, Hamas terrorists killed 12 Latin Americans and took 29 hostage.“In general, support has split along left-right lines,” a Madrid-based think tank, Elcano Royal Institute, writes in a survey. “The left has sided with Hamas, and the right with Israel.” In one of the odder reactions, Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, charged, in an apparent reference to the Roman Empire, that Jesus Christ was a “Palestinian child, unjustly condemned by the Spanish Empire.”The two outliers are El Salvador and Colombia.“As a Salvadoran with Palestinian ancestry, I’m sure the best thing that could happen to the Palestinian people is for Hamas to completely disappear,” El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, posted on X. “Those savage beasts do not represent the Palestinians. Anyone who supports the Palestinian cause would make a great mistake siding with those criminals. It would be like us Salvadorans taking the side of the terrorists of MS13 simply because we share ancestors or the same nationality.”Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, September 26, 2022 at Cucuta. Guillermo Legaria/Getty ImagesMr. Bukele, whose paternal grandparents were Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem and Jerusalem, is locked in open warfare with the Mara Salvatrucha gang. Since taking office four years ago, Mr. Bukele has jailed 72,000 gang members. His tough-on-crime policy drastically slashed the nation’s homicide rate.The other surprise is Colombia, South America’s second-largest nation, with 52 million people. One year ago, a former guerrilla, Gustavo Petro, took office as the nation’s first left-wing president. Now, through dozens of presidential posts on X, Colombians are seeing the consequences.“I’ve been to the Auschwitz concentration camp and now I see it being copied in Gaza,” Mr. Petro posted, referring to Israeli reprisal attacks against Hamas. After Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said his troops were fighting “human animals” in Gaza, the Colombian president posted: “This is what the Nazis said about the Jews. All this hate speech will do, if it continues, is lead to a Holocaust.”Mr. Petro, age 63, then posted that Hamas is an invention of Israeli intelligence, whose purpose is to “divide the Palestinian people” in order to have the excuse to punish them.The World Jewish Congress accused Colombia’s president of completely ignoring the hundreds of Israeli civilian victims and called Mr. Petro’s statement “an insult to the six million victims of the Holocaust and to the Jewish people”.Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Mr. Petro’s comments “reflect support for the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists, fuel anti-Semitism, affect representatives of the State of Israel and threaten the peace of the Jewish community in Colombia.” An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lior Haiat, said his country is stopping defense exports to Colombia.At the X battle continued, the Colombian president said: “If Colombia needs to suspend its foreign relations with Israel, it will do so, because the South American country does not support genocides. … Hitler will be defeated for the good of humanity, democracy, peace and world freedom.”In a telling comment, Mr. Petro said someday the Israeli army and government “will ask us for forgiveness for what their men did in our land, unleashing a genocide.”Starting in the 1980s, Israel became a key supplier, alongside America, of military equipment to help Colombia’s armed forces fight a myriad of Marxist guerrilla groups. In the field, Colombian army soldiers carry 5.56mm Israeli-made Galil assault rifles and 7.62mm Galil sniper rifles. In the air, Colombia relies on a fleet of 22 Kfir (“young lion”) ground attack jets. Punishing attacks by laser-guided bombs from these jets pushed the largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, to sign a disarmament accord in 2016.Recently, Colombia’s Defense Ministry signed a $5 million contract with Israel Aerospace Industries to upgrade and maintain the jets. Separately, Colombia recently hired an Israeli company to outfit two Boeing 737’s with electronic warfare equipment and to help the military jam communications of remaining rebel groups and to monitor their movements.After Israel announced the suspension of arms sales, Colombia’s foreign minister, Álvaro Leyva, lashed out on social media over the “rudeness” of Israel’s response and demanded that Israel’s ambassador leave the country. A few hours later, he backtracked, tweeting that Colombia was not formally expelling the Israeli envoy. Before he became foreign minister, Mr. Leyva was best known to Colombians as a veteran government peace negotiator with myriad guerrilla groups. His closeness to guerrilla groups and his friendships with their leaders prompted a conservative Bogotá senator, María Fernanda Cabal, to dub him “the FARC Foreign Minister.”Reflecting military skepticism of Colombia’s new president, General Eduardo Zapateiro resigned as commander of the Colombian army to avoid standing next to Mr. Petro on his inauguration day, August 7, 2022. Since then, Mr. Petro’s popularity ratings have tanked — to 26 percent last month, from 65 percent in the summer of 2022. Colombian presidents are elected for four-year terms and cannot serve second terms.In a sign of things to come, opposition candidates swept local and regional elections held Sunday across Colombia. Sharp critics of Mr. Petro won races for mayor in the nation’s three biggest cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. At Bogotá, the ruling coalition’s candidate, Gustavo Bolivar, came in third place for mayor. Mr. Bolivar called the result a “punishment vote” over disappointment with Mr. Petro’s government. It’s unclear if Mr. Petro’s hostility toward Israel, a reliable arms supplier to Colombia for 40 years, contributed to Colombian voters’ disenchantment with their guerrilla-turned-president.

While Latin America’s Silent Majority Sides With Israel Over Hamas War, Colombia Goes Off the Deep End

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