BOGOTÁ, Colombia—When President Biden invited Colombian President
Iván Duque
to the White House in March, he told him that “Colombia is the linchpin, in my view, to the whole hemisphere, north and south.”
Mr. Biden thanked Mr. Duque for swiftly condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and said the U.S. would designate Colombia, which has since 2000 received $13 billion in aid to fight drugs, a major non-NATO ally. Mr. Duque said ties between the two countries had “reached the highest peak ever.”
But on Sunday, voters in the U.S.’s closest ally in Latin America elected as president a former leftist guerrilla,
Gustavo Petro,
who says he wants to phase out oil and mining, overhaul the U.S.-backed drug war and renew relations with Venezuela’s regime. Colombia joins Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico and some smaller countries that have elected leftist leaders in the last four years whose policies sometimes are at odds with Washington’s interests in Latin America.
“If Petro moves ahead with what was in his campaign, the U.S.-Colombia relationship is surely going to change,” said Cynthia J. Arnson, a Latin America scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “The willingness or interest of Colombia to line up with U.S. foreign policy looks like it will be diminished.”
The political trend is fundamentally different from the “Pink Tide” that swept across Latin America in the 2000s, when voters elected leftists in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Ecuador.
Back then, leaders were often in agreement and worked in concert. A commodities boom fueled by exports of oil, soybeans and metals to China filled coffers. And Venezuela’s strongman,
Hugo Chávez,
led leftist allies in rebuffing the U.S. while forming international bodies to counter the Organization of American States and United Nations, which they saw as beholden to Washington. The windfall allowed Venezuela, for instance, to buy Argentine bonds after that country’s default and fund a program to provide discounted oil to the Caribbean.
This time, the leftist leaders of countries from Chile to Mexico often have diverging positions with each other on issues ranging from climate change to abortion to relations with Washington. Mexico’s president is conservative on social issues, while Chile’s young leader…
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