Colombia’s Socialist President Condemns U.S. ‘Ethnic Discrimination’

Far-left president of Colombia Gustavo Petro claimed on Tuesday that the United States is engaging in “ethnic discrimination” of illegal migrants and accused it of being responsible for the Venezuelan migrant crisis by imposing human rights sanctions on the socialist regime.

Petro described the sanctions as a “blockade” on the country.

The socialist president made his remarks in a speech at the United Nations’ ongoing meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16), hosted throughout this week in the Colombian city of Cali.

Since the early 2010s, Venezuela is experiencing an unprecedented migrant crisis in the region described as the worst in the Western Hemisphere, rivaled only in size to that of Syria and Ukraine. Those countries are in a state of war, unlike Venezuela, whose migrant crisis is the direct result of the collapse of the country’s socialist system under the authoritarian regime led by dictator Nicolás Maduro.

According to U.N. estimates, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled their country — roughly 27.5 percent of the country’s 28 million population.

Petro, a former member of the Marxist M19 guerrilla with friendly ties with Maduro, did not attribute any responsibility to the dictator or his socialist regime for the Venezuelan migrant crisis in his speech. Instead, he claimed that the crisis is the result of an alleged U.S. “blockade” which, according to him, backfired, leading to a surge of U.S.-bound Venezuelan migrants.

“The Swedes are scared of the Syrian migration and there are 200,000 of them. Three million Venezuelans passed through here and we are not scared, because we consider them our brothers,” Petro said. “And they continued south and now they are going north, to the United States, which was the one that devised to blockade Venezuela. Victim of their own invention.”

The Colombian far-left president continued his accusations against the United States by claiming that it engages in “ethnic discrimination” of migrants akin to that of the times of slavery. According to Petro, migrants only serve the United States when they work 18 hours, but not “when they talk about rights.”

“The blockade is not a boomerang that is thrown against a people to kill them and returns to the people of the one who threw it. Then they become fascists because they do not want those migrants, neither Haitians, nor Cubans, nor Venezuelans, nor Colombians, nor Latin Americans in the United States,” Petro said. {snip}

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