The left-wing senator who was once mayor of Bogotá has around 40% support in the polls ahead of Sunday’s election, and is expected to face a second round to try to win the presidency.
Gustavo Petro denounced the recent extradition of the accused leader of the Gulf ClanDairo Antonio Usuga, aka “Othniel“, while questioning the effectiveness of this legal tool that Washington considers a powerful deterrent to crime.
“Extradition deserves a dialogue, a measurement of figures, if what we have done in 40 years has worked or not, if those million Latin American deaths, most of them Colombians and Mexicans, have been worth it,” the candidate for the weekly magazine.
Petro, a former guerrilla of the group M-19said no accused criminal should be extradited until he confesses his crimes and assured that the current Colombian authorities accelerated the departure of Úsuga, better known by the alias “Otoniel”, to avoid embarrassing revelations before the elections.
“Alias ’Otoniel’ meant what generals in the Police, the Army, what senators, what representatives to the Chamber, what governors, what ministers, what presidents had allied themselves with him,” he said at a political demonstration in the city of Fusagasugá .
Before his extradition, ‘Otoniel’s’ lawyers argued that he should be allowed to testify before a transitional court and reveal links between the army and illegal armed groups.
President Ivan Duke promised that ‘Otoniel’ will return to Colombia to face more charges after serving a sentence in the United States.
Green drug policy
Current policies have failed to reduce cocaine production in Colombia and instead it has skyrocketed.
Between 2010 and 2020, the most recent year for which figures are available, potential cocaine production tripled to 1,010 tonsaccording to US government data.
Petro says his priority for the bilateral relationship will be to combat climate change and that his administration will frame drug policy around the environment.
The three-time presidential candidate opposes restarting aerial fumigation of coca – the raw material for cocaine – with the herbicide glyphosate and proposes replacing the crops of that plant with legal marijuana.
Gustavo Petro is likely to face the center-right candidate Frederick ‘phyco‘ Gutierrez in a second round on June 19 if none of the candidates achieves more than 50% of the votes next Sunday.
Gutiérrez, who has around 25% support in the polls, would present fewer challenges to the status quo. He does not oppose glyphosate spraying and supported Otoniel’s extradition.
Gutiérrez said in recent statements that if he wins he will coordinate with the United States the creation of a victims’ commission, although he also urged modifications to the bilateral relationship with Washington, although he did not specify them.
Gustavo Petro could find common ground with the US president, Joe Bidenon crop substitution and the implementation of the peace agreement with the former guerrilla of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), said Oliver Kaplan, associate professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.
In a sign that Petro may be toning down some of his more strident proposals as the vote nears, the candidate has softened the language around proposals to renegotiate free trade agreements, including a 2012 deal with the United States, to promote national agriculture.
radical twist
Petro has also proposed phasing out fertilizer tariffs, while also raising tariffs on food imports.
Senator Roy Barreras, an ally of Petro, said at an event of the Colombo-American Chamber of Commerce in April that in terms of trade agreements, the candidate of the Historical Pact seeks “not to renegotiate, but to rethink them.”
The Justice Department would take a dim view of an extradition ban, Kaplan said, though it remains to be seen how Petro’s objections might translate into policy.
The prospect of potentially long sentences far from home has long been one of the main weapons in the bilateral arsenal to combat drug trafficking.
Historically, Colombian traffickers have feared extradition, and in the late 1980s the Medellín Cartel, which led Pablo Escobar he opposed that mechanism with indiscriminate bomb attacks and the slogan “we prefer a tomb in Colombia to a dungeon in the United States.”
“A radical shift” in addressing these issues could limit US funding for the drug war and affect the general sense of security in Colombia, said Carolina Urrego, a political science professor at the Universidad de Los Andes.
Source: Ambito
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