In Latin America, no good deed goes unpunished.

So here's news from Colombia in a New York Times report in what's a warning about what to expect from the rabid left in President Trump's post-presidency:

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombia's Supreme Court ordered on Tuesday the detention of a former president and longtime giant of Colombian politics, Álvaro Uribe, amid an investigation into whether he committed acts of fraud, bribery and witness tampering.

The decision is a landmark in a nation accustomed to back door deals between politicians who were rarely called to answer for their actions in court.

While some other nations in Latin America have tackled corruption aggressively in recent years, sometimes prosecuting presidents, Colombia has infrequently indicted major political players.

Widely viewed as the most powerful Colombian politician of the last two decades, Mr. Uribe had been the subject of investigation for years, but this is the closest he has come to facing a panel of judges. His ability to avoid prosecution had led many Colombians to call him the "Teflon president."

The court order has the potential to upend the political landscape in Colombia. And it makes him the first president in modern Colombian history to face detention.

This is beyond disgusting.  President Uribe, who was America's top ally in Latin America during his presidency from 2002 to 2020, was the Lincoln of his country, freeing it from its horrific chains of FARC gangster Marxist narco-terrorism, bankrolled by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.  The result was almost night and day — he brought Colombians the foremost of all human rights, the right to personal security, the thrill of being able to walk outside and not fear a kidnap or a car bomb.  He was also the Reagan of his country, freeing its economy from decades of socialist sludge regulations and state takeovers that rendered it a typical Latin American basket case and a net exporter of illegal aliens, turning Colombia into Latin America's brightest star.  The flow of illegals reversed on his watch; that's a prime instance of voting with one's feet.  And yes, he was a proto-Trump, too, populist in nature, going out to Colombia's back boonies to places the government had never had control over until he brought Colombia its victories and holding weekly televised town halls there with the astonished locals, as well as fighting like hell against the biased, mendacious press and the far-left squadsters of the country — sounding exactly like Trump.  He once looked at Hugo Chávez, the nightmare to his country's east, and at a Mexican conference told him, "Ay, sea varón," or "Oh, be a man!"  

In 2008, he freed three Americans and more than a dozen Colombians held by FARC Marxist terrorists, kidnapped, starved, terrorized, and held in the depths of jungle for five years in the most spectacular raid since Entebbe.  The Americans' book, Out of Captivity, is a dazzling, riveting read, and Uribe is a hero.

For transforming his country from Latin American hellhole to bright shining star with a great future — the left has done to him exactly what it did to Augusto Pinochet, a man reviled by the Castroite left, because he destroyed Castro's little empire in Chile in 1973 — gone after him with every legal technicality (Pinochet appeared to have misappropriated some money, not much, to have cash to pay lawyers to fight off leftist legal attacks, despite his exit with immunity) to accomplish what they couldn't on the assassination front (they tried to kill him several times and came close).  Pinochet was painted as the devil by the left, the Castroite left, same as the people going after Uribe, even though the post-Marxist death count in his country was almost entirely attributable to Marxist guerrillas who attacked soldiers first, and the human rights violations in his country were absolutely minuscule compared to what went on in Brazil and Argentina. P inochet's real crime to the left was turning Chile into a first-world country, a peaceful place, a desirable, low-corruption place, on a foundation of private savings accounts that created huge pools of development capital and the basis for rule of law.  That was Pinochet's real crime, and the left never forgave him, going after him in his old age in the most disgraceful manner.  Lady Thatcher made one of her most eloquent speeches on the entire travesty of the picture.

It is a tradition — no good deed goes unpunished.  We saw some similar outrages of this kind last year as the left went after Peru's best president, Alan Garcia, an ex-leftist who learned his lesson and, on his second run, made Peru great, too.  The rabid left drove him to suicide as they had finally engineered an arrest.

And no, this stuff isn't about rule of law.  As Daniel Duquenal, a brilliant Venezuelan blogger who is of all things a left-leaning rule-of-law liberal, noted:

Comentario ocioso
Con lo de @AlvaroUribeVel preso hoy veo que cuando la derecha se defiende y logra algo termina en el banquillo. Cuando la izquierda hace sus fechorías y solo logra miseria a nadie le quita el sueño, pareciera.

— daniel duquenal (@danielduquenal) August 4, 2020

Translation:

Idle Comment:  What with @AlvaroUribeVel prisoner today I see that when the right wing defends itself and achieves something, it ends up on the bench. When the left does its misdeeds and only achieves misery, nobody takes away their sleep, it seems.

This really is the ugly picture.  Whatever Uribe did, it must be recalled that he did it as someone fighting a hydra-headed beast of multiple enemies, taking them out one at a time, making deals with some in order to prioritize others. 

He's the guy who made Colombia a great country; he ended its reign as the most vile place on Earth and made it a beautiful place.  He fought communists with the passion with which we fight communists, and yes, he calls himself a conservative, too.  And the icky little leftist slimebag, a creep named Ivan Cepeda, who set into motion all of these events for Colombia's very tainted Deep State, did his crowing about "rule of law" in, of all places, the far-left Chavista propaganda organ of the Venezuelan state, Telesur, known as Telechavez in the region.  It shows you that something is way wrong.

But it also shows that the rabid left will follow a president who does good into his post-presidency.  Ever wondered why Latin America is such a cesspit of crime and revenge and vigilantism?  This distortion of the law is a good guess.  Ever wonder why Latin America's people are so cynical about change for the better ever happening?  This, again, is a good guess why.

They'll try that with Trump, too, but now that we have these three examples from Latin America of what happens to effective transformative presidents who take on the left, we will have to be ready not to let it happen to Trump.  This shows what they do — their willingness to bring down heroes, their willingness to distort law, and their relentless hate for all those who bring good.

All we can say now with this latest example is that the task before us is to politically destroy them first. 

Image credit: Bush White House archives, public domain.