After getting totally domesticated by President Trump last month over repatriation flights for illegals, you'd think Colombia's far-left president, Gustavo Petro, might have stayed quiet for a reasonable interval.

Guess again. The budding buffoon of South America has put out this doozy of a statement on non-dangers of cocaine:

Which is more than a little disturbing. There's plenty of difference between snorting lines of coke and sipping expensive whiskey in a club as anyone with common sense can tell you.

To say the least, this is highly abnormal for any Latin American leader to be saying, complete with whimpering victimization about gringo being all prejudiced against Latin Americans in their designation of the drug as dangerous.

It's disturbing because his country is the world's leading producer of cocaine and still controls about 61% of its coca crop production. Colombians have fought for years to contain it, fighting wars against Marxist narcoterrorists such as FARC, and a string of successive drug cartels, at a great sacrifice of blood and treasure.

The U.S. last year gave Colombia $385 million for drug eradication, yet all he ever does is talk about stopping the drug eradication and freeing up the drug trade as if it were any other. It may well be that Petro is making statements like this as a call to make sure his aid money gets to him this year, too as USAID goes into reorganization, but he's been against drug criminalization for years and years.

It's a striking change from the seriousness Colombia's previous leaders have expressed on ending the evil drug trade, so the contrast must be a jolt within Colombia.

I've heard Colombian officials speak like fire-breathing dragons about the evils of cocaine and the cocaine trade, given the harm it has done to the country -- from random violence to wasted lives involved in cartel activities, to environmental disasters surrounding its manufacture. Colombia's former Vice President Francisco Santos comes to mind -- he was once kidnapped by Pablo Escobar himself and tied to a bed for six months running as the monster's hostage. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a superb nonfiction book about the terrifying experience.

Petro, though, had a different experience with Escobar in his long ago -- as an M-19 Marxist narcoterrorist guerrilla. That group served as an Escobar goon squad, blowing up the Supreme Court in Bogota and burning it down in 1985, killing 11 of the 25 justices in it, in an attempt to enable Escobar and other drug lords to escape extradition to the U.S.

Petro was a member at the time M-19 when it was paid $1 million from the drug lord to attack the court, according to Mark Bowden in his superb book "Killing Pablo."

According to Wikipedia:

During his time in 19 April [M-19], Petro was emerged as a leader; he was elected ombudsman of Zipaquirá in 1981 and councilman from 1984 to 1986.^[18] In 1985, the M-19 assassinated 13 Colombian politicians at the Palace of Justice. This group was also involved with kidnapping and violence in villages across the country. He led the M-19's seizure of land to house 400 poor families who had been forcibly displaced by paramilitary groups, and then contributed to the construction of what would become the Bolívar 83 neighborhood. He then went underground and allied with Carlos Pizarro, one of the main commanders of the M-19, insisting on the need for a negotiated political solution to the Colombian armed conflict and on the transition to a Constituent Assembly.^[17]

In 1985, Petro was arrested by the army for the crime of illegal possession of arms. He was tortured for ten days in the stables of the XIII Brigade,^[17] then sentenced to 18 months in prison.^[19][14] It was during his incarceration that Petro shifted his ideology, no longer viewing armed resistance as a feasible strategy to gain public backing. In 1987, M-19 engaged in peace talks with the government.^[20]

For Petro to now be coming out like a Hollywood idiot and making claims of the stupid kind he's making pretty well tells us he's not a particularly serious person on Colombia's pre-eminent problem.

Petro's remarks drew this response from a local:

I'm Pablo Escobar and I approve this message, more or less.

It all raises questions raised about just how deep he is with the illegal drug trade, which already surfaced in a scandal with drug lords paying campaign expenses for Petro's presidency.

According to The Guardian, in a piece that ran in 2023:

The lawyer representing a businessman accused of financing killings by paramilitary death squads has admitted that his client donated money to the campaign of Colombia’s first ever leftwing president, Gustavo Petro.

Alfonso Hilsaca knowingly gave 400m pesos ($95,000) to Gustavo Petro’s eldest son as a donation to his father’s electoral campaign, his lawyer said this week – though he said Hilsaca had not expected Nicolás Petro to steal the money for himself.

The admission is the latest development in a scandal involving alleged donations of narco-money into Petro’s 2022 campaign that threatens to derail the president’s hopes of bringing reform to the Andean nation – and could lead to the former guerrilla being indicted.

Drugs have been decriminalized in his country in small amounts but are largely understood to be the curse of the country, with huge resources going to eradicate them. Petro repeatedly calls for all drug activity to be decriminalized.

He vehemently opposed the presidency of Alvaro Uribe, a Trump-like figure in terms of determination, who in the early aughts made tremendous progress against the drug lords.

Petro also loudly supported the late, unlamented dictatorship of Hugo Chavez in next-door Venezuela, which rapidly emerged as a narcostate transshipment point on Chavez's watch.

You have to wonder how big drugs serve as a factor in his dealings.

Right now, he sounds like a flaming drug dealer in need of a crushing. His statements are no different from those a drug lord might make.

How much more of this about him is out there?

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