In a letter sent by former President Andrés Pastrana to President Joe Biden, he strongly criticizes the national government for its peace policy and on illicit drugs. The communication was given before the meeting that President Gustavo Petro will hold this Thursday with his US counterpart.
Pastrana, points out in the letter that “since his presidential campaign, the President today promised heaven and earth to drug traffickers and agreed to votes with the most dense political corruption.” He added that Petro Urrego messed up “Plan Colombia” by dismantling its social and anti-drug components, with which the United States has supported the fight against the guerrillas and drug trafficking since 1999.
“Once in power, he accelerated the dismantling of the social and anti-narcotics components of ‘Plan Colombia’ ‒which rescued a nation on the brink of a failed state‒, a trophy that the FARC narco-guerrilla obtained as compensation for signing an agreement with the government of Juan Manuel Santos”, says Pastrana’s letter.
The former conservative president added that “today there is no peace in sight in Colombia. On the contrary, as witnessed by The Economist magazine in its edition last week, the Colombia of Petro is a chaos of public order and crime in which the prevailing drug trafficking organizations negotiate face to face with the Government”.
He expressed in this, that President Gustavo Petro “de facto legalizes coca cultivation” through the prohibition of eradication by fumigation with glyphosate.
In this sense, he maintained that “this year, the Petro government has not eradicated a single one of the 300,000 hectares of production – some 750,000 acres – while the productivity of crops and the industrial production of cocaine register unprecedented increases and it is destroyed environmentally The world’s lung”.
Finally, he pointed out that “the dramatic reduction in coca cultivation to 40,000 hectares, thanks to ‘Plan Colombia,’ took a U-turn when the binational initiative was canceled and coca cultivation was de facto legalized, through a legal subterfuge.” that prohibits its eradication by fumigation”.