BEN NORTON—Marco Rubio has waged a kind of political war against Petro, fixating on his past as a guerrilla in a revolutionary leftist organization, claiming that he “has put Colombia’s security and stability at risk”.
Rubio has aggressively aimed to cut off Latin America’s relations with China, which has become the largest trading partner of South America, and the number one trading partner of Latin America as a whole, excluding Mexico.
In 2023, Petro visited Beijing, where Colombia and China elevated their relations to the level of a “strategic partnership”. Rubio wrote in outrage on Twitter that “Petro’s new ‘Strategic Partnership’ with the Chinese Communist Party will leave Colombia hostage to their authoritarian grip”.
