A member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reportedly spent $1.6 million to try to assassinate the country’s conservative president, Iván Duque.
According to Breitbart News, citing Spanish-language newswire EFE, the director of Colombia’s national police, Jorge Luis Vargas, while speaking at an event honoring 36 fallen police officers, said FARC leader “John Mechas” also spent an additional $500,000 in an attempt to take out a top general of the national police and Diego Molano, Colombia’s minister of defense.
“We are certain that John Mechas has distributed 7 billion pesos already in [assassination] attempts against the president of the republic, Iván Duque,” said Vargas.
Duque’s term of office is almost at an end. August 7 will be the inauguration of Gustavo Petro, a Marxist who in his youth belonged to the terror group M-19.
FARC was at war with the Colombian government for decades. In 2016, the left-wing terrorist guerillas signed a “peace deal” with the government that allowed the group to keep the money it had made through illicit means, including cocaine, to form a political party with uncontested seats in Colombia’s congress.
The Colombian government refers to FARC members who continue to engage in terrorism as “dissidents.” These “dissidents” notably celebrated Petro’s election win in June.
“On June 19, an extraordinary event occurred that will mark the history of Colombia: the end of 200 years of successive oligarchical governments that never had a feeling of love for the people, but the hardest stone hearts,” the terror group stated in a press release.
Breitbart notes:
Vargas warned of growing violent activity by the FARC “dissidents,” the ELN, and the Clan del Golfo, a major rival drug-trafficking organization, during the ceremony last week. Prior to that, Vargas gave an interview to the right-leaning Colombian magazine Semana, published on Wednesday, in which he warned of mounting attempts at “criminal vengeance” on the part of these groups in the country.
“These armed, organized criminal groups are [committed] to the territories and their desire to remain there by the possibility of protecting crops, of processing coca leaves, producing cocaine, establishing traffic routes abroad, and generating criminal rents for this,” Vargas told Semana. The threat that the police poses to all three groups’ cocaine operations has prompted both an increase in deadly attacks on officers, he said, and in operations attempting to kill Duque, confirming intelligence of a seven-billion-peso investment in killing him.
The attempt by “John Mechas” wasn’t the first on Duque’s life. Last year, FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) jointly backed an attempt to shoot down an Air Force helicopter carrying Duque, along with Molano and other cabinet ministers.
In November, Biden took heat even from members of his own party when he took FARC off the U.S. list of foreign terror organizations.
The move especially drew criticism in Florida, home to many Colombians and others of South American origin.
“This is terrible. It’s bad policy. It’s bad politics,” Annette Taddeo, a state senator running in the Democrat primary for governor, told Politico.
Taddeo — who left her home country of Colombia at age 17 when her father, a WWII American fighter pilot, was kidnapped by FARC — called the White House’s move “outrageous.”
Even Congressman Charlie Crist, a former governor who is also in the Democrat primary to try to reclaim his old job, expressed concern at the news, saying the FARC “caused decades of war and death — they’ve earned their designation.”
As reported by El Tiempo, Duque said at the time of the Biden administration’s decision, “We would have preferred another decision, but knowing this, today we are concentrated on confronting the dissidents, confronting those groups and, as the United States said, those who have charges against them in their courts, the processes continue.”
It’s not surprising that Biden would give cover to left-wing paramilitary terror groups abroad. After all, this is the man who protected Antifa by claiming that it is an “idea, not an organization.”
Such has generally been Democrats’ strategy to shield America’s own left-wing terror group — using feigned ignorance and minimization of violence, pretending the problem doesn’t exist and that Antifa’s actions aren’t the acts of murder and maiming Republicans claim, but merely the brave “free speech” of “peaceful protesters.”
