Colombia’s increasingly authoritarian President Ivan Duque told the United Nations on Tuesday that Venezuela’s “dictatorship” posed a “constant threat to democracy in the region.”
In his annual address to the UN General Assembly, Colombia’s far-right president additionally claimed Venezuela’s socialist “dictatorship” is “sustained by drug money” and “harboring terrorists.”
Duque called on “all nations of the world” to raise their voices demanding truly free elections, and not the prefabricated orchestra to which they want to take the Venezuelan people to perpetuate the dictatorship.”
Colombia’s president is being investigated over his own ties to narcos after evidence revealed Duque’s Democratic Center party conspired with a drug trafficking organization to rig the 2018 elections.
Unlike last year, Duque did not sustain his accusations with fabricated evidence and admitted his own government was struggling to combat drug trafficking.
In response to growing criticism over his government’s inaction to the mass killing of human rights defenders and community leaders, the president praised their efforts to “construct a more dignified, more generous society and, despite difficulties, don’t cease their activity to construct a country for all.”
More than 1,000 social leaders have been assassinated since the beginning of a peace process with demobilized FARC guerrillas in late 2016.
Duque, whose party fiercely opposes this peace process, stressed the importance of the international community’s efforts to consolidate peace in Colombia, which continues to suffer an internal armed conflict that began in 1964.
