In a little game of yoyo, the new government of Colombia, led by the newly invested President Gustavo Petro (radical left), decided to restore diplomatic relations with the separatist movement of the Pseudo SADR frozen since 2001.
This is one of the first decisions that Petro makes in international matters after his inauguration as president of Colombia. The latter and the separatists had established diplomatic relations in 1985, under the government of Belisario Betancur, relations which had been frozen in 2001 under the presidency of Andrés Pastrana before being restored by Gustavo Pedro. This reversal follows the backpedaling of the Colombian authorities, in October 2021, who announced that “the consular jurisdiction of its embassy in the kingdom now extends over all Moroccan territory, including the Sahara”.
Considered as Colombian recognition of the Moroccanness of the Sahara, the announcement had made the rounds of national and international media before Colombia published a statement indicating that Colombia maintained “its historic position of support for the various Security Council resolutions, which recognize Morocco’s efforts in the search for a political, pragmatic, realistic and lasting solution to this dispute, under the exclusive auspices of the United Nations“.
However, the separatists who were losing momentum in this part of the world have succeeded in restoring lost relations with Honduras, Peru and Bolivia and with the new incorporation of Colombia, a whole dynamic is created in this Andean region of South America. We can see there the intense lobbying activity orchestrated by Algeria, Venezuela and others in favor of the separatists, helped in this by a wind from the radical left which sweeps away one by one the banana democracies and whose policy is often the art of dressing small philosophy in big private interests.
And the latter, no need to make up their minds, it is in the drug and arms trade that they find themselves. The smugglers, but also the terrorist groups that are rampant in the Sahel or the Sahara and of which the Polisario is a part, live on. Moreover, and there is hardly a shadow of a doubt, proven facts in this region of Africa show that there is a connection between terrorism and drug trafficking.
As proof the latest clashes in Tindouf between the clans of Brahim Ghali and Mohamed Lamine Ould El Bouhali. A situation which is neither more nor less than the reflection of a struggle to have a stranglehold on the smuggling of arms and drug trafficking in the Tindouf camps. Also, it is quite understandable to see the turnaround in Colombia, which along with Peru and Bolivia, are the three main cocaine producing countries.
When al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) sought to position itself in Gao (Mali) and in very specific places in the Sahel and the Sahara, that was terrorism. But since then, they have started to operate as a transnational organized criminal group where drug and arms trafficking is no longer taboo. Today, traffickers from Colombia are present in Gao to “buy” the rights of passage on the drug routes in the Sahel and the Sahara towards the north (Algeria). This means that drugs and trafficking of all kinds have a place of choice in the supply of the fund of jihadists of all kinds.
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