MiamiThis week, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno will make a sort of homecoming when he travels to Colombia as part of a three-nation Latin American tour.
Born in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, Ohio’s first Latino senator, who defeated an incumbent last year with the support of Donald Trump, kept a close eye on his homeland through older brothers who are influential in both business and politics there, even as he pursued the American dream.
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The 58-year-old Moreno has become a mediator for conservatives in Latin America who want to get in touch with the Trump administration.
He voiced serious concerns about Colombia’s trajectory under left-wing leadership in an interview with The Associated Press prior to the trip.U.S. sanctions, increased tariffs, or other retaliatory measures may be required to correct it, according to President Gustavo Petroand.
Moreno claimed that the recent criminal conviction of conservative icon and former president Alvaro Uribe was an effort to suppress the man who rescued Colombia from guerrilla warfare. The United States is now less secure due to record cocaine production, and Colombia could lose its White House certification for not cooperating in the fight against drugs.
According to Moreno, who will meet with Petro and Uribe as well as local politicians and business leaders, the trip’s goal is to fully comprehend all the dynamics before making a decision. However, nothing has been removed off the table as of yet, and nothing is being specifically considered.
elected with the backing of Trump
Last year, Moreno, a Cleveland luxury vehicle dealer, upset incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown with the aid of the largest political ad expenditure in U.S. Senate election history, $441 million. His close friend JD Vance resigned from the Senate to become vice president, and he was elected senior senator for Ohio almost immediately after taking office.
Moreno has imitated Trump’s rhetoric in Congress by calling on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, calling out top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer as a wretched old man straight out of a Dickens story, and threatening to subpoena California officials for their handling of anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles.
He has also been vocal on Latin America, calling Mexico on the verge of becoming a narco state and denouncing Petro as a socialist tyrant on social media.
His suggestion in January that Trump should meet with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro despite his reelection in what the U.S., European Union, and other governments denounced as a corrupt vote also shocked many conservative Republicans in the GOP early on. Even though he called Maduro a “terrorist” and a gang leader, Moreno said he supported the Trump administration’s decision last month to permit energy giant Chevron to begin drilling in Venezuela after reaching an agreement with Maduro to release ten Americans who were imprisoned there.
According to Moreno’s interview, “people wanted to hear in January that we were going to fly F-16s into Caracas and wage war against the country, and that just wasn’t going to happen.” We risk ceding Venezuela to China if we take excessive steps in that direction.
In Latin America, such remarks have gained attention, but they hardly register in blue-collar Ohio. This is true even though Moreno does not serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has not resided in the area for decades.
According to Michael Shifter, the former head of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, he is someone to keep an eye on. He is among the Senate’s most ardent Trump supporters and, considering his Latin American upbringing, may have policy sway.
Monday marks the beginning of Moreno’s first congressional trip to Latin America, which will meet with President Claudia Sheinbaum and other authorities in Mexico City for two days. Terrance Cole, the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, will accompany him on this, his first international trip since the Senate accepted his nomination last month.
Seeking collaboration on fentanyl with Mexico
According to Moreno’s pre-trip interview, Sheinbaum has done more to stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States than her mentor and predecessor, Andrs Manuel L. Pez Obrador, whom he called a complete failure. However, he stated that greater collaboration is required and that Mexico should permit the DEA to return a plane used in bilateral investigations that L. Pez Obrador grounded, as well as to take part in court wiretaps, as it has done for decades in Colombia.
According to Moreno, corruption grows so widespread that it’s similar to curing cancer if it’s not stopped. Mexico must simply acknowledge that it lacks the resources necessary to eradicate the drug cartels entirely. And the only way we can truly achieve it is by requesting assistance from the United States.
Plans to take a Panama Canal tour
Moreno is traveling from Mexico to Panama, where he will accompany Trump’s incoming ambassador, Kevin Marino Cabrera, on a tour of the Panama Canal.
An agreement reached in March by a conglomerate based in Hong Kong would have given American investment firm BlackRock Inc. control of two ports on either end of the canal constructed by the United States. Trump, who had threatened to retake the canal in order to limit Chinese influence, announced the agreement.
Beijing’s antitrust authorities have subsequently questioned the acquisition, too, and last month the seller announced that it was looking to include a strategic partner from mainland China—the allegedly state-owned shipping giant Cosco—in the transaction.
You could as well say that Cosco is the real communist party, Moreno said. Cosco cannot be a part of Panamanian ports under any circumstances.
We want Colombia to be powerful.
Another Colombian American senator, Democrat Ruben Gallego of Arizona, will accompany Moreno on the last stop of the tour in Colombia. Gallego and his three sisters were reared by an immigrant single mother on a secretary’s salary, in contrast to Moreno, who was born into affluence and counts a former ambassador to the United States among his siblings.
Notwithstanding their disparate backgrounds, the two have united in their desire to preserve the history of bilateral U.S. assistance for Colombia, which has been Washington’s most steadfast partner in the area for many years. The effort is made more difficult by the growing polarization in both nations.
With nine months to go before important presidential elections, Uribe’s recent sentence of 12 years of house arrest in a lengthy witness tampering case has rocked the country’s politics. Despite being prohibited from running, the former president is still a strong leader, and Moreno stated that his absence from the campaign trail might change the rules of the game.
Additionally, he is concerned that the narcotization of a bilateral relationship that ought to be centered on trade, investment, and mutual prosperity may occur once more as a result of the surge in cocaine production.
“We want Colombia to be strong, healthy, prosperous, and secure, and I believe the Colombian people want the same thing,” he continued. So, how do we get there is the question.
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Smyth reported from Ohio’s Columbus.
