A split is happening across Latin America. Poll after poll shows the region’s publics turning against Israel, whose three-year assault on Gaza is widely considered a genocide.
Yet a wave of new right-wing governments - in El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Costa Rica and now Colombia - signals a shift in the opposite direction, deepening the region’s security, diplomatic and technological ties with Israel, while denying Palestinians the most basic right to self-determination.
The clearest illustration came last month in Colombia. Gustavo Petro, the former guerilla and outgoing leftist president who addressed a pro-Palestine rally in New York last year before Washington revoked his visa, lost power to Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer who has defended paramilitary groups and has ties to military dictatorships and US President Donald Trump.
Petro has accused the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm BlackCore of deploying half a million bot accounts to flood Colombian voters with disinformation ahead of the June run-off, which De la Espriella won by less than a single percentage point.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t wait for that dispute to settle before celebrating online, congratulating the president-elect and declaring that “Israel’s friends continue to win”. The region is home to some 700,000 Palestinians and 500,000 Jews.
