Colombia’s first leftist leader held talks with President Biden at the White House on Thursday, addressing sharp disagreements on how to fight drug trafficking while looking for ways to end the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela.

For Colombian President Gustavo Petro, it was an opportunity to ease relations with Washington, where some officials are harboring doubts about Bogota’s 8-month-old government.

to pray

would be expected to push for more cooperation from Petro on immigration as the number of Colombians

immigrant

Illegal entry into the US has skyrocketed in recent months

. That was exactly the case in March

second only to

the number of migrants

S

originating from Mexico

.

The meeting was symbolic

the ideological balancing act of the United States

tries to navigate in his dealings

with Colombia

. O

often called Washington’s best friend in Latin America,

Columbia is

not ruled by for the first time

a right or

centrist pro-American president.

Colombia is the key to the hemisphere,” Biden said, sitting in the Oval Office next to Petro. I think we have a chance, if we just work hard enough, to have a Western Hemisphere that is united, equal, democratic and economically prosperous. “

Petro

said he believed

Democracy is something that is not set in stone, but flows and evolves like a river leading to more democracy and even more freedom.

We are on the same river as the US, he said.

Petro, once a young guerrilla fighter in Colombia’s half-century civil war, is one of many leftists to rise to power

through Latin America,

usually through democratic elections.

Prior to the White House meeting with Biden, Petro, 63, acknowledged

to reporters that

there were

doubtless

important differences

between

the two government policies.

We believe the war on drugs has failed, Petro said. The past 50 years have proved absolutely disastrous [results]both here in the United States and in our Latin America.

Colombia, long the world’s largest producer of raw coca

plan

accustomed to material

manufacture

cocaine, from 1999 onwards, was the focus of Washington’s Plan Colombia for nearly two decades, which spent billions of dollars in mostly military aid to fight drug traffickers and left-wing insurgencies.

In 2016, the Colombian government and the main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, signed a peace agreement that ended much of the fighting and reintegrated many guerrillas into civil society. It won then-President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize, but violence is spreading through Colombia again,

special

in rural areas, now that coca cultivation is on the rise again.

Despite their differences, Petro has made gestures to cement a good relationship with the Biden administration. He has reduced US-sponsored coca crop eradication operations but, against expectations, has continued a program to extradite suspected drug traffickers to the US.

affected

improved farmers.

Petro faces strong headwinds in the form of criticism from the right,

both in the US

and in Colombia, inclusive

by

several Republican US legislators who

have tried to associate him

authoritarian leftist leaders from Latin America, such as the Venezuelan Nicol

s Maduro and Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua.

Petro met with Conservative Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) on Wednesday as part of his rounds on Capitol Hill. The next day, Salazar accused Petro of dodging her questions. He wanders, he doesn’t answer, he plays for time, like Fidel and Chavez used to do, like Maduro and Ortega did,” she told a Colombian television station, referring to the late Cuban president Fidel Castro and the late Venezuelan president. Hugo Chvez.” It’s what the socialists do to confuse you. Prior to Petros’s election last year, Salazar labeled him a socialist, Marxist, and terrorist.

Analysts dispute that characterization,

noting that Petro

is more intellectual than fighter these days

other

has a track record in elected politics, having served several terms as elected mayor of Bogota and in Congress.

There are those who would like to see the U.S.-Columbia ties broken, but surprisingly, he’s committed to building relationships, said Steve Hege, a Colombia-based program director at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

His ambitions are exactly what Colombia needs, Hege added,

referring to Petro’s

plan to end violence through negotiations with armed groups, and to reform health and pension systems.

But the government still lacks the technical and institutional capabilities to implement those changes, Hege said. T

alcohol

scary

with armed groups coming from both the right and the left is a controversial endeavor in a country where more than a quarter of a million people were killed by the army, guerrillas or right-wing paramilitary squads during the western hemisphere’s longest armed conflict.

Biden and Petro may feel the most mutually beneficial issue between them is a more productive approach to the crisis in Venezuela.

During the Trump administration, years of heavy economic sanctions, diplomatically

exclusion

and not even the threat of military intervention could dislodge Maduro, a socialist autocrat

no longer govern with a democratic mandate. Some of those punitive measures against Colombia have continued in the Biden administration, also to no avail. Maduro succeeded the much more popular Chévez after his death in 2013, and has overseen the demise of his once wealthy country’s economy, along with the repression and forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of citizens. i

n his public appearance with Petro on Thursday,

to pray

praised

and thanked

Colombia for hosting Venezuelan immigrants, often providing them with jobs and legal residency.

next week,

Petro

want to

to meet at an international conference in Bogota aimed at bringing

scary

the Venezuelan government and its opposition in meaningful negotiations. The US will send a delegation along with nearly 20 other countries, Petro said.

Trusting his leftist credentials, Petro

reopened diplomatic ties with Caracas that had been severed by his predecessor and appears to have gained some confidence in the Maduro government.

Everyone here in Washington has no ideas about how we can help Venezuela return to democracy in the short term, said Adam Isacson, a security expert with the Washington Office on Latin America. There is room for a creative third party to help.

It is still questionable whether the US and Europe

want to

relax some sanctions to encourage Venezuela

curtain

repression

over there

or if there needs to be a movement toward democracy before the West lifts the sentence.

If Petro can play the role of a balanced mediator, he can win regionally by reviving trade relations between Colombia and Venezuela, and internationally by

improve

one of the hemisphere’s most nagging crises.

“From a US perspective, it positions Colombia as a key interlocutor to move Maduro toward advancing democracy,”

said

Jason Marczak, senior director of the

Adrienne Arsht

Latin America

C

entering the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington. “Colombia is a pivot of our policy in Latin America.”

One area where Petro and Biden found solid convergence was climate change. Both enthusiastically endorsed a move away from fossil fuels and towards a more “carbon-free” world. “We need to get rid of fossil fuels, of fossil fuel greed, which has developed like a hurricane that threatens our very existence,” Petro said. “We are making real progress toward a carbon-free environment,” Biden said.