Free Republic

Colombia is hoping to expedite its mission to recover a three-century-old sunken treasure worth as much as $20 billion as the ownership of the fortune lies in legal limbo amid an ongoing court battle. President Gustavo Petro ordered his administration to exhume the “Holy Grail of shipwrecks” — the Spanish galleon San José — from the floor of the Caribbean Sea as soon as possible, the country’s minister of culture told Bloomberg last week. Petro wants to bring the 62-gun, three-masted ship to the surface before his term is up in 2026 and has requested a public-private partnership be formed...

Colombian right-wing and centrist candidates obtained sweeping victories in Sunday’s regional elections, dealing a huge blow to the leftist government coalition led by President Gustavo Petro, the nation’s first leftist president. The Colombian electorate headed to the polls on Sunday to elect 32 governors, 1,102 mayors, and more than 19,000 other regional legislatures and public office positions nationwide, featuring over 125,000 candidates on the ballot. The voter turnout rate in Colombia was tallied at 59.08 percent, meaning 22.98 million of Colombia’s 38.9 million voters participated in the election.

BOGOTA, July 29 (Reuters) - Nicolas Petro, son of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, has been arrested as part of an investigation into money laundering and illicit enrichment, the attorney general's office said early on Saturday

They were leaving a social event in the south-western department of Huila when their vehicle hit a road mine. They were then shot dead in the ambush, a police spokesperson said. It is the worst attack on security forces since former guerrilla Gustavo Petro was sworn in as Colombia's first left-wing president less than a month ago According to the national police and attorney general's office, three of the officers who were killed were aged 20 or younger. Mr Petro condemned the attack, calling it "a clear act of sabotage against peace" in a tweet. Late on Friday he travelled...

It turns out that President Biden is not the only president with a son in the news. Down in Colombia, recently elected President Gustavo Petro is getting questions about his son too. This is the story: Colombia's attorney general's office said on Friday it will begin an investigation into accusations that President Petro's oldest son took money from drug traffickers in exchange for including them in his father's peace efforts.Nicolas Petro, a lawmaker in Atlantico province, has said he has had nothing to do with the president's efforts to make peace or surrender deals with rebels and criminal gangs, and...

Like sheep led to the slaughter. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” –George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905 Over the course of the 20th Century, murder by communist government acccounted for the deaths of over 100 million people. The brutalities are well known—or should be—there are countless histories of the terror inflicted upon citizens by believers in Marxian doctrine. In fact, the scourge persists still today, most notably in China. Despite the tremendous amount of evidence (both historical and current) detailing the most unspeakable horrors at the hands of men like Pol Pot, Mao...

Colombia, which is America's strongest ally, has always had the most level-headed voters in the region. They've had two conservative parties, sometimes at once, and voters there have always rejected the crazy left, which in their case, is a Castro-grade revolutionary crazy grade of left, with Bill Ayers-types on steroids. They did, after all, fight a 60-year war against Marxist narcoterrorists, with only a few university wokesters defending them. So it was shocking news that on Sunday, Colombians went and elected just about the worst leftist of this stripe, a former M-19 narcoguerrilla named Gustavo Petro, president, turning one of...

The surprise electoral surge of a man dubbed Colombia’s Donald Trump could scupper the left’s hopes of a historic takeover of the presidency in a race now between two anti-establishment candidates, analysts say. Maverick millionnaire Rodolfo Hernandez, 77, finished second in presidential elections Sunday with 28 percent of votes cast. He denied the frontrunner, leftist Gustavo Petro, an outright first-round victory and eliminated right-wing establishment candidate Federico “Fico” Gutierrez, whom most opinion polls had placed in clear second place.

PART 2 OF 3. The Hunter Biden Files Hunter Biden and his business partners were involved in discussions about possible deals in dozens of foreign countries, often corrupt backwaters, at times invoking official channels like ambassadors, emails reviewed by The Daily Wire show. While most attention has focused on Ukraine, where a gas company paid the now-president’s son tens of thousands of dollars a month while he was in deep crack addiction, and China, Hunter and his partners at a consultancy called Rosemont Seneca were eager to do business in a vast array of other places. The map below highlights...

His full name is Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco, and his legacy is equally voluminous. Born on July 24, 1783, he was serendipitously raised in an age of revolutions, and was one of the key leaders in the struggle for independence from Spain which spread throughout Latin America. On June 15th, 1813 he dictated his “Decree of War to the Death,” and the rest is history. He would go on to lead Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia to independence from Spain. At one point he was dictator of Peru, president of Colombia,...

As mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro has put forth a ban on carrying guns in public even with a legal permit. Skeptics have countered that criminals will not follow the ban, and the result will only disarm citizens legally carry guns for security reasons. In 2002 Brazil implemented restrictions which made it virtually impossible for citizens to obtain a permit. According to Brazil’s National Confederation of Municipalities as recently as 2008, more than half of the homocides in Brazil were perpetrated with a firearm, despite restrictions on legal ownership of firearms. The nation suffers at three times the global average...