Sept. 28—The President of Colombia Gustavo Petro addressed a pro-Palestine rally in Times Square in New York City  Sept. 26, and issued a public call for American soldiers to disobey the orders of U.S. President Donald Trump, and instead join with the “forces of humanity” to militarily liberate the Palestinian people.

Predictably, the "former" narco-terrorist Petro’s brazen provocation brought a prompt response from the U.S. State Department: “Earlier today, Colombian president Gustavo Petro stood on a NYC street and urged U.S. soldiers to disobey orders and incite violence. We will revoke Petro’s visa due to his reckless and incendiary actions.”

More significantly, Petro’s actions will greatly discredit the efforts of The Hague Group of 34 nations, which Colombia recently co-founded with South Africa, to find a way for the United Nations General Assembly to intervene to stop the genocide in Gaza. One experienced Colombia analyst commented to EIR: “Petro, once again, is acting the part of the seasoned agent provocateur, much as he did as a leader of the M-19 narco-terrorists in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. London, Washington and Tel Aviv will be pleased as punch with his Times Square stunt.”

Petro told the rally: “From here, from New York, I call on all the soldiers of the United States Army: Do not point your rifles at humanity. Disobey Trump’s order. Obey the order of humanity…. We have to organize that great army … it has to be bigger than the army of the United States.” Petro’s words were interpreted into English for the crowd by one of his aides.

Petro was a leading member of the M-19 guerrilla group in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. The M-19 famously seized the Justice Palace in Bogotá in 1985 and held all the members of the Supreme Court hostage. This led to the slaughter of 100 individuals, including half of the Supreme Court Justices, and the gutting of the national legal archives, which made it impossible to prosecute the drug kingpins. That “guerrilla” action, it has since been acknowledged, was contracted and financed by the Medellin cocaine cartel, which was trying to stop the extradition of top Narcos to the United States. Petro was in jail at the time of the takeover and claims he had no involvement in those events. But he has always defended both his role and the actions of the M-19 and does so to this day.

The M-19 was also closely allied with the narco-terrorist FARC—the world’s largest cocaine cartel—throughout this period, while remaining organizationally distinct. For a while the two narco-terrorist groups worked together in the Simón Bolívar Guerrilla Coordinating Board to negotiate a “peace pact” (including control over territory where they would be allowed to proceed with legalized drug-running) with the government.

That’s the context for the subsequent famous “Grasso Abrazo” picture of the New York Stock Exchange’s Richard Grasso embracing the #2 leader and head of finances of the FARC, Raul Reyes, in the “liberated” jungles of the Caguán area of Colombia in 1999.