Colombian President Gustavo Petro has made Gaza the moral centerpiece of his foreign policy. Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, he has devoted extraordinary political capital to denouncing Israel, questioning its right to self-defense, and framing the Gaza war as a singular global emergency.
He summoned “Free Palestine” marches, spent public funds hosting solidarity concerts in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, donned a keffiyeh near Times Square alongside Roger Waters, branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal,” labeled Gaza a “genocide,” and even urged U.S. military personnel to disobey orders from President Donald Trump over Middle East policy.
The performance was theatrical, relentless – and costly. Petro’s visa to the United States was revoked. Months later, he was placed on the U.S. Treasury’s OFAC sanctions list alongside his close political ally and interior minister Armando Benedetti, as well as his wife – or estranged wife – Verónica Alcocer, whose marital status, according to Petro himself, remains mysteriously unresolved.
Yet for all this moral fervor, Petro has remained conspicuously silent on one of the gravest human rights catastrophes unfolding today: Iran’s brutal suppression of nationwide protests.
His silence is deafening.
Since protests erupted across Iran in late December 2025, the regime has responded not with reform but with terror. Demonstrators demanding economic relief, dignity, and political change have been met with live ammunition. Militiamen aligned with the Revolutionary Guards have swept through cities on motorbikes, firing automatic weapons into crowds. Snipers reportedly aim at faces and genitals. Morgues are overflowing. Bodies are stacked in blood-soaked streets. More than 12,000 are believed dead. Thousands more have been dragged from hospital beds into prisons, many never to be seen again.
This is not metaphorical violence. These are not contested narratives. These are crimes against humanity carried out by a theocracy against its own citizens.
And yet – nothing from Petro.
The Iranian regime insists the unrest is a foreign-engineered plot: psychological warfare orchestrated by hostile powers to destabilize the Islamic Republic. The opposition, by contrast, sees a nationwide rupture—an uprising rooted in decades of repression, economic collapse, and the severing of legitimacy between rulers and ruled.
Narrative control matters. In modern conflict, perception is a battlefield. As scholars Ihsan Yilmaz and Shahram Akbarzadeh have noted, authoritarian regimes increasingly rely on Strategic Digital Information Operations—psychological warfare designed not merely to suppress dissent, but to reshape reality itself. The objective is cognitive: to induce fear, discredit opponents, and convince societies that resistance is futile.
Petro’s brand of performative moralism has not been cost-free. His compulsive need to condemn Israel – and, by extension, the United States – was read in Washington not as symbolism but as direct provocation. It coincided with a marked deterioration in U.S.–Colombia relations, freezing high-level dialogue, undermining security cooperation, and contributing to the unprecedented decision to revoke his U.S. visa. For a country whose military, intelligence, and counter-narcotics apparatus remains deeply intertwined with American support, the damage was neither abstract nor symbolic – it was strategic.
The rupture with Israel was even more explicit. By publicly referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “Nazi,” Petro crossed a diplomatic red line that few world leaders have dared approach. The comparison – historically illiterate, morally inflammatory, and deeply offensive- effectively severed Colombia–Israel relations. Defense cooperation was halted, diplomatic channels collapsed, and decades of bilateral engagement in security, technology, and trade were sacrificed to rhetorical escalation. Whatever one’s view of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, equating the Jewish state with the architects of the Holocaust is not principled criticism; it is diplomatic arson.
In both cases, Petro appeared less concerned with consequences than with signaling ideological virtue to a global activist audience. The result has been the erosion of Colombia’s standing with two key partners—one its most important ally, the other a longstanding strategic collaborator—while yielding no tangible benefit to the civilians whose suffering he claims to champion.
What makes Petro’s silence on Iran so damning is not merely its contrast with his Gaza activism; it is the exposure of a deeper incoherence. For years, leftist politicians, celebrities, and fringe groups have flooded streets in capitals around the world denouncing Israel’s war as “genocide.” Now, when protesters are machine-gunned in Iran, hospitals are raided, and young people are summarily executed, this outrage dissipates.
As Allister Heath wrote recently in The Telegraph, this is “pure, unadulterated evil… a stain on humanity.” And yet where are the chants? Where is the flotilla? Where are the luvvies? One might also ask: where is the Colombian president who claims human rights as his moral compass?
The answer is uncomfortable. Gaza became a performative ritual of sit-ins and campus “occupations.” The tragedy of Iran exposes the hollowness of that performance.
When Iran’s protests began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, authorities initially assumed they were manageable. Bazaar merchants—traditionally conservative and closely linked to the state—were seen as transactional actors seeking economic relief, not regime change. Even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei acknowledged their grievances, a rare concession.
But the regime miscalculated. Protests spread to more than 25 provinces. Ethnic minorities—Kurds, Baluch, Arabs, and Azeris—joined despite deep skepticism about the opposition and fears of what might follow. The unrest evolved from economic protest into an existential challenge to the state, triggering a massacre reportedly claiming more than 6,000 lives.
Meanwhile, fears of chaos loom. Exiled figures such as Reza Pahlavi position themselves as transitional leaders, even as their proposed roadmaps concentrate power in ways eerily reminiscent of the current theocracy. The Syrian precedent—where Western intervention elevated jihadist actors rather than democratic forces—haunts the region.
None of this excuses silence.
President Petro has every right to condemn injustice – especially on his own soil, where human rights abuses by FARC dissidents and the ELN guerrilla continue to inflict immense suffering on Colombia’s most vulnerable. Yet here, too, the silence has been deafening: soldiers kidnapped, children cowering under desks amid gunfire in Cauca, an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Catatumbo that has displaced more than 60,000 people and quietly slipped from the government’s agenda.
For Petro, moral leadership is selective. If civilian lives matter, they matter everywhere. If state violence is intolerable, it is intolerable whether committed by an ally, an adversary, or a regime ideologically convenient to ignore.
Silence in the face of mass murder is not neutrality. It is complicity by omission.
Petro’s foreign policy has become a study in selective empathy – loud where ideology demands it, louder still on social media, but mute where principle requires courage. That is not moral clarity. It is hypocrisy incarnate.
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