Alvaro Uribe and Jair Bolsonaro are the most recent political prisoners of 21st century socialism
By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 20/08/2025
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Along with the expansion of Cuba’s dictatorship as 21st Century Socialism, Castroism’s crimes have proliferated throughout the region using its methodology of State-terrorism. Thousands of political prisoners, millions of exiles, hundreds of crimes, forcible migrations, narco-States, transnational organized crime operations, and permanent actions of hybrid warfare are the current objective reality. In this context, the most recent political prisoners are the former presidents Alvaro Uribe Velez from Colombia, and Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil.
A political prisoners is “the individual who has been jailed because of his/her beliefs or political actions.” In the process of “political jailing” it is common for the accusation and/or sentencing; to be falsified, to be disproportionate with the presumed crime, for the presumed perpetrator to be treated in a discriminatory manner, and for the detention to be the result of judicial proceedings that are clearly biased and unfair.”
Political jailings are aimed at the civil and political disqualification of the victim. It is all about removing that person from the scenario of the fight for freedom and democracy that is being fought and that the victim is committed to. The deprivation of the victim’s freedom is the “vaccine” with which State-terrorism is applied to the population. State-terrorism is “the use of illegitimate methods by a government, aimed at instilling fear or terror in the civilian population in order to promote behaviors that would, otherwise, would not have occurred on their own.”
The false accusations and charges, to attribute the crimes perpetrated by the dictator and his/her inner circle on to the victims, making the use of individual freedoms, basic rights, and the defense of human rights a crime, manipulating narratives and using tele communicational technologies to destroy the image of political adversaries who 21st Century Socialism has turned into an enemy, are but a handful of “the assassination of reputations” that the government perpetrates as part of its system of “character assassination.”
To destroy democratic leaders, to end the system of political plurality, to gag the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech, to destroy national unity, to end the national business community, to turn criminals into politicians, narcotics’ traffickers into entrepreneurs, and common criminals into revolutionary groups, is just a part of the on-going supplantation that is perpetrated as hybrid warfare against democracy in the Americas in this 21st century.
Hybrid warfare are the attacks “in which all types of means and procedures, conventional, irregular, and indirect forces, are used (conspiracy, insurgency, terrorism, forcible migration, common crime, narcotics’ trafficking, cybernetics, street arousal, human trafficking, fake news, assassination of reputations, false accusations. . .)” It is “a new type of warfare that has superseded asymmetric warfare (regular army against an insurgent force),” that it also has “the advantage of avoiding the attacker to be held responsible for the attack.”
The control of governments in democratic countries through the patronage of candidates, gives way to the existence of “para-dictatorial” governments, defined as “the government elected democratically who represents a democratic nation but who serves dictatorial regimes to whom he/she owes his/her ascent to power to contribute to its sustenance and permanence with legitimization actions and support, disregarding international legal obligations and hindering the nation’s own national interests.”
Today, the governments of Petro in Colombia, and Lula da Silva in Brazil are para-dictatorial at the service of Cuba’s dictatorship and of 21st Century Socialism. This servitude goes back a long time, not just in this century but prior years, a time in which the current presidents of these two important countries were guerrilla fighters and trained subversives, sustained by Castroism. The backgrounds of Petro in the M-19 guerrillas and of Lula as operator of the Forum of Sao Paolo to sustain the Cuban dictatorship, are only a brief part of a long history that we cannot afford to ignore.
The facts reveal that 21st Century Socialism operates a strategy to advance in the control of Colombia and Brazil by going beyond the operations of just having para-dictatorial governments there, to the actual supplantation of democracy by their dictatorial methodology. The assassination of reputations, judicialization of political persecution, the disqualification and imprisonment of Alvaro Urive Velez and of Jair Bolsonaro, with different falsifications and pretexts, but with the same end objective, are the advanced -and almost terminal- phase of the destruction of democracy in Colombia and Brazil.
*Lawyer & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.
Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas
«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».