By Hedelberto López Blanch on September 30, 2025
foto: LA Times
Colombian President Gustavo Petro delivered one of the most courageous speeches in recent times at the United Nations General Assembly, openly denouncing the arbitrary and aggressive actions committed by the United States and its current president, Donald Trump, against numerous countries around the world.
A few hours after Donald Trump had spoken in that same room, his words having been described by many analysts, diplomats, and politicians as aggressive, arrogant, and full of lies, Petro, using direct and colloquial language, exposed the numerous falsehoods coming from the current US president.
I think that at that moment Petro also recalled the famous speech by a great Latin American leader, President Hugo Chávez, when on September 20, 2006, addressing the UN General Assembly after US President George Bush had done so, he said: “Yesterday the Devil was here, yesterday the Devil was here, in this very place. This table where I have been asked to speak still smells of sulfur.”
On this occasion, the Colombian president, refuted the many fallacies of Trump including the unfounded accusations against Venezuela as a drug-trafficking country and the military threats of the United States in the Caribbean and specifically against the Bolivarian Revolution.
On that subject, Petro said: “Drug traffickers live in Miami, New York, Paris, Madrid, Dubai. Many have blue eyes and blond hair and do not live on boats where missiles fall. Drug traffickers live next door to Trump’s house in Miami.”
Petro’s words about the expansion of the drug business in Miami are easy to verify because they have been appearing in the media for years, and I collected many of his examples in an investigation I conducted in that country, which I later published in a book titled Miami Dinero Sucio (Miami Dirty Money).
The drug boom in Miami began in the mid-1960s when Cuban-Americans who had been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry out attacks against Cuba were left unemployed after the failure of Operation Mongoose. There were more than 50 front companies of all kinds that were created in Miami to camouflage destabilizing operations against the Revolution.
These men were taught where and how to penetrate the various Cuban keys and inlets with speedboats, but they also knew how to do so in the United States. They allied themselves with Colombian drug traffickers and began to fill Miami, New Jersey, New York, and other cities with contraband, first marijuana and then cocaine.
This is how major drug traffickers such as Albero Cruz, Salvador Magluta, Augusto Willy Falcón, and Leonel Martínez emerged, to name a few who dominated and controlled the police officers who protected them in exchange for large sums of money.
Among the drug traffickers on the long list is Armando Pérez Roura Jr., son of the spokesman for the Cuban-American right wing and former director of Radio Mambí, who was arrested with 2,754 pounds of cocaine paste. However, as is usual in that corrupt society, although the prosecution sought a 10-year prison sentence, he was released thanks to his father’s political connections.
A highly instructive case of the immense smuggling between powerful men in the Cuban mafia in the United States was that of Carlos Salman, founder and vice president of the far-right Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).
When Salman died on September 12, 2001, several newspapers praised him. El Nuevo Herald noted: “He was an important Republican activist in Miami-Dade. From nothing, he built a huge real estate business.”
His political connections led him to befriend former President Ronald Reagan and right-wing Cuban-Americans such as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. One of Miami’s main avenues was named after him.
The disappointment came several years later, in 2007, when the Colombian newspapers Primera Plana and El Colombiano exposed all the drug trafficking and money laundering in which Salman had been involved with his companies C.W. Salman Partners and Salman Coral Way Partners.
The whole image of an honest man and successful builder came crashing down, and even the street name was removed.
But we don’t have to look far for another example. Orlando Cicilia, (husband of Barbara Rubio) brother-in-law of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was arrested at his home in 1987, and more than $15 million in cocaine was found during the search (the money was never found). Cicilia was a front man for one of the biggest drug traffickers of the time, Mario Tabraue.
Cicilia, sentenced to 25 years in prison, was released in 2000 thanks to the efforts of his brother-in-law Marco Rubio (then leader of the Florida House of Representatives), who also pressured the authorities to grant a real estate license to his “rehabilitated” brother-in-law.
Because of these actions, some in Miami, such as former Hialeah Mayor Raúl Martínez, refer to him as “Narco Rubio.”
A report by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) indicated that in the late 1970s, around 70% of the cocaine and marijuana entering the country from Latin America (mainly Colombia) entered the US market through southern Florida, a business estimated to be worth $40 billion.
That is why Petro, with great reason and wisdom, emphasized before the plenary session of the UN General Assembly that traffickers are not in small boats that are attacked with missiles by the US military fleet without any legitimacy, but rather that drug traffickers live in residences in major capitals and also near President Trump’s mansion Mar-a-Lago in Miami.
Moral of the story: even if Washington now revokes Petro’s visa, the truths he expressed against Trump and the aggressive actions of the United States around the world will remain recorded in the history of the UN.
Hedelberto López Blanch is a Cuban journalist who writes for the daily newspaper Juventud Rebelde and the weekly Opciones. He is the author of “Cuban Emigration to the United States,” “Secret Stories of Cuban Doctors in Africa,” “Miami, Dirty Money,” “The Rebirth of the Cicadas,” and his most recent “Rubio: An Uncontrollable Mythomaniac,”.
Source: Cuba en Resumen