You know, as a Latin American I like this pod and I'm generally left leaning but it can be very frustrating to see how simplistic most Americans seem to be when it comes to politics, because leftist by no means necesarily means good.

I'm from Colombia, a country that recently went from decades of far right, death squad loving goverments, to its first far left president and the guy is a huge mess, not because he turned not to be truly leftist but because he's deeply irrational.

He wants to stop further oil exploration because of climate change, keep in mind that if every country had the per capita emissions of Colombia then CC wouldn't be much of a problem, without any real plan to replace this vital part of our economy, except announcing on Twitter that he's going to quadruple tourism into the country (do tourist flying in and doing tourist stuff not produce unnecesary emissions then?) without any actual plan to do this. This has predictably tanked the local currency and caused even greater inflation hurting specially the poorest.

He's a Twitter addict constantly posting random ideas, getting into feuds and making grand announcements that almost always turn out false or at least massively exaggerated. One example of this was an announced deal to buy a massive ammount of rural land to redistribute amomg poor farmers. Later on his minister had to quietly admit they have the budget for like 3% of what he announced and in a meeting with US senators he was basically threatening to get closer to China unless the US gave him the money to make the purchases he promised, obviously that's never going to happen.

He and his ministers constantly lie, misrepresent and tell half truths to support their ideas. His energy minister (a philosopher BTW) was caught blatantly lying about the countriy's oil reserves to try and make the idea of no further exploration more palatable. He's been pushing a rather controversial health reform and tweeted a picture of a run down hospital to show the need for change except it turned out the picture was from Venezuela, showed an OCDE graph about how Colombia has the lowest ratio of doctos to population but it had to be pointed out nothing in his law did anything to adress this.

He's more than happy to defend corrupt criminals elsewhere as long as they're ideologically alligned such as the Kirchners in Argentina and the ousted, coup attempting Pedro Castillo from Peru. He threw so much shit as Peru's new right wing goverment (which is pretty shit) that he caused a diplomatic crisis while being pretty soft on Maduro who has done fsr worse.

I could keep going but you get my point. With 13% inflation and rising, a devaluated currency, shrinking growth, an insistence on terminating one of the main sources of public money (oil) with no clear replacement while also increasing public spending and just a generally chaotic, nonsensical and random way of goverment, it seems almost certain that leftism in general will be very discredited in Colombia when his term is over, leaving to chance for other leftist that may want to go about it in a less absurd way.

So yeah, I'm sure Kissinger frowned briefly when he read that the US's staunchest satellite state in LA has ellected a leftist former guerrilla. How nice, that will surely comfort the 40% of the population that is below the poverty line and has to deal with 25% YoY food inflation.