Latin Americans “know that President Trump just wants them to be safer,” fueling a rise in support for conservatives that could reshape the future of the region, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) told Breitbart News in an interview on Monday following a visit to Bogotá, Colombia.
Sen. Moreno, who was born in Colombia, was part of an American delegation in the country to attend the funeral of Miguel Uribe Turbay, a 39-year-old senator shot by a child during a campaign rally for the presidency in July; Uribe died in mid-August after a prolonged fight for his life in an intensive care unit. Prior to his killing, polls indicated that the conservative lawmaker was in the lead to become the next president of the country; Colombians are scheduled to vote for a new head of state in August 2026.
The Ohio senator also used his visit to meet with former President Álvaro Uribe (no relation to Miguel), still the kingmaker and most powerful conservative in the country despite leaving the top office in 2010. Uribe was sentenced to over a decade on house arrest for allegedly abusing power and bribing a public official. The case centered around Uribe filing a lawsuit against a leftist lawmaker, Iván Cepeda, who he alleged with evidence was bribing criminals to testify that Uribe was sponsoring paramilitary activity. Rather than investigating Cepeda, Colombian authorities opened an investigation into Uribe that conservatives in the country describe as fraudulent persecution of the country’s most important right-wing leader.
Colombia is currently experiencing a growing wave of violence and persecution against conservatives under radical leftist President Gustavo Petro, the first leftist president in the history of the country. Petro, a proud former member of the Marxist M19 guerrilla terrorist group, won the 2022 election as voters turned away from the conservative establishment in response to onerous coronavirus restrictions, choosing a rogue outsider businessman to challenge Petro in the runoff election. Since taking office, Petro has ruled over a historic boom in cocaine production, organized criminal activity, and persecution of conservatives. Petro’s response has been to declare cocaine safer than fossil fuels and reintegrate guerrilla criminals into law-abiding Colombian communities.
Sen. Moreno told Breitbart News that he met with Petro for three and a half hours during his visit to Bogotá last week, striving to find common ground to improve the lives of Colombians and make the world safer in his last year in office (Petro is term-limited out of running again). He described the meeting as productive and cordial, and credited Petro with at least acknowledging that Colombia’s inability to keep conservative politicians safe from Marxist violence was a critical problem. The engagement between the two is particularly remarkable given Petro’s strident antagonism towards the Trump administration and Sen. Moreno’s actions to sanction Petro in January in response to Petro initially refusing to accept repatriated Colombian illegal immigrants.
“Petro was elected democratically by the citizens of Colombia,” Sen. Moreno acknowledged, “so my goal was, ‘What are some things that we can do?’ And we’ve got some common ground, they need some more help on drones, they got rid of some auto industry trade restrictions that were important.”
Aside from the president — who has consistently antagonized President Trump since the latter’s return to the White House in January — Sen. Moreno described the people of Colombia as excited for the return of American influence and eager to see President Trump expanding friendly ties to their country.
“First of all, the interesting irony was that no matter who I talked to in Colombia… we literally talked to the entire ecosystem. Obviously former President Uribe as well, Miguel Uribe’s family,” he detailed, “everybody’s begging, begging the United States for help restoring law and order to Colombia.”
“And the reason I say it’s ironic is because we have Democrats here in the United States that are doing everything in their power to destroy law and order in America,” he added, “So it’s this incredible contrast.”
Sen. Moreno described meeting with “the top mayors, the top political leaders including obviously the president, the president of the Senate, the president of their version of the House of Representatives, the top business leaders, the political candidates, the media… the whole ecosystem” of politics in Colombia.
“President Trump’s strategies towards Latin America are working,” Sen. Moreno asserted. “We have a secure border because of President Trump. We have a crackdown on these narco-terrorists because of President Trump. Which leads you to understand that there was no better friend for drug traffickers, drug dealers, and human traffickers than Joe Biden and the Democrats, which is very sad.”
“Of course the mainstream media will never give him credit for that — but you know who does?” he continued. “The people of Latin America.”
“The most popular thing you can bring to Latin America, where people will just — their eyes are wide open and they have a big smile on their face — you give them a red MAGA hat and they think they just won the lottery,” Sen. Moreno described. “I’m not kidding you. At the airport, we had to get like nine of them because the police officers that were sweeping the aisles, the security guys, all these guys — I could’ve given them $500, they would’ve preferred the MAGA hat. It was crazy.”
President Trump’s popularity in the region, Sen. Moreno explained, was attributable to the fact that he takes the Western Hemisphere seriously and prioritizes America’s neighbors, rather than only focusing on distant foreign affairs.
“I analogize President Trump when it comes to Latin America to the most influential president since James Monroe,” Sen. Moreno said. “So what Monroe had said is, ‘Look, the Western Hemisphere is off-limits to communists; we’re going to have a blanket of influence over Latin America.’”
“And unfortunately between Biden, Obama, those guys destroyed that Monroe Doctrine and President Trump in short order is restoring it,” he continued. “So I think President Trump is the first president in my lifetime who is basically saying, ‘We’re not going to put up with this anymore, and we’re not going to have a tepid response.’”
The senator noted that President Trump stacked his State Department with experts on the region — including “the smartest secretary of state when it comes to Latin American affairs in American history,” Secretary Marco Rubio — and internalized the reality that, “when we’re not engaged, the siren call of communism spreads throughout the area, and you’re seeing that throughout the entire region.”
Colombia’s conservatives have rallied for years to prepare for the 2026 election. The loss of their presidential frontrunner to a child assassin has left them in a state of discord, but Sen. Moreno expressed optimism that, with a worker-centered message that can appeal to those who put their hopes in socialism, Colombia can get back on track.
“President Trump knows how to talk to working Americans, cares about working Americans, and I implored the people in Colombia that… you’ve got to talk to that worker in Colombia,” the senator said, “that person in Colombia who wants a better future instead of the country club crowd. And one of the things I saw was almost the conservative movement stuck where the Republicans were stuck back in 2012, and they’ve got to adapt a much more worker-focused process where they’re talking about the economy working for all Colombians.”
“If they don’t do that, and other leaders in South America and Latin America don’t do that, they’ll continue to elect communists and socialists who promise them everything and deliver nothing,” he warned.
“The Mitt Romneys of the world did not talk to working Americans and that’s why he lost his election to Obama,” he recalled.
Sen. Moreno also noted that Colombia’s presidential race currently has 56 “pre-candidates” — individuals who have declared their intent to run but, due to it being too early to register as candidates, are not yet official. He encouraged conservatives in Colombia to “rally around one candidate, a conservative that has the backbone to turn that country around, that has the intellectual capacity to turn that country around, that can communicate with the Petro voter.”
“We gotta make certain that who comes next is somebody strong, not a lightweight, somebody that can present a vision for Colombia that really resonates with its people,” he said. “But I am hopeful — I am very, very hopeful — that that happens. I think Colombia can have a great, bright future and America will be standing ready there to welcome them to the kind of relationship we had when Uribe was president.”
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