Last month, Colombian president Gustavo Petro used a megaphone to support pro-Palestinian protesters on the streets of New York while wearing a keffiyeh. Days earlier, his Chilean counterpart, Gabriel Boric, had told the UN General Assembly that he wanted to see Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought before the International Court of Justice.
These were powerful moments. But after two years and 67,000 Palestinians killed, Israel’s war on Gaza still has not elicited the same unanimous condemnation among Latin America’s progressive parties and governments as the South African apartheid did in the twentieth century.
While Petro and Boric, as well as Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexican foreign minister Juan Ramón De la Fuente Ramírez, denounced Israel’s attacks on Gaza as “genocide” at the UN last month, other leaders of the so-called regional progressivism have avoided using such language.
