I'm John Batchew with my colleague Professor Aben Ellis of the U.S. Army War College.

New World Report, Russian Flotilla, dividing at the moment the submarine a boomer north the

flotilla south however we've been ticking off who gains and who loses professor you

mentioned Bogota.

This is Gustavo Petro who sees himself

as a young revolutionary now as senior executive.

How does Columbia gain or lose

from the call of the Russian flotilla and is Petro pleased with this conduct?

Well, it's ironic, John.

Certainly Columbia loses and continues to lose from what has been going on in neighboring Venezuela.

And just to outline a number of different things, you know, number one, for a year since the late 1990s, the major criminal

terrorist groups that prejudiced the security in Colombia, the FARC and

the National Liberation Army, the ELN, as well as others, operated within

Venezuelan space with relative impunity.

Indeed, for the E.L.N, a lot of the illegal mining that occurred in the Orinoco belt

actually allowed the E.L. L.A. L. F.

and other activities in Colombia. So that's long been a problem.

And of course, Colombia has been the country that has been most prejudiced by the almost 8 million

Venezuelans who have been forced to leave Venezuela because the Maduro regime and before Chavez destroyed the economy with corruption and violence and other problems.

So of those Venezuelans, an estimated 2.8 million of those Venezuelans are in Colombia.

So again, you can imagine it's not only the strain on the social system, especially in

the eastern part of Colombia, the border region, places like Kukata.

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