MIAMI — Two candidates fighting for votes in South Florida’s most competitive congressional race are trying to appeal to voters by turning to a surprising source: former Colombian President Ivan Duque.
Annette Taddeo, a Colombian American and Democratic state senator vying to replace Republican U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, published two videos last week highlighting the former conservative leader’s supportive comments about her during a brief visit to South Florida this summer.
In one of the videos, Duque called her “a force” in the Colombian-American community.
“When I see you guys, you know what happens to me? That I always feel so proud of how Colombian Americans have done so much in U.S. politics,” Duque tells a crowd of Colombian-American leaders in one of the videos, filmed during an event on July 13. “And I know we’re going to get pretty soon to Capitol Hill, and one day we’re going to have a Colombian American at the White House, for sure.”
A day later, Salazar, who is Cuban American, tweeted out a photo of the incumbent shaking Duque’s hand with the caption: “Thank you, President Duque, for your support!”
A spokesperson for Duque told The Miami Herald that Duque was not endorsing either candidate, as Taddeo and Salazar separately suggested, stressing that he “does not get involved in (U.S.) domestic politics.”
But the candidates’ efforts to imply that he has — and their crossfire accusations of sympathizing with socialists at home or abroad — illustrate the outsize role Latin American exile politics continue to play in South Florida elections, including for Colombian Americans, a burgeoning bloc of voters in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
And in the competitive race for Florida’s 27th Congressional District, a Miami-Dade region with more Latinos than any other congressional district in the state, every vote could count.
Colombian Americans are one of the fastest-growing electorates in Florida and a larger share of Colombians in Florida are U.S. citizens when compared to other Latin American immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the American Community Surveys published in 2020. Although they make up a small portion of the overall Latino electorate in the state, about 248,000 Colombian Americans in the state — many of them living in South Florida — are eligible to vote.
Still, Colombian voters are far from monolithic in their views on U.S. politics and many are swayed by fears about encroaching leftist politics in the region. While Colombia’s first leftist president, Gustavo Petro, won his election in June with slightly more than 50% of the vote, Colombians in Florida voted overwhelmingly for his opponent.
When the former M-19 guerrilla member won his election, Taddeo said she respected the results but hoped Petro would “not impede on freedom of the press (or) property rights” and would uphold Colombia’s constitution. Salazar, meanwhile, has called Petro a “thief, a socialist, a Marxist, a terrorist.”
That’s where Taddeo’s video of Duque, a conservative Colombian politician, comes in. Her own story about being forced to flee Colombia after members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla group often referred to as FARC, kidnapped her father has been a major focus of her campaign. And when the Biden administration announced plans to take the FARC off the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, Taddeo criticized the decision.
The Florida Democratic Party also sent out mailers to voters in the district, accusing Salazar of voting “like a socialist” in Congress, including against the Inflation Reduction Act, which in part aimed to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and for supporting restrictions on access to abortion.
The mailers were a reversal of a standard campaign tactic in South Florida, in which Republicans accuse Democrats like Taddeo of being socialists or leftist sympathizers.
One pro-Salazar political committee, Latino Vote for America, published an attack ad on Instagram against Taddeo alluding to Colombian politics. With ominous music playing in the background, the digital ad claimed she has “never denounced socialists in her party” and refuses to call “Marxist President Gustavo Petro what he is.”
More recently, Republicans resurfaced a photo of Taddeo speaking at a meeting in 2018 at the Second Baptist Church in Richmond Heights about Medicare for All, a proposal for universal health care. The photo captured Taddeo speaking in front of a group sitting at a table with the flag of the Democratic Socialists of America draped in front of it. An ad paid for by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC supporting House Republicans, used the photo to depict Taddeo as a supporter of “socialist ideas.”
Last week, Taddeo held a news conference at Second Baptist Church to deny she was a socialist, saying that the meeting was not hosted by Miami’s DSA chapter and that she was invited by the church to speak to the community about health care. Her campaign also said it is running a radio ad on two Spanish-language AM stations until Election Day denying claims she is a socialist and arguing that Salazar is using “lies and cheap demagoguery” to manipulate voters.
“If it was a Democratic socialist event, I wouldn’t have come,” Taddeo said last Friday. “It is insulting to the entire community that she has to resort to these lies.”
