Bernie Moreno says he fled socialism in Colombia for the US in 1971. What does history say?
The Republican challenger to Democrat Sherrod Brown for US Senate in Ohio has made dubious claims in his campaign
Martin Pengelly in Washington
Thu 28 Mar 2024 13.00 CET
Bernie Moreno, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio who expected to mount a stern challenge to Sherrod Brown, the incumbent leftwing Democrat, says his family fled socialism when they came to the US from Colombia in 1971, when he was four years old.
Though such statements formed a central part of Moreno’s campaign message on his way to securing the Republican nomination with support from Donald Trump, they do not withstand historical scrutiny.
In an interview in 2020, about his success as a car dealer in Ohio, Moreno described himself as “somebody who moved to this country a long time ago to escape what happens in most South American countries, which is socialism and the absolute prison of those ideas”.
In 2021, as Moreno moved into national politics with a first run for a Senate nomination, the Cleveland Plain Dealer said he “says he came to the United States as a child with his mother and siblings to flee socialism in their native Colombia. He believes that same ideology is rising in the United States, and he wants to fight back.”
But when Moreno was born, on 14 February 1967, Colombia was nine years into the 16-year period of National Front government, in which conservative and liberal parties alternated being in power as a way to avoid violence between the two factions.
Furthermore, the first leftwing Colombian government in modern times is the current one, headed by Gustavo Petro and in power since 2022.
Colombia has long been home to leftwing guerrilla groups. As described by the US Congressional Research Service, when Moreno lived there, the country was home to “leftist, Marxist-inspired insurgencies … including the Farc, launched in 1964, and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), which formed the following year”.
Such groups, the CRS says, “conducted kidnappings, committed serious human rights violations, and carried out a campaign of terror that aimed to unseat the central government in Bogotá”.
Moreno, however, has described an early childhood far removed from such worries.
By his own description, his father was secretary of health under Misael Pastrana, a conservative and the last National Front president between 1970 and 1974.
“We had a very, very, very, very incredible lifestyle in Colombia,” Moreno said in 2019, at a business event in Cleveland, adding that his mother moved the family to the US – initially against his father’s wishes – bec
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