In Latin America, John Kelly trained for a job serving Trump
In Latin America, John Kelly trained for a job serving Trump
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From left: Gen. Juan Pablo Rodriguez, the top officer in Colombia’s armed forces, and Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón were two of the Colombian officials who worked with Gen. John F. Kelly when he led U.S. Southern Command. Pinzón said the job turned Kelly “from a warrior into a statesman.” (Guillermo Legaria/AFP/Getty Images)
A few weeks after John F. Kelly was placed in charge of U.S. military affairs in Central and South America in late 2012, he went to Colombia to meet the country’s defense minister, Juan Carlos Pinzón. Pinzón, a young, Princeton-educated economist, brought Kelly to visit soldiers maimed by the land mines of leftist guerrillas. Kelly’s son, Marine 1st Lt. Robert M. Kelly, had been killed after stepping on a mine in Afghanistan two years earlier, and to friends and colleagues, the tall, jaunty Marine general seemed to have turned gaunt, as if withered by grief. Kelly embraced the legless and disabled Colombian troops one by one. “It was an emotional moment,” Pinzón said. “He immediately identified with my soldiers. And after that we became very close friends.”
From that day until Kelly’s retirement from military service in 2016, he spent more than three years working in Latin America as head of U.S. Southern Command (Southcom). The period was a bridge in Kelly’s late-career transformation from four-star general to field marshal of the Trump White House, where as chief of staff he spends long hours battling the agents of executive disorder.
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Many in Washington were surprised to see Kelly emerge as an outspoken, combative member of President Trump’s team. He had been widely depicted as less ideological than others in the president’s orbit and as someone stirred to White House service by patriotic duty, not politics.
Those who worked alongside him in Latin America knew his worldview aligned more closely with Trump’s than many may have realized. As Southcom’s commander, Kelly oversaw the Guantanamo naval base and its notorious prison, and not always in the way the Obama administration wanted him to. He took on illegal immigration, drug cartels and the political and military complexities of a peace deal in close ally Colombia that ended a 52-year war with Marxist rebels.
The job, said Pinzón, “turned him from a warrior into a statesman.” In a role that put him at the intersection of U.S. diplomacy, national security and Washington politics, Kelly also revealed conservative views and a reputation for troublemaking — qualities that would make him a prime recruit for Trump as he assembled his Cabinet.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-john-kellys-final-military-tour-hardened-his-views-on-border-security/2018/01/06/8ac11db0-de9b-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html?utm_term=.de4201d83798
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