On 19 June, to the acclaim of progressive governments in Latin America, Gustavo Petro won in the second round of Colombia’s presidential election with 50.44 % of the vote. He beat the millionaire right-wing front man Rodolfo Hernández, who now faces a corruption trial on 21 July. Hernández received 47.31%. Running for the ‘Historic Pact’ coalition, Petro will be the first left-wing president of Colombia, and the vice president Francia Marquez Mina is the first Afro-Colombian, and second woman in this role. Petro describes himself as a democratic socialist. Of the 58% of the 39 million electorate who voted, the largest turnout in history, the Historic Pact leaders received 11.3 million votes and won by some 700,000. Once in office on 7 August, an immense challenge faces Petro as he sets out to fulfil his election promises. Alvaro Michaels reports.
Petro has promised to implement fully the 2016 peace deal with the communist guerrilla group, FARC, and to seek negotiations with the ELN guerrillas who still oppose the ruling class with arms. This contrasts with the outgoing president Ivan Duque, who allowed only the minimum application of that agreement, and only because the UN, as ‘guarantor’, pressed him to do so. Duque broke off negotiations with the ELN, the remaining large guerrilla group.
Petro has promised to rethink Colombia’s relationship with the US, including the current collaboration against the cocaine trade. He will recognise the government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela instead of the isolated pretender Juan Guaidó ‘recognised’ by Duque and the US. Petro has already announced negotiations with Venezuela to re-open the shared border with Colombia. Trade policies, too, are up for a new approach. Petro intends to press the US on its reluctant climate change policies, specifically on the destruction of the Amazon forests.
Petro calls the current economic system ‘the depletion model,’ of which ‘the end result is a brutal poverty.’ Lack of opportunity and rising violence have prompted record numbers of Colombians to migrate to the US in recent months. He wants to reduce the Colombian system’s reliance on oil exports, calling for a halt to all new oil exploration, the development of other industries, and an expansion of social programmes, while imposing higher taxes on the rich. The intention is to raise state educational spending and develop a universal health care system. Notably, Petro has called on the Attorney General to free all of the youth detained in last year’s massive national strike against the detested Duque government.
US imperialism
These promises are in direct conflict with US imperialist priorities. Furthermore, Colombia’s congressional procedures, the presence of more than a dozen parties to deal with in Congress, the heightened political polarisation in the country, and the economic and social crisis, present Petro with huge challenges. In an effort to counter criticisms, he speaks of ‘developing capitalism’ and overcoming ‘premodernity and feudalism’. Here is the problem. The economy in Colombia is enmeshed with US imperialism, and its ‘premodernity and feudalism’ is the recurring product of the predatory and uneven nature of capitalist development. It is capitalist accumulation that is now holding back the changes that are essential to meet the needs of all the people, not capitalism’s ‘lack of development’.
The Colombian ruling class has up until the last moment continued its murderous campaign against those FARC members that continue the armed defence of the rural poor from large landowners and drug gangs. Rather than fulfil the contracts of the 2016 Peace Agreement, as Petro intends, Duque preferred to sow more death. Leider Johany Noscue (Mayimbu), who refused to lay down arms in 2016 in the face of the obvious deceits of the ruling class, was killed by the Colombian army on 12 June in Cauca province. Duque targeted for assassination all the leaders of the militarily active FARC groups across the country, whilst ignoring the daily murders of social leaders and demobilised ex-FARC members, who all live in fear of their lives. Ahead of the first electoral round last month, death threats against several Congressional candidates were followed by the murder of an electoral witness in the department of Cauca (in Guapi), which will now be investigated.
In hypocritically welcoming the new presidency, after hurriedly co-opting Colombia as a major extra-NATO ally in March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken aims further to integrate the Colombian ruling class into the US imperialist system saying, ‘We look forward to working with President-Elect Petro to further strengthen the US-Colombia relationship…’.
Racism and sexism
The new President is mixed race. The new Afro-Colombian Vice President Francia Marquez was pregnant at 16, forced to work in a nearby gold mine to support her family, then hired as a maid. She led campaigns against illegal gold mining with its poisonous mercury use along the Ovejas river, and for 20 years defended the land and rights of the Afro-Colombian Community there. Colombia has the second-largest population of African descent in Latin America, 9.34% (4.7m), but some estimates refer to 25%. Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities continue to face persistent structural discrimination resulting in the worst levels of poverty and social exclusion, violence and land expropriation. Compared to 30% of the Colombian population as a whole, nearly 80% of Afro-Colombians live in poverty, and more than 30% have no water or sanitation services. Their infant mortality rate is more than three times the national average. In the mineral rich Choco province, 84% of the people are Afro-Colombians, and here death squads and displacement are systemic, as large corporations have moved in. Francia Marquez has determinedly raised the challenges of racism and sexism in Colombian society, raising great expectations among all militants. Last year there were some 500 femicides in Colombia, the result of poverty, insecurity, desperation and a machismo that is promoted and stimulated by the country’s capitalist institutions.
In February the fight back campaigns of the ‘Green Wave’ in Colombia finally led to the decriminalisation of abortion during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, all part of the wider social campaigns that led to the 19 June ‘Historic Pact’ victory. The significance of this change, after the similar victories in Mexico and Argentina, cannot be underestimated. They stand in complete opposition to the reactionary closing down of these rights in the US imperialist heartland itself, and are a decisive blow against the institutionalised religious bigotry fomented by the Colombian propertied classes.
