President Gustavo Petro came to power in August 2022 on the promise of introducing a vast swathe of reforms to education, workers’ rights, pensions, land, health and tax. He also said he would reach out to the armed rebel groups who had rejected the ‘Peace Deal’ of 2016. The election of Colombia’s first-ever progressive president, himself a former guerrilla, was a product of the mass mobilisations that took place across the country against the repression and huge inequality that existed under previous right-wing leaders. But even modest reforms have been constantly thwarted by Colombia’s right-wing Congress and now the ruling class is stepping up its attacks on the Petro government with attempts to foment a ‘legal coup’ – as in so many other countries in Latin America – through a vicious series of smears and investigations. Petro has been forced to call on the masses to mobilise in defence of his government and take to the streets. Colombian activist YONATAN MOSQUERA says clear lines of class struggle are being drawn.
Social-democrat Gustavo Petro came to the presidency of Colombia promising a great ‘national agreement’ between bosses and workers, between landowners and peasants, between exploiters and exploited. ‘The business community today should be aware that their businesses only prosper in a fairer social coexistence. This coexistence is the basis of a new social pact’, said Petro. Class collaboration would lead to capitalist development and prosperity for all, to alleviation of the brutal consequences of capitalism, to a ‘win-win’ deal.
But barely eight months into government, and despite his sincere efforts, the reality of irreconcilable class antagonism has forced Petro to admit that ‘the invitation to a social pact for change has been rejected’. Since then, a lot has happened, including the dismissal of the Colombian ambassador to Venezuela and the chief of staff; the change in tone in Petro’s speeches, the media onslaught of fake news and the intensification of judicial persecution led by Attorney General Francisco Barbosa, de facto leader of the opposition, who justifies his campaign of entrapment and espionage in the interests of ‘separation of powers’.
The role of the press and the prosecution
While Barbosa arbitrarily raids government offices, encourages judicial setups, publicly disavows the president, and publicly invites the armed forces to sedition; the traditional media are redoubling their ferocious onslaught against the government. Some media, such as Revista Semana, have taken off their gloves and abandoned any claim to objectivity. This ferocious and brazen campaign of slander and misinformation has revealed once again that the media are nothing more than paid spokesmen for bankers, landowners, and local capitalists; microphone and keyboard mercenaries at the service of the powerful.
But while the Petro government is the direct recipient of intensified smears from the mainstream media, the truth is that the target of its attacks is much broader. Who the owners of the press and the country really hate, who they seek to defeat, are the masses of exploited who, over several years of mobilisation, have relatively raised their self-esteem, have gained experience, and now have the insolence to demand better living conditions.
What the ruling class wants is to break our backs, paralyse us, demoralise us, so that we return to our homes and workplaces hopeless, with our heads bowed and resigned to the will of the boss. It is no coincidence that the prosecutor’s office, the same entity that has led a sinister campaign of judicial entrapment against the participants of the 2021 protests, is the same institution that in 2023 is directing the campaign of judicial siege against the Petro government. The state seeks to discipline us, it wants to punish us so that we learn to ‘behave’, that we abandon the idea that a better world is possible, that we lose faith in our own abilities.
Democratic space
During the social outbreak of 2021, many workers who were once slandered as ‘guerrillas’, those who in the neighbourhood or workplace expressed ideas considered ‘left’ or ‘radical’, found themselves participating for the first time in their lives in the social movement and learned firsthand the true role of the mainstream press and the seriousness of the criminalisation of protest. Many of them were turned into victims of Semana and other disinformation media that branded them as ‘terrorists’ and ‘urban guerrillas’ for accompanying the neighbourhood barricades that arose as a spontaneous response to police repression. Repression that ended up killing more than 80 participants, injuring hundreds more and trapping dozens of innocent people who have been in the dungeons of the regime for two years as punishment for having participated in the protests.
Today in the neighbourhoods, schools, factories and squares of Colombia there is more space to share ideas and debate. It is this exchange of ideas, this dialogue between the oppressed, this democratic space, that so scares the landowners, industrialists and bankers who activate their disinformation media, their state power, their legal and illegal armies, their prosecutors, their cultural hegemony and its commercial power to close this space through the demonisation of the social movement, police repression, judicial entrapment and threats of a bosses’ strike.
Bosses’ strike?
To close that democratic space that scares them so much, the bourgeoisie is ready for anything, including commercial sabotage and bosses’ strikes, as Vargas Lleras announced, threatening the working class with massive layoffs: ‘before the reforms are passed, we are going to remove thousands and thousands of people.’ This threat provokes indignation in many who sincerely maintain illusions in the non-existent ‘social pact’, in the imagined ‘national agreement’.
But what else could be expected? The capitalists have not been expropriated, which leaves them with all the power to decide who works or who doesn’t, who eats or who starves, who lives or who dies. So why be outraged or surprised that the employers are going to use their power to achieve their goals? The surprising thing would be if they didn’t.
In response to the political, judicial, commercial and media persecution against his government, Petro makes a public call for peaceful mobilisation, inviting the Colombian masses of the countryside and the city to massively defend the social reforms proposed by the government in order to achieve the promised change in the election campaign. The success of the reforms depends on the degree of popular mobilisation, ‘we will go as far as the people want’, explains Petro.
How should the working class respond to Petro’s call for mass mobilisations?
What is at stake is the ability of the working people to organise and fight for better living conditions, to participate in the country’s political life, to elect and be elected, and to resist the capitalist onslaught that seeks to make us pay for the global crisis of an obsolete system incapable of solving the problems of humanity.
On 7June 2023, one year after the electoral triumph that led Petro to the presidency, thousands of Colombians marched in the cities of the country in response to the call of the Colombian president. The mainstream press alleges that turnout was very low while government sympathisers claim it was massive. Whatever the truth, this will not be the last confrontation, nothing has been defined yet.
Big class battles are on the horizon. It is through those class battles and mobilisations where this episode of the class struggle will be played out. The working people of the world must stand in solidarity with the working and peasant classes in Colombia, we must support this call for popular mobilisation in defence of our class interests.
It is through mass mobilisations that we will find out how much the popular spark can be rekindled after so much water was poured into the popular gunpowder for so long with utopian and demobilising promises of ‘class reconciliation’; with the elevation of hopes in bourgeois electoralism, ‘the revolution is at the polls’, and with the promotion of imaginary alliances between exploiters and exploited. It is through mass mobilisations that we will have the opportunity to continue learning, accumulating experiences, opening democratic space and building a true alliance between the oppressed.
All out now!
Yonatan Mosquera
