Victory for Colombia’s Left, but the Fight is Just Beginning

by Zack Frailey Escobar · Published June 30, 2022 · Updated July 19, 2022

In a historic outcome, Gustavo Petro, a self-declared socialist and former guerrilla, has been elected president of Colombia. After decades of bloody repression against the left, Petro is considered to be Colombia’s “first leftist president.” While the mainstream press is rushing to stoke fears of Petro as a threat to democracy in Colombia, some on the Left are eager to hail the victory as a model for an electoral path to power for “left populism” and a vindication of the politics of “pink tide” social democracy. The reality is that Petro’s win was the culmination of struggles Afro-Latino, indigenous, women, and workers’ struggles which will only face new obstacles under a Petro administration.

A Bloody Past, a Fragile Peace

Violence has always been a part of political life in Colombia. As early as 1948, the assassination of charismatic Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán set off a period of partisan political violence between ruling Liberals and the Conservatives known as la violencia which killed more than 200,000 people, mostly non-combatants. Despite the official end of the conflict in 1953, the underlying causes were never addressed. Indigenous people, Afro-Latinos, and poor peasants continued to be excluded from the political process in the new system of power sharing between the two parties.

By 1964, poor peasants who had been subjected to years of violent anti-communist repression formed themselves into the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (National Liberation Army). This resulted in the longest-running civil war in modern history. The conflict has claimed more than 450,000 lives, mostly civilians, and displaced around 5 million people with atrocities committed on all sides—albeit mostly by the state and its far-right paramilitary auxiliaries.

The civil war was officially ended by a peace agreement signed between the FARC and the government in 2016, which granted a general amnesty and allowed the now-demobilized FARC to run for office and participate in government. But the right-wing government of sitting president Ivan Duque failed to hold up its end of the agreement. Since the accords were implemented, more than 1,000 activists from the labor, indigenous, peasant, and women’s movements have been murdered by government-aligned paramilitaries. This has led to renewed violence between the government and dissident FARC militants who have refused to lay down their arms, which could spiral out of control if there is not a radical change.

A Historic Election

Extreme inequality, combined with violent state repression, corruption, and mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic have led to a total disillusionment with the Colombian establishment. This disillusionment is clearly reflected in the results of the first round of the election. Federico Gutiérrez was the clear favorite of the political class receiving endorsements from all of the traditional parties in Colombia (the Democratic Center, the Party of the U, Radical Change, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party). In spite of this support—or rather, because of his identification with the status quo—Gutierrez finished third in the first round, setting up a runoff between Petro, the great bogeyman of the Colombian elite, and Rodolfo Hernandez, the wealthy and erratic right-wing populist.

The collapse of support for the traditional center-right parties opened the door for Rodolfo Hernández, an erratic right-wing populist, to make the runoff. Hernandez has gained notoriety for slapping a counselor during his time as mayor and for his offensive comments, including that he is “a follower of the great German thinker, Adolf Hitler,” (he later claimed that he meant to say Albert Einstein). He brands himself as a centrist, but has campaigned on reactionary “law and order” rhetoric, and characterized Venezuelan women as “baby factories” who leech off the state. His main campaign promises revolve around anti-corruption, but he is himself the subject of a corruption investigation relating to a consultancy contract his son received while he was mayor of Bucaramanga.

His left-wing opponent, Gustavo Petro, has a more credible claim to outsider status. At 17, Petro joined the 19th of April Movement (better known as M-19), a leftist guerrilla group formed in opposition to the far-right National Front coalition government that came to power as the result of a fraudulent election in 1970. During his time as a militant, Petro never saw combat but was subjected to prison and torture by the Colombian government.

In 1990, Petro used his influence within M-19 to promote peace talks with the government, which brought about the eventual dismantling of M-19 and amnesty for its members. After M-19 disbanded, Petro became a politician, serving as mayor of the capital city of Bogotá and as a senator.

Petro has continued to fight against the repressive Colombian state as a politician. In parliament, he helped to expose the “Parapolitics” scandal, showing that the government had colluded with both paramilitary groups and narco-traffickers in order to suppress political opposition. As mayor of Bogotá, he overcame attempts by the federal government to remove him from office by court order.

In spite of his background as a revolutionary and his progressive credentials, the former militant has moved steadily to the right in an effort to win over the more liberal sections of the ruling and middle classes. He has moderated his rhetoric and been explicit in signaling his intention to work within the beltway of established political norms and not pursue radical policy changes. Petro plans to raise taxes on unused land held by large owners to encourage them to sell to the state, but his plan stops short of redistributing land to the poor and oppressed peasant farmers—the only real solution to the cycle of poverty and violence in the countryside. He claims that he can work with Joe Biden and the United States, and has promised to form a governing pact with all the major political parties in Colombia.

Despite his overtures to the “respectable” classes, Petro has in no way been accepted by the Colombian elite or by the press. While the press was eager to present Rodolfo Hernández as a “maverick” who could undercut Petro’s anti-establishment message, the Colombian ruling class had a clear preference between the two. Their chosen candidate, Federico Gutiérrez, immediately endorsed Hernández after the first round and called on his voters to “keep Petro out.” Their media machine worked to demonize Petro at every turn as an aspiring dictator in bed with the cartels, the Venezuelans, the Cubans, the FARC, and any other bogey man they could come up with.

Fortunately, their deal with the devil failed. Petro’s radical background won him the support of the poor Colombian masses, and his support among Colombia’s feminists and Afro-Latino communities was cemented by his choice of Francia Marquez as his running mate, who will be Colombia’s first Afro-Latina vice president. In the end, Petro was victorious with more than 50% of the vote.

The Struggle Continues

Both the Colombian and U.S. elite are terrified of Petro and the movement he represents. For decades, Colombia has been the main bulwark of reaction and U.S. imperial interests in Latin America. While a pink tide of left-wing, social democratic governments swept through Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, Colombia remained reliably right-wing and retained a “special relationship” with the United States. To elites in both countries, it appeared that this would be the case indefinitely. With an incoming Petro government, it seems to them that hell has frozen over.

But this moment did not come about as the result of an electoral campaign. The end of the armed conflict, and the extreme unpopularity of the incumbent Duque government opened a new political space for the left and the social movements. The period of 2020-2021 saw hundreds of thousands of Colombians mobilize against regressive taxation, budget cuts and austerity, and state repression. The protests, strikes, and blockades stopped the passage of the reactionary Sustainable Solidarity Law and forced the government onto the back foot. It was this successful mass mobilization which showed that the grip of the Right on Colombian politics is not invincible, and that the working class and peasant masses will have their say.

The radical social movements which preceded Petro’s victory cannot stop after the election, nor can they allow themselves to become a mere appendage of the new government. The Petro government will face even steeper obstacles than previous pink tide governments did. The Petro government will face a parliament which still contains a conservative majority. Even more importantly, the rightwing paramilitary apparatus remains intact; and the state bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the military remain firmly captured by the rightwing and conservative elite, ensuring the likelihood of political violence and sabotage against the Petro administration.

The radical social movements which preceded Petro’s victory cannot stop after the election, nor can they allow themselves to become a mere appendage of the new government.

Perhaps worse than this is the economic outlook. Whereas the pink tide governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, were able to use an economic boom driven by high commodity prices to finance an expansive welfare state without fundamentally disturbing capitalist property relations, the likelihood of a global recession (and Petro’s promises to wean Colombia’s economy off of oil production) will make this approach almost impossible.

A hostile deep state, a belligerent superpower to the North, and a difficult economic situation will force Petro to make a choice: go back on his promises of reform, or escalate the conflict with Colombia’s elite. This is a dilemma which faces all countries in Latin America and the global South attempting to break free from the domination of U.S.-led capitalism.

In Venezuela, the Bolivarian revolution has entered into a deep crisis as a lack of economic growth has stalled the government’s redistributive policies, while the US state has persisted in its efforts to foment an internal overthrow of the Maduro government. In 2009, this approach was successful through military coup in Honduras, ushering in over a decade of far-right, state terrorist regime.

Chile in the early 1970s faced a similar tipping point, which led to a rightwing coup backed by the United States and a period of savage repression of the Left which only truly ended with the successful protest movements of the past several years and the inauguration of a new democratic constitution this year. Left wing governments in Bolivia and Brazil have been deposed through military and judicial coups, in the last few years. Of all the Latin American countries to face this question, Cuba has gone the farthest towards economic autonomy, and as a result has been monstrously punished by the United States embargo for over five decades.

There can be no successful solution to this dilemma at the national level, and certainly not within the bounds of Colombia’s state as it is currently constituted. The hope for Latin America lies in the transnational movements of indigenous and Black people, workers, peasants, women, and queer and trans people which have expanded enormously across the region. The task of revolutionaries in every country is to connect these movements with one another and orient them toward the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, the only possible solution to the suffering of the people in Colombia, Latin America, and the rest of the global South.

Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.