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Friday November 2022, through Patrick Guillaudat
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The presidential election in Colombia on June 19, 2022, in which leftist candidate Gustavo Petro and his running mate Francia Márquez emerged victorious with 50. 44% of the vote, marks a turning point in the country’s primaries, also for Latin America.
Colombia is considered to be a U. S. forward base. The U. S. military is in place because of its strategic position, wedged between Central and South America, with the presence of the U. S. military. It allows for surveillance of the Caribbean Sea while keeping an eye on the rest of Latin America. Wing parties have ensured that the Colombian political left and social movements remain out of political power. Therefore, the victory of the Petro/Márquez price ticket constitutes a break with the new history of the country.
One can easily believe that since Colombia has been governed by the right, its other peoples would have been left out of the convulsions of the Latin American world. The right has been in place frequently and the country has not been affected by the “progressive wave” of the early 2000s. But then, how can we perceive that two of the toughest guerrilla movements on the continent, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (National Liberation Army) are in this country?
The explanation goes back to 1948, the date of the assassination of the liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, when the ultraconservative bourgeoisie unleashed a wave of mass shootings against the opposition, and everything that directly or indirectly involved social organizations. Colombian history, Violencia, lasted until the 1960s and caused between 100,000 and 300,000 deaths. It was in those years that the Colombian left made the survival selection and opted for armed struggle. The FARC was formed from the Colombian Communist Party while the ELN was created around supporters of the Cuban revolution, especially the Guevarists, and Christians committed to liberation theology, disciples of Camilo Torres. Even the nationalist left was forced to go underground, totally or partially. This was the case, for example, of the M-19 (April 19 Movement), which laid down its arms in 1990 and where Gustavo Petro came from.
An attempt to return to legal political life was attempted through the FARC beginning in 1984 with the creation of the Popular Union. But its militants were persecuted. A report by the National Center for Historical Memory indexed 4,153 activists killed between 1984 and 2002. [1] It is not surprising that the armed organizations managed to survive, without the population seeing a democratic and legal solution to their demands, without social demands under fierce repression.
It is as a result of this internal war that a specific form of state has evolved in Colombia, with armed forces basically dedicated to the fight against the “internal enemy” and the creation of paramilitary groups, used through the government for “unofficial” tasks, maximum in alliance with drug trafficking groups. [2]
Despite this deleterious situation, the United States has relied on the Colombian government to expand a strong military presence under the pretext of the “war on drugs,” reinforced with the signing in 1999 of Plan Colombia, which went into effect in 2001. Behind it, the announced objective of lifting the country and fighting social inequalities and drug trafficking manifested itself for an absolutely different reason: to disarm the guerrilla organizations, first and foremost the FARC, and keep Colombia under US domination. [3] Since then, governments have succeeded each other with systems limited to more or less monotony in their commitment to fight “terrorism”, the palm of cynicism for President Álvaro Uribe, former mayor of Medellín, in detail related to drugs. . Traite, elected in 2002 to eliminate guerrilla warfare. During his two terms, he promoted the progression of paramilitary teams that multiplied abuses, especially in the countryside, punctuated with abstract shootings, destruction of crops through chemical fumigations and population evictions.
But this war against the FARC is a failure: guerrilla warfare continues to exist and the rest of Colombians have a shameless hard time opening peace talks. This is one of the explanations for the triumph in 2010 of Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, architect of the peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and the FARC in 2016. The “uribista” right tried to sabotage this agreement and kidnap it to disarm the FARC preserving to the maximum the armed teams of the right sowing terror in the countryside. This scenario was used to carry out a crusade to denounce the peace agreement, all the more effective since peace seemed out of reach[4].
Since then, Iván Duque, ultraconservative candidate for the presidency in 2018 and Uribe’s candidate, has continuously assumed this demand, widely disseminated through the Colombian media. As soon as he was elected, he resumed the repressive policy of his mentor, and in 2021 foreign organizations pointed out that only 30% of the provisions of this agreement were implemented.
To perceive this triptych signature/denunciation/reactivation of the peace agreement, we will have to go back to the profound adjustments in the Colombian economy. As in the rest of the continent, neoliberal reforms have been implemented in Colombia, and in the last decade of the twentieth century labor reforms, tax exemptions and the withdrawal of the State from social spending began. In addition to copying and pasting neoliberal recipes, the Colombian state has to transfer a giant component of its social policies to local or regional administrative entities. , reinforcing the prevailing clientelism.
But behind those reforms, there is also a profound renewal in Colombian capitalism. The main vector of expansion and export is no longer agriculture (especially coffee), but the mining sector, which has become dominant and attracts foreign investors. Colombia has entered the cycle of a rentier economy subject to the global market. However, mining requires prospecting and, above all, the securing of extraction sites, hampered by the presence of armed teams in a large part of the territory. There were two other answers to secure this number one progression model. The first was to fight a fight to the death with these teams, a factor of precedence in Plan Colombia. It is this strategy that was selected by the Colombian bourgeoisie in supporting the candidacy of Álvaro Uribe for the presidential elections of 2002. The momentary solution arose after the failure of this method: to negotiate a peace agreement that would open the door to slack in long-term exploitation spaces. This was implemented through the new president Santos, elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014, a strategy denounced by his successor Lván Duque, elected in 2018.
The effects of this transitory extractivism have become a reason for mobilizations of the indigenous peoples who demanded to remain in their ancestral territories and denounced the social, environmental and suitability consequences of this new productive model. In this way, connections began to emerge between these rural movements and those of urban youth, sensitive to the struggles for the defense of the environment, and the union movement of the industry that fought against the greater flexibility of paints and the social damage caused by the neoliberalism. There were student movements in 2011 and 2018 in particular, but the wonderful mobilization of April/May 2019 was a global struggle against Yvan Duque’s anti-social measures, in particular against his tax reform, but also against privatization. of budgetary pension and the reform of the new hard work code. This popular revolt is intended to unify all social sectors opposed to government policy. It was followed by that of 2021, which took the form of a general strike followed massively, in continuity with that of 2019. Although the government deserted its new tax reform order after a few days of demonstrations and mobilizations that paralyzed the country, the The mobilization continued because the protesters also demanded an end to social inequalities and corruption and received the abandonment of the neoliberal remodeling of the fitness system. [5] The fiscal remodeling is all the more questionable since it consists of generalizing the source of income tax while cutting corporate tax and increasing the VAT rate on essential items (water, electricity, etc. ) and on various food products. By refusing to raise taxes on the richest and extinguish taxes on the poorest, the government of Yvan Duque has tried to ensure that the debts accumulated with the Covid-19 pandemic are paid through the poor and middle classes, while the poverty rate has increased by a third between 2020 and 2021.
Quickly this conjunction of de facto social struggles pointed the finger at an unusual adversary: neoliberal policies. By breaking into the political field, these social movements provoked the reorganization of the political left, which was carried out through successive trials and errors. creation of the Alternative Democratic Pole, a coalition of left-wing forces that first ran in the 2006 presidential election. But above all, there the creation of the historic Pact in 2021, a coalition of seven organizations that led to Petro victory.
The Historical Pact, by bringing together the national and local organizers of these struggles and presenting their candidacies in the legislative elections of 2022, has hegemonically controlled within the social sectors in struggle. Through this intertwining, the Historical Pact represents a successful fusion between the social movements that have largely mobilized in 2019 and 2021 with left-wing activists and political currents.
Despite the opposition of the bourgeoisie and the unleashing of the media opposed to social mobilizations and left-wing candidacies in the 2022 elections, the Petro/Márquez price ticket wins the presidential elections despite the demonization by the right of Francia Márquez in particular. [6] The historic Pact achieved this feat by articulating the strong popular aspiration for peace and the promise to revive the 2016 agreement with a catalogue of anti-neoliberal measures. The strategy of starting from the aspirations expressed through mobilizations “from below” to build a new political tool conceived as a way out of the demands of social struggles has borne fruit.
This first victory of the left in the history of Colombia accentuated the crisis of the right, a right shaken by the mobilizations of 2019 and 2021, divided by the question of the peace agreement, and which carried out a hysterical media crusade against the candidacy of Petro. So much so that it was outsider Rodolfo Hernández who prevailed on the right in the first round, beating the classic matches. [7] But after Petro’s victory, the bourgeoisie understood that it was mandatory to avoid falling into a Brazilian-style scenario with a Bolsonaro who controlled to antagonize the highest Brazilian bosses. For this reason, the Consejo Gremiai Nacional (CGN), the main Colombian employers’ organization, invited Petro on June 19 to “integrate a not unusual program that aims at the unity of our country and the social and economic progress of Colombia,” this way taking the position of the political right, defeated, divided and in full reconstruction. [8] In response, on August 23, 2022, President Petro invited the GNC to discuss the tax reform bill, which is expected to raise $11 billion and finance social spending. He also called on the GNC to reach an agreement with the unions on hard labor reform in 2023.
The country’s economic scenario is doubtful: the OECD forecasts GDP expansion of more than 6%, and inequality will continue to widen with an unemployment rate above 13% and a formal employment rate slightly above 50%. Uncertainties about the long term led employers to temporarily request Petro pledges. This requires a reactivation of the peace agreements, thus paving the way for the exploitation of the subsoil in spaces hitherto outside the control of the State. To achieve this, Petro has accelerated the procedure and is seeking to generalize it to all armed groups. He has proposed his extension to come with the ELN and has already called for negotiations with the drug cartels, promising appropriate sanctions and the denial of any extradition to the United States. in exchange for the cessation of violence. [9] One of the objectives is also to reactivate the agrarian reform project, whose component is foreseen in the peace agreement and has not yet been implemented.
Without a majority in Parliament, to achieve its goals, the Petro government has a right-wing component, in particular the one that supported Santos. Petro has appointed members of the right-wing opposition components and even former ministers from previous governments to key positions in his government, thus affirming his willingness to associate with an anti-Uribe right. [10] From a more global point of view, this action is based on his conviction of a vision of Colombia not as a dependent capitalist society but as a feudal society. For him, before reaching an egalitarian society, it is first necessary to create a capitalist Colombia with an evolved national bourgeoisie. It is not certain that this old choir will resist the popular demands that allowed it to gain access to power. [11] As for the United States, the foreign policy of the country is mainly oriented towards Asia due to the clash with China, it is not certain that Biden will be happy with the new neutrality shown through the president. Petro, especially since the new Colombian president needs to review the lax industrial agreement that binds him to the United States and has made the decision to resume diplomatic relations with Venezuela.
Petro’s Colombia is part of a long series in Latin America where in many countries, the emergence of new leftist components is driven by the waves of social struggles that preceded those electoral victories. Initiated in 1998 with the election of Hugo Chávez, it turns out to end with the retreat of the right in Ecuador, the coup d’état against Morales in Bolivia, the victory of Bolsonaro in Brazil or the defeat of the Frente Amplio in Uruguay.
However, very recently, the victories of Boric in Chile, Castillo in Peru and Petro in Colombia have shown that we are still in the same sequence. . . but with strong nuances. The anti-imperialist discourse of the first wave has largely faded and those 3 new presidents are much more likely to expand their majority into a right-wing component. These 3 newly elected representatives are entangled in their selection to respect the institutions, while Chávez, Correa or Morales had made the political selection, to replenish the situation, to convene without delay a constituent assembly based directly on the social mobilizations that followed their victories. Advance his merit depending on the euphoria caused by his victory with the people.
From the point of view of political power, the hopes of social transformation of other Colombians are now suspended in the legislation that will or will not be fulfilled through the governing coalition. It is not certain that the right-wing faction that supports the government and the bosses will move in the same direction as the population that fought massively in 2019 and 2021. Given the scale of the mobilizations beyond, it is also not certain that other Colombians will be happy with this intermission for long.
Translated through Mirada Internacional del Anticapitalista.
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[1] Its figure is higher in 2022 to 5,733, adding the years after 2002.
[2] Former President Uribe is one of the most illustrious representatives of the rise to the strength of political elegance allied to these formations.
[3] However, a 2001 report ready for the Colombian government indicates that while armed struggle organizations were guilty of 2. 5% of drug trafficking, paramilitary organizations accounted for 40%. However, they were completely saved. To combat the guerrillas, as a component of the counterinsurgency struggle, campaigns were organized to spread chemicals, adding glyphosate, either in coca crops and other crops, in order to cut off the resources of origin to the guerrilla groups, even if this resulted in an explosion of diseases, especially among children.
[4] See, for example, the case of “false positives”, peasants executed by the army or paramilitaries, as killed by the guerrillas.
[5] Colombia is, according to the World Bank, the country with the highest inequality at the moment in Latin America and the 7th in the world.
[6] From a very young age she campaigned against mining in her region and threatened with death, forced her to take refuge in Cali. Her commitment to human rights, women’s rights and defending rural communities has wreaked havoc on the right. A survivor of an attack in 2019, she is the first Afro-Colombian elected to the position of vice president.
[7] Note that this candidate was supported through Ingrid Betancourt and her party, the Partido Verde Oxïgeno.
[8] A Gallup vote showed that Petro had 62% favorable reviews from businessmen in mid-July.
[9] These extraditions to the United States have been facilitated since the signing of Plan Colombia and subsequent agreements.
[10] In addition to the coalition that built it, it received votes from the Green Alliance Party, the Liberal Party, Citizens’ Force, the Independent Social Alliance, the Commons, the People’s Union Party and the Conservative Party that allowed it to win a majority in Parliament. It should be noted that the Popular Union Party was a component of the coalition built by Uribe in 2006 and Duque in 2018.
[11] In an interview with El País on September 19, 2019, she stated that “my government program is the Constitution, and my reforms would be described as left-wing in Europe. The yearnings of Colombian society are to build socialism, but to build democracy and peace, period.
Patrick Guillaudat holds a PhD in Anthropology, trade unionist of industry and (with Pierre Mouterde) of “Hugo Chavez and the Bolivariarian Revolution – Promises and Challenges of a Process of Social Change”, Publisher M, Montreal, 2012. He completed an extended stay in Venezuela in 2016.
“There is a widespread sense of urgency. In this sacred hour, the militant vanguard, which continues to be despite the times.
“The announcement of the mobilization seems a desperate step and one for a regime that had opted for the depoliticization of the masses. “
“The truth of the attack on the living criteria of running elegance passes through pomp and circumstance. “
“We will stand in solidarity with our Ukrainian comrades and our Russian comrades to contribute to the defeat of the Russian invasion in every and every conceivable way and help rebuild an independent and democratic Ukraine. “
Petition proposed through the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine.
International Viewpoint is published under the duty of the Office of the Fourth International. Signed articles necessarily reflect editorial policy. Items can be reprinted with an acknowledgment of receipt and a direct link if possible.