On August 7, Gustavo Petro will set a historical milestone in Colombia. The leftist former guerrilla and senator who signed the country’s 2016 peace accords will be inaugurated as president.
His election marks the end of decades of rightwing leadership in the country, including outgoing center-right president Iván Duque. In another first, his vice president, Francia Márquez, will be the first woman of Afro-Colombian descent to hold the office.
“This was a very important election for Colombia,” Soraya Gutierrez, a lawyer and human rights defender with the Bogotá-based Collective Corporation of Lawyers (Corporación Colectiva de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo, or CCAJAR), tells The Progressive. “These elections also show an exhaustion, a weariness, because of what the Duque government left. It begins a historical moment.”
The Petro administration is inheriting a country where inflation and corruption are rife, and where political activists and human rights defenders often face violence. Colombia also has suffered from its own armed forces participating in criminal activities, including drug trafficking, working with paramilitaries, and targeted killings.
Since the signing of the peace accords in 2016, more than 1,300 social leaders, including political activists, Indigenous and civil rights defenders, and community representatives have been killed, according to the Colombian Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz). In 2022 alone, 101 killings have occurred. The majority of killings remain unprosecuted.
“It ruins their day, that not only is Petro arriving to power, but also this person who was [their] public enemy number one.”
President-elect Petro has made implementing Colombia’s peace accords one of his top priorities. His success is especially critical after the Duque administration failed to fully implement the accords. Petro has also sought to expand internal peacekeeping, calling for a bilateral ceasefire with the National Liberation Army, the last major guerrilla group still operating in the country.
“The first 100 days are going to be key for Petro,” Gutierrez says. “On its face, this could be the government of the [peace accords].”
The new administration will also renew diplomatic relations with Venezuela, after years of tension.
In the effort to reform Colombia’s armed forces and police, Petro has already hired prominent anti-corruption lawyer Iván Velásquez as minister of defense. Velásquez gained notoriety after investigating paramilitary groups in Medellín and leading the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) before that body was closed in September 2019.
Velásquez’s selection sent shockwaves through Guatemala’s far right, who have maintained close ties to their counterparts in Colombia and with the country’s armed forces. Velásquez previously faced attacks from anti-CICIG groups in Guatemala, especially in parts of the private sector.
“Those sectors in Guatemala would have liked that in Colombia there was a soldier or someone very orthodox in that ministry,” Renzo Rosal, an independent political analyst in Guatemala, tells The Progressive. “It ruins their day, that not only is Petro arriving to power, but also this person who was [their] public enemy number one.”
Guatemala’s government and business groups have a close relationship with Colombia, maintaining corporate investments in and often purchasing military equipment from the country.
So while hopes are high for the new Petro administration, a daunting reality remains.
“We cannot say that there are going to be structural changes or deep changes,” Gutierrez says. “A situation like the one Colombia is facing, which has been historical, which has been structural, cannot be resolved with a progressive government.”
Petro’s election is part of a trend in Latin America, where, after a decade of rightwing rule, the left is once again winning. Elections in Honduras, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile have brought leftist leaders to power.
The left is also poised to take office next October in Brazil, the region’s largest economy, though far-right violence has increasingly plagued the election.
But it is an error to call this a new “Pink Tide,” the term used to describe the wave of leftists that won in the region in the mid-2000s. The rise of the political left in the previous decade did little to transform the hemisphere, with these governments focusing instead on simple social programs. These new leftist administrations, says University of California, Santa Barbara sociologist William I. Robinson, “are going to very quickly experience a crisis because we’re on the verge of a new global recession.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re left or right in Latin America,” he adds, “you’re going to be in a deep crisis.”
And there is an extreme crisis in the region, one that has been reflected in the rise of the far right. This has led to deep polarization, driven by failures to obtain change amid the economic crisis caused by the war in Ukraine and the pandemic.
Change will be hard to achieve, given that there is little space for these governments to pursue major policy and economic shifts.
This is especially true given the continued influence of financial capitalism in the region. The far right in the United States is also poised to maintain its influence in the region. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate in 2024, weighed in on the Colombian election that brought Petro to power.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re left or right in Latin America. You’re going to be in a deep crisis.”
“The results of that election have been very, very troubling for people that believe in freedom in the Western hemisphere,” the Florida governor stated in a press conference. “To elect a former narcoterrorist and a Marxist to lead Colombia is going to be disastrous.”
But as Robinson points out, these new political forces are not Marxist or even promoting a leftist agenda, rather a reformist model.
“You have this polarization, and the center is collapsing,” Robinson says. “It’s not a radical left, it’s not a Marxist left. It’s not really a socialist left, even though they use the language of socialism.”
At the same time as the hemisphere has begun to take steps toward progressive change, the failures of earlier leftwing governments to obtain substantial social changes has permitted the far right to build its base of support as well.
“The failure of the left to head a transformative project from below earlier in this century and in the late 20th century paved the way for the fascist insurgency,” Robinson says. “Masses of people have [suffered] through all of those years of neoliberalism and continued capitalist crisis and ever more precarious situations, and the left completely failed them.”
“And that opened up space for the fascist right to organize very important sectors of society,” he adds, “including and especially among the working and popular classes.”
As Colombia and other South American nations turn a new political page, Central America is experiencing the continued decline of democratic institutions. Countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua have seen rollbacks of democracy and authoritarian actions, including the co-optation of Guatemala’s judicial system and El Salvador’s consolidation of power.
In Guatemala, the leftward swing in South America has been a source of anxiety, especially as the country heads into its 2023 election.
“What they see is that Central America is about to fall into the hands of the left,” Rosal says.
He adds, “I feel that the level of fear here is so strong that they are going to try by all means to avoid candidates who [appear to be on the left], although in practice, they do not have an opportunity.”