Updated:
Save
The fear of many Colombians that former guerrilla Gustavo Petro would reach the presidency of the country, which has already prevented his election on two previous occasions, was not enough to deny him victory in last Sunday’s elections. The distrust also caused by his opponent, the populist businessman Rodolfo Hernández, who against all odds went to the second round, ended up raising the number of blank votes to 500,000 and the number of invalid votes to 270,000: if all of them had been for the surprise candidate, he would have given the victory, because Petro won by 700,000 votesobtaining 11,290,000 (50.44%) compared to 10,580.00 for Hernández (47.31%).
The 2016 Peace Accords, with the demobilization of the FARC (although some dissidents remain armed, as well as the ELN guerrillas), have opened up Colombian politics, contributing to its normalization and making it possible for the left to win for the first time.
But Petro does not come from a moderate left, ‘European style’ as it is sometimes presented, but for many years he has drunk from the same sources that have led Chavismo to dictatorship in Venezuela.
Needing to expand support, Petro has been distancing himself from Nicolás Maduro, but continues to praise Hugo Chavez. When he died, he described him as a “great Latin American leader” and has always refused to attribute authoritarian behavior to him. Precisely that regional leadership that Chávez occupied is the one that Petro aspires to assume, in the midst of a new wave of leftist governments, which already number a dozen in Latin America. Mexico and Brazil being too big (where the return of Lula da Silva to the Presidency in October) to embody a leadership without neighborhood suspicions, a certain agglutinative character may correspond to Colombia. But Petro does not have the oil checkbook that Chávez had.
Petro militated in the urban guerrilla of the M-19, a movement that in 1985 led to the seizure of the Palace of Justice, which resulted in a hundred deaths. He assures that he did not shoot anyone and that he did not participate in that massacre. That guerrilla demobilized in 1990, fostering political agreements that led to the 1991 Constitution, which is in force today. In 1994 he accompanied Chávez during his visit to Bogotá after he was released from prison for his coup d’état two years earlier and since then he has maintained a close relationship with Chavismo. In recent years he has admitted that there is a “growth of authoritarianism” in Venezuela, but he refuses to call Maduro a dictator. In 2016 he spread photos from Caracas questioning the food supply problems suffered by Venezuelans.
It is a link that has been maintained, also when he was mayor of Bogotá in 2014-2015, although it has been publicly postponed for electoral reasons. He has not condemned the regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, as Chile’s leftist president, Gabriel Boric, has. A proof of the hope that these countries have in Petro is the satisfaction with which they have welcomed his victory.
Recognize Maduro
In fact, Petro promised in the electoral campaign to recognize Maduro as president (and not Juan Guaidó) and to reopen the border with the neighboring country without conditions. Although it is going to review the official hostility towards Maduro that the outgoing government of the conservative Iván Duque has carried out, the request that Colombia made before the International Criminal Court in The Hague to prosecute Maduro for crimes against humanity is already underway, after the court prosecutor, Karim Khan decided in 2021 to open an investigation.
His relationship with Chavismo came to light in the campaign when piety cordoba, an elected senator from her electoral coalition, the Historical Pact, was arrested at the end of May at the international airport near Tegucigalpa carrying a briefcase with undeclared $68,000. Córdoba has historically had contacts with the guerrillas, especially the FARC, and has served as a political link between them and Chavismo. The senator herself made contradictory statements about the origin of the money, in a context that allowed some to recall possible past payments from Chavismo to Petro campaigns. He limited himself to declaring himself “repentant” for having included Córdoba in the candidacy of the Historical Pact for the Senate.
Despite certain similarities with Chávez and other Bolivarian processes, such as the one carried out by Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Petro has not proposed a new Constitution. A new constitutional text is being drafted in Chile and the president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, plans to also go down the same path. For now Petro has defended recovering the spirit of the 1991 Constitution, which in reality has barely been amended since then. One of the changes that were introduced was the possibility of re-election, but recently the country returned to single four-year terms. Petro has not defended reinstating re-election, which at least for now differentiates him from the Chavista model.
www.abc.es
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism