Vol 6 — Issue 2 by Catalyst

Author:Catalyst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-09-21T00:30:42+00:00

Colombia’s Electoral Left Regroups

Colombia’s fractured Left, both armed and unarmed, has sought to form coalitions in the past, only to fracture again. Gustavo Petro brings decades of involvement in this evolution. He joined the M-19 guerrilla movement as a student in the 1970s and participated in the organization’s demobilization in 1990. Like others who demobilized, Petro moved into legal political activism, serving several terms in Congress. He was a founder of the Polo Democrático Independiente coalition in 2003, which then formed the Polo Democrático Alternativo party in 2005. Polo candidate Samuel Moreno was elected mayor of Bogotá in 2007, though he was accused of corruption and removed from office in 2011. Petro was the Polo’s presidential candidate in 2010. He didn’t make the runoff, but he led a split from the coalition in 2011 to form the Movimiento Progresista (later Colombia Humana), then served as mayor of Bogotá from 2012 to 2015.

In his second attempt at the presidency in 2018, Petro made the runoff but lost to current president Iván Duque. In early 2021, the Left, including social movements, labor unions, indigenous and Afro-Colombian movements, and feminist, socialist, and environmental movements, united anew in the Pacto Histórico, voting to back a third Petro candidacy.

Rather than choose a “safe” or mainstream running mate, Petro kept his sights firmly to the left, choosing Francia Márquez, a much younger activist deeply immersed in Afro-Colombian, environmental, and women’s rights movements — constituting Colombia’s newer, social movement left. Márquez received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018 for her work to protect rural communities from mining operations. She has also, like so many social leaders in Colombia, been the target of multiple death threats and assassination attempts. (Another Goldman prizewinner, Honduran indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, was murdered in 2016 for defending her community against a multinational dam project.) Environmental and land rights activists have become a front line of defense for peasant rights against neoliberal economic development projects, multinational land grabs, industrial agriculture, and extractive industries like fossil fuels — leaders of what Naomi Klein termed “blockadia.”24 They thus pose a formidable challenge to investors, accumulation, and the larger economic model of neoliberal capitalism, and they have come under assault worldwide.

Petro centered his candidacy in a commitment to fully enact the 2016 peace agreement (largely denounced and ignored by the Duque government), including its call for agrarian and police reform. He also promised to use social welfare and redistributive measures to address the country’s long-standing economic crisis and its exacerbation by COVID and the Ukraine war, as well as to reduce the country’s reliance on mining and fossil-fuel-led extractivism and prioritize a clean energy transition and the environment. Like much of the pink tide, the Pacto Histórico brought together the historic left with new social movements, but in the specifically Colombian context of the long reign of the Right and alliance with the United States, the decades of war and violence, and the disappointments with the unfulfilled 2016 peace accord. And, like the post–pink tide elsewhere,

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