Analysis: The left has never governed in Colombia; could that change with Gustavo Petro?

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – It is not the first time the former mayor of Bogotá and ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro has emerged as a strong contender in Colombia’s presidential elections.

However, this time, there is a growing concern, perhaps unprecedented, in establishment circle,s due to his consistency in the polls. The most recent one, published in October by the reputable Datexco firm, gives him a 16-point lead over his closest competitor, the centrist Sergio Fajardo, for the May 29 elections.

Although analysts agree that it is still early to make predictions, the history of Colombia indicates that his victory would be a surprise: the center and the right have been in power for a century and a half of republican life.

Colombia is the only country in South America where the democratic left has never governed. This political characteristic is attributable, in part, to the weariness of a civil society suffocated with 60 years of confrontation between the State and various extreme left-wing guerrillas, such as the now-defunct M-19, where Petro was a militant.

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Violence has conditioned the “reproduction of the political system”, according to historian Medófilo Medina. He also explains that since the ’50s of the last century, the “alternative, populist or leftist” sectors rejected the possibility of influencing as a democratic alternative: “they chose to respond to the establishment with the incorporation of violent and military patterns.”

Mauricio Villegas, the political scientist and essayist, says that there have also been virulent reactions from the outlaw right, not infrequently with the collaboration of state forces. In the 1980s, for example, paramilitary forces assassinated 1,163 militants of the legal guerrilla-rooted Unión Patriótica party (among them two presidential candidates).

According to Villegas, author of ‘El país de las emociones tristes’, “as long as the parties do not agree to reject the violent extremes related to their ideological orientations, Colombian democracy will not be consolidated.”

In any case, and judging by the electoral results, it has perhaps been the conservative politicians who have taken the best advantage of the tension.

On his Twitter account, former President Alvaro Uribe often uses labels such as “Castro-Chavismo”, “neo-communism,” or “infiltrated by terrorism”. The platform has blocked and limited the Colombian politician’s account on two occasions.

330 YEARS TO GET OUT OF POVERTY

Historian and Doctor of Philosophy María Emma Wills stress that in the 20s and 30s of the last century, several populist movements flourished in South America with figures such as Perón in Argentina or Getulio Vargas in Brazil.

This led to a certain “pluralization” of politics with socialist or workers’ parties. In those days, in Colombia, what for many had been the only robust social agenda proposed from power was shipwrecked.

The liberal President Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934-1938), wanted to implement an agrarian reform that gave the land a social function, but “sectors of his party, anchored in very conservative regional orders, did not support the reform package and left the party fractured.”

On April 9, 1948, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, populist leader of the most rebellious and secessionist wing of the Liberal Party, was assassinated in downtown Bogotá. His socialist project posed a significant threat to the bipartisan oligarchy, and the assassination led to an outbreak known as the Bogotazo. This insurrection is still being studied as a possible catalyst of later conflicts.

The academic María Emma Wills says that not only have there been no progressive governments, but neither has a single mature left wing. The long-term liberal project materialized: “The last attempt, perhaps, has been the peace agreement with the FARC (2016), but the ruling party – the conservative Democratic Center – has been dedicated to postpone and weaken it.”

COUNTRY OF ELITES

Gonzalo Sánchez, historian and former director of the Historical Memory Center, adds that this is a nation with few political shocks: “We have the impression, due to the acts of violence, of always bordering the precipice. But in the end, nothing ever happens because the elites have been very skillful in maintaining tradition and balance.”

The clearest example of the above is a pact of fraternal bipolarity baptized as the National Front, designed and signed between Sitges and Benidorm. The leaders of the two old parties, Liberal and Conservative, agreed to alternate power between 1958 and 1974 as the most effective method to appease the partisan violence that bled the country since the mid-1940s.

For Sanchez, these “mediations from above” are a historical constant. The political elites of the right and the center have survived the great crises by making some concessions that have allowed them to retain power.

This skill increasingly contrasts with the general feeling that there is a lack of profound change to tackle education, justice, equality, or the agricultural world.

Historian Jorge Orlando Melo suggests that the closed-mindedness of the political and economic elites has blocked any attempt to examine alternatives to a socioeconomic system that has benefited “bankers, big businessmen, and the political elites”.

INEQUALITY

Colombia is the most unequal country in the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development it joined last year. A 2018 study by that body pointed out that it would take 330 years for a poor Colombian child to escape poverty, the equivalent of eleven generations (in Chile six and Spain four).

Already in the 1920s, a veteran politician equated local democracy to an “orangutan with sackcloth.” He was referring to an unjust and repressive domestic structure, camouflaged by an appearance of stability when holding elections.

That balancing act has left historical differences with its neighbors, such as the fact of having a civilist tradition, or not having suffered long dictatorships, or incurred in major economic or financial disasters.

On the other hand, the country has gone through a long and bloody armed conflict fueled by drug trafficking and deep social imbalances (42.4% live in poverty today).

“There has been an enormous conservatization of politics,” says Gonzalo Sanchez, author of Caminos de Guerra, Utopías de Paz (Colombia: 1948-2020). And he points out: “It is a democracy that, in the end, does not feel sufficiently demanded to make the necessary reforms.”

María Emma Wills adds an element of study to understand the solidity of a “very cohesive conservative nucleus”: the Concordat signed between the Vatican and the Colombian State in the 19th century and which remained almost unaltered until 1993.

For a century, the Church dominated public education, and its members were exempt from being investigated by the ordinary penal system. According to Melo, “a model of electoral coexistence, democratic, sometimes deceitful, very clientelist, which has never dared to question, for example, an unequal economic project,” has been woven.

Since the 1960s, the Colombian economy has had stable figures, with slow but steady growth. Initially guided by the protectionist postulates of ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), from the 1990s onwards, it took the path of an orthodox neoliberal opening.

The economist and politician Cecilia López Montaño recalls that although the economic management never aimed at fighting inequality, with the policy of the 1990s, inequality ran rampant, public spending was reduced, and the concentration of traditional power was further accentuated.

Today the level of rural land concentration, according to the Gini index, is 0.89: “Number 1 would be total concentration. It’s shameful,” she says.

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE IN THE CENTER

A famous phrase used to say that the only difference between conservative and liberal politicians was that while one went to mass in the morning service, the other went to mass in the afternoon. The ideological boundaries have not been as clear-cut as their first names suggest.

Sociologist and Yale University professor Fernando Guillén Martínez wrote in the 1970s that, with the “exception of their struggles for control of the presidency and public administration,” the two traditional parties “did not seem at all divided in their social and economic opinions.”

Today the political landscape has been dissambled into a handful of parties that change names as the formula wears out. Made up of remnants of the two old formations, now much discredited, their actors adjust to the new times with names like the ruling Democratic Center, or the National Unity Party, of former President Juan Manuel Santos. Or the Historic Pact movement of Gustavo Petro.

A series of names add to the confusion: “Unmasking the ideologies of political parties in Colombia has never been easy. Today, it is less so,” says Cecilia Lopez.

For María Emma Wills, in any case, it would be unfair to ignore that there is a “supremely vital” civil society, with progressive academic circles and social movements demanding change. “What happens,” Wills points out, “is that the political system has been unable to represent them. There is a knot in the political representation of a vibrant country.”

Jorge Orlando Melo agrees and is cautious at the same time. He does not believe that the traditional machinery will let the pendulum swing to the right.

The opening of democracy may still take time: “As long as the popular sectors are guaranteed basic subsidies and the elites are not bothered with higher direct taxes, the system will continue to work with all its flaws and inconsistencies.” says Melo.