Opinion: Impressions of the significance of Gustavo Petro’s victory in Colombia

By Miguel Santos García

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) In this article, I will focus on specific fragments from the president-elect’s celebratory speech in which he layed out some exciting yet vague comments that might give us some clues on what his new administration will indeed utilize to tackle the various domestic and foreign policy problems that Colombia faces.

It was a welcome surprise when many members of the various right-leaning governments and parties within and outside of Colombia did not commence their usual Hybrid War programming of challenging the election results with fabricated evidence. Instead, most of them congratulated Petro at the same pace as left-leaning regional leaders.

Regarding the political violence in the country, the president-elect Gustavo Petro has given signs that he is interested in fulfilling the agreements signed in Havana in 2016 between the Colombian state and the FARC and resuming dialogue.

Petro also indicated he wishes to stop the use of the mobile anti-riot squad by the state, symbolically showing his administration will not be unnecessarily violent or terroristic against the population, seeking instead to have an attitude of dialogue and not repression in the face of all protests.

Regarding political violence, Petro said in his speech that there needs to be communication “…firstly from the great national dialogue between the whole Colombian society, and secondly, achieving that the weapons stop firing, that the weapons stop being used, that the weapons stop existing outside the Colombian state.”

Regarding the lack of democratic security in Colombia and the structural lack of efficiency of the justice and state security apparatus, a key issue has been that Colombia’s police is still part of the Ministry of Defense and not of the Ministry of the Interior and Justice.

The Colombian police is a much-militarized police force with a strong military background and practically no civilian training; this becomes an obstacle in dealing effectively with citizen coexistence or solving low-level crime.

These are structural problems of the overall security in Colombia that the Petro administration must solve to move forward.

On the economic front, there was a part of his speech that was especially telling on what Petro’s strategies will be, stating that:

“… they accused us … that we would expropriate the goods of Colombians, that we would destroy private property, well … we are going to develop capitalism in Colombia, not because we worship it, but because we must first overcome pre-modernity in Colombia, feudalism in Colombia, the new slavery.”

“We have to overcome primal, atypical mentalities connected with the world of serfs, the world of enslaved people, which had as counterparts the masters and slaveholders; we have to build a democracy. And we will build this democracy by…. allowing an economic pluralism; economic pluralism means overcoming the old slavery and the old feudalism…. to have an economy that can be strengthened by connectivity, by education, by cheap credit, out of which will come forms of capitalism, hopefully democratic, hopefully productive, hopefully not speculative.”

“From there will also come new forms of human relations based on new technologies, from there will become a strong, productive economy, that is why we want to move from the old extractivist economy … to a new productive economy that can make Colombia grow.”

As it stands, Gustavo Petro’s government has some exciting ideas about actualizing and restructuring the state’s critical areas. Still, it remains to be seen whether U.S. control of the Latin American nation for Hybrid War purposes against other regional actors will lessen.

Colombia’s role in the region is that of a U.S. neo-colony that even has some ties with NATO, as Nino Pagliccia noted in a 2020 article titled “The Hybrid War On Venezuela Moves To A New Stage of Aggression”: the escalation in Venezuela from violent riots to armed mercenary incursions and sabotage, likely aided by the U.S. and its proxy Colombian government, indicates that the Hybrid War on Venezuela is moving to the next stage of aggression.

We shall have to wait and see what happens, for if Petro’s government could be sovereign and not be used as a tool of the U.S. and its Hybrid Wars in the region, then positive changes might arise from this.

Also, he has to further develop Colombia economically and industrialize it, which the right-wing won’t or can’t do at a fast enough pace. To achieve most, if not all, of the goals for his administration, Colombia will undoubtedly have to step on the toes of the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention Colombia’s relationship with NATO, and strengthen its sovereignty by developing a functional, independent, Colombian state that is not a vassal of the USA, but its own master, ready to exchange and function in the multipolar order.

This post is mirrored and was first published in oneworld.press