In the space of just a few days, Colombia has been plunged into a political crisis that could end up toppling its first ever left-wing government.
Given the present situation in Colombia, which, as Lambert was wont to say, is “overly dynamic”, particularly following the attempted assassination last weekend of a sitting senator and aspiring presidential candidate by a 15-year old sicario, this post is unavoidably quite speculative in nature.
First, a little background.
Led by former M-19 guerrilla Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s government is not only seeking to introduce sweeping labour and healthcare reforms that threaten the interests of Colombia’s financial and business elite but is also in the process of realigning Colombia’s foreign and trade policy away from the US and toward the BRICS — in particular, the US’ number-one peer rival, China.
Petro has also denounced the destructive insanity of the US-led global war on drugs, including from the podium of the UN General Assembly in New York. Colombia was also one of the first (and only) countries to fully break off diplomatic ties with Israel in response to the Gaza genocide — a principled and dangerous act given Israel’s strong ties with Colombia’s police, military and paramilitary forces.
All, of these actions, needless to say, are big no-noes for a country whose government and military have been aligned with the US and Israel for over half a century, and whose political institutions and class remain firmly tethered to the US.
In fact, in 2008 Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez famously labelled Colombia the “Israel of Latin America” after the Colombian military made an illegal cross border attack in Ecuador. In 2021, the Spanish left-wing politician Manuel ‘Manu’ Pineda, drew the same comparison, describing Colombia as a “North American military base that serves as both an experiment and a launch pad for destabilising the wider region”:
Colombia is playing a very important role in the destabilisation of Venezuela, for example. A country full of military bases that, with the pretext of combatting drug trafficking, are actually hosting counter-insurgency troops; because as far as drug trafficking is concerned, they seem to be wildly ineffective. Colombia is the largest supplier of cocaine to the United States, by far, according to the DEA’s own reports.
In short, Colombia has played a key role in US counter-insurgency policy in South America, particularly toward Ecuador and Venezuela. As in Afghanistan, the US’ drug control programs in the country appear to have been a lot less successful — as long as one takes the word “control” to mean “reduction”.
The US currently has seven formal military bases in Colombia, according to the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (also known as CELAG). However, a report (in Spanish) published by School of Americas Watch in April 2021 claims there are also dozens of so-called “quasi-bases” — which differ from formal bases in no other way than that they lack a formal lease agreement for use of facilities — scattered around the country, particularly in areas rich in mineral resources and/or close to Colombia’s border with Venezuela.
Since the year 2000 Colombia has received $13 billion of aid from the US, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, most of which was spent on weapons, soldiers and herbicides. Colombia was the only Latin American country to support the US-led war in Iraq and even contributed soldiers to the occupation of Afghanistan. In 2017, Colombia became one of NATO’s global partners, and the Alliance’s first Latin American partner.
The End of a 200-Year Trend
In short, Colombia was an almost perfect vassal state. But that changed in June 2022, when the former M-19 guerrilla Gustavo Petro made history by becoming Colombia’s first left-wing president since the country won independence in 1819. One of the few people who came close to achieving the feat, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala, was assassinated during his second presidential campaign, way back in 1948.
It is no exaggeration to describe Colombia as a hostile territory for left-wing politics. In the late ’80s, the then-Colombian President Virgilio Barco hired Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad chief, to help end the guerrilla conflict in the country. Eitan’s involvement in Colombia’s civil war was kept secret for 36 years, for obvious reasons: one of Eitan’s recommendations, which was enthusiastically embraced by Barco, was to exterminate the political leaders of the Patriotic Union (UP), the left-wing party that emerged from a peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla.
What followed was a brutal years-long assassination campaign that took the lives of 3,122 members of UP, including two presidential candidates, five sitting congressmen, 11 deputies, 109 councillors, several former councillors, eight current mayors, eight former mayors and thousands of other activists. According to data presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the total number of victims is more than 6,000, including murders, disappearances, torture, forced displacements and other human rights violations.
Three years ago, however, a majority of Colombians voted against the status quo. The problem, as we noted at the time, is that Petro has limited room for manoeuvre, firstly because he only has one four-year term in which to enact his government’s ambitious reform agenda. Also, he does not have a full majority in either of the two legislative chambers. As a result, many of his government’s proposed legislation has been blocked or significantly watered down in Congress, including its labour and healthcare reforms.
To get out of the impasse, Petro has decided to let the people decide. On Wednesday, Petro and his cabinet signed a decree calling for a referendum on August 7 on a raft of proposed labour and healthcare reforms that have been bogged and watered down.
The proposed labour reforms include the strengthening of union guarantees, an increase in the mandatory surcharge for night shifts, the strengthening of controls on temporary work agencies, the extension of paternity leave and the regulation of work on digital platforms. The health reforms, meanwhile, seek to expand the state’s role in financing and providing health services at the expense of private providers.
Like the labour reforms, they have also faced stiff opposition in Congress. Interestingly, the Senate, after a mammoth 12-hour session yesterday, did finally approve 75% of the articles proposed by the government in its labour reforms, which suggests the call for a public consultation is already concentrating minds and lubricating the wheels of government.
Early Stirrings of a Coup?
Now, in his third (and penultimate) year in government, Petro faces what could be the early stirrings of a soft coup against his government, The first major act came on Saturday when 39-year old Miguel Uribe Turbay, an opposition MP and potential presidential contender, was shot in the head by a 15-year old sicario as he was addressing a campaign event in a public park in Bogota.
The handgun used has apparently been traced back to a gun shop in Mesa, Arizona. It appears to be yet another example of how US gun smuggling is fuelling deadly violence throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Somehow, Uribe Turbay survived the assassination attempt but is still in critical condition. The grandson of former President Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala, he is a member of Álvaro Uribe Vélez’s Centro Democratico party.
Among right-wing circles, Álvaro Uribe Vélez is widely credited with bringing some semblance of order and stability to Colombia after decades of fratricidal warfare. This he did, however, at great human cost, by mobilising the army and ruthless paramilitary organizations — including one allegedly set up by Uribe himself and his brother — against leftist guerrilla groups.
When they ran out of guerrillas to kill, the military and paramilitaries began killing entire villages of innocent civilians and dressing them up as guerrillas. It was one way of ensuring that the “aid” money kept flowing from the US. In total, 6,402 civilians were murdered by the military between 2002 and 2008 and passed off as rebels in a practice dubbed “false positives.” According to the findings of Colombia’s Truth Commission, the US-supported paramilitary groups killed almost twice as many people as the guerrilla groups.
For the moment, we do not know is behind the assassination attempt on Uribe Turbay. However, comparisons have been drawn with Fernando Villavicencio, the journalist-turned-presidential candidate who was assassinated just weeks before the first round of Ecuador’s elections in 2023.
Villavicencio’s assassination was widely credited with galvanising support for the eventual election winner, Daniel Noboa, the US-born and raised son of the Ecuador’s richest man, a banana magnate. A couple of months ago, Villavicencio’s widow accused Ecuador’s Attorney General, Diana Salazar, of pressuring her into blaming Ecuador’s former left-leaning President Rafael Correa for the murder of her husband.
As happened in Ecuador, the attempted assassination of Uribe Turbay has created an atmosphere of fear and panic in Colombia, a country that has spent much of the past 100 years in a state of civil war. Some opposition figures appear to be more than happy to fan the flames of fear and hatred.
“We must understand that today we took a massive step back towards the Colombia of death,” said Vicky Davila, a former journalist and television presenter who is currently leading the polls among the right wing candidates.
As happened in Ecuador, many opposition figures and media outlets have already pinned the blame on the Petro government — just as Villavicencio’s death was blamed on the Correista Citizen Revolution Movement. In both cases, no solid evidence has been presented.
Again, from Vicky Davila:
“I tell you now, the whole country: the main politician responsible for this is President Gustavo Petro because he has promoted an atmosphere of violence, an atmosphere that has brought us bloodshed and pain.”
It is against this backdrop that Petro announced on Wednesday to a crowd gathered in Cali that a far-right leader of the Andean country, whose identity he did not reveal, has been in contact with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to organise an alleged coup d’état against him. From Swiss Info:
“I have information and I know that a certain leader of the extreme right in Colombia has been talking to the secretary of state,” Petro said, adding that this person would be “allied with drug trafficking” and looking for sectors of the extreme right in Colombia and the United States to “carry out a coup d’état” in the South American country.
During a speech to a crowd gathered in the centre of Cali, in the southwest of the country, to talk about the popular consultation with which he seeks to approve his labour reforms, Petro assured that there is a recording that supports his accusations and that it has already been heard by Colombia’s Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo.
Although he did not reveal the identity of the alleged suspect, he clarified that it is not the right-wing former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), founder of the Democratic Center party.
“I want (to ask) the owners of that recording to make it public in the newspapers of the United States, hopefully,” the president said.
Boy Who Cried Wolf?
This is not the first time that Petro has alerted of an approaching coup or lawfare attempt against himself or his government. In fact, it has happened so often that there is almost a “boy who cried ‘Wolf’” quality to his warnings. However, this time it may actually be true, for four main reasons…
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Nick Corbishley 