Colombia: The end of the Uribista cycle

The presidential election in Colombia, held on May 29, selected two candidates who will face off in a runoff election June 17. Those candidates are Gustavo Petro, who headed the Historic Pact, a center-left alliance, and Rodolfo Hernandez, who some journalists have called the “Latin American Trump.” For months, opinion surveys showed Petro ahead, leading many to expect that he could win the presidency outright. This would have been an historic victory for the mainstream left, which has been locked out of power in Colombia for decades. But in the last few weeks before the election, Hernandez, a “populist” running against “corruption” (despite his history as a politician and businessman), climbed into second place. Hernandez will now seek to consolidate the right-wing vote to defeat Petro’s ticket.On Election Day, Petro’s supporters experienced a “victory without celebration,”suggesting that they were uneasy about Petro’s prospects in the runoff.

This article, by the well-known Uruguayan leftist journalist Raúl Zibechi, provides the background to understand the shifts in Colombian society that the election results represented. The article originally appeared in the Uruguayan newspaper, La Brecha.and appeared in Correspondencia de Prensa. The ISP translated this article from Spanish.

Álvaro Uribe Vélez assumed the presidency of Colombia on August 7, 2002, and, after being reelected, remained in office until 2010. However, Uribismo has its roots in the 1990s, during its leader’s tenure as governor of Antioquia, a position that marked out his political trajectory. At that time, Uribe promoted “Convivir” (rural community vigilante associations) that played a prominent role in conflicts in the countryside. Convivir was integrated into a legal framework favorable to landowners, who armed themselves to confront guerrilla groups with the support of the Armed Forces. Over the years, many of the members of Convivir joined the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the country’s main paramilitary organization.

As president, Uribe quickly negotiated peace with the paramilitaries in 2003, giving them maximum sentences of five to eight years, although some of them reorganized themselves by creating new and illegal armed structures. He ended his eight years as president with popularity ratings of around 70 percent, largely for having reduced violence and weakened the guerrillas, who were hugely unpopular because of their kidnappings and killings (see “A la espera del hito”, Brecha, 20-V-22). Later, he opposed his successor, Juan Manuel Santos, for having negotiated an end to the war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In 2016 he actively mobilized in the No campaign in the plebiscite on the peace agreement, managing to win against all expectation.

However, Uribe’s star gradually faded, largely because the rhetoric of “security” began to wear thin: the guerrillas’ defeat was the greatest success of his presidencies, but it ultimately undermined his support. On the one hand, he was unable to offer alternative policies to appeal to “security,” (France 24, 12-III-22) and, on the other hand, corruption and the evident violations of human rights that characterized his governments began to take their toll.

The most serious case was that of the “false positives”, the assassinations of young people not involved in the war but which the military presented as combat casualties. Uniformed officers who managed to inflict casualties on the guerrillas received prizes, vacations and promotions, while commanders who did not give “positive” results were punished. [Editors’ note: This provided the incentive for the military to murder young people, and to present them as if they were casualties from battles with guerrillas.] The courts have recognized more than 2,000 crimes of this type during Uribe’s presidencies, but it is estimated that the total figure for the whole country may be as high as 10,000 murders. Some human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, consider that the practice of false positives is unprecedented in the world.

Starting in 2006, during Uribe’s second term, the “parapolitics” scandal began to reveal the relationship between high-ranking government officials in Uribe’s entourage and paramilitaries. By 2013, 60 parliamentarians and dozens of mayors and governors from different regions had been convicted for their links with far-right armed groups.

In July 2018, the Supreme Court of Justice opened a formal investigation into Uribe for the crimes of procedural fraud and bribery, having proven witness tampering. In August 2020, it imposed house arrest on the former president for obstruction of justice, but he made a clever maneuver by resigning his seat. Thus, his case passed to the Attorney General’s Office, a site more sympathetic to him than the Supreme Court.

Traqueta culture

One of the greatest consequences of Uribism is the so-calledtraqueta culture, “a term coming from the language used by the hitmen of drug trafficking and paramilitarism in Medellín, which refers to the characteristic sound of a machine gun when it is fired (tratratra)”, according to historian Renán Vega Cantor (Rebelión, 14-II-14). This culture of thugs and hitmen, in which the narcotraffickers and the paramilitary overlap, causes any situation to be resolved through physical violence. The historian explains that “the attachment to violence, money, machismo, discrimination and racism complements and flows from the inequality that characterizes Colombian society”.

To preserve that inequality in the face of increased organization by peasants and popular sectors, the dominant classes forged a close alliance with the narco-trafficking kingpins and paramilitaries. In this way, they tried to “wipe out with blood, fire and chainsaws any alternative political project that proposed a real democratization of Colombian society,” Vega Cantor noted.

The traqueta culture took root throughout society and became hegemonic, particularly in politics and journalism. “I’ll break your face, faggot,” one of Uribe’s most well-known phrases, made good the historian’s point that “the dominant classes of society absorbed traqueta culture, abandoning any project of bourgeois culture, which had previously provided them with cultural distinction and aesthetic refinement.”

The fall

The real downfall of Uribe, whom the absolute majority of Colombians came to repudiate, began in 2019, during the strike called by the trade union federations, which, against all odds, extended for weeks, when young people with no future mobilized in the social breach the strike opened. During the pandemic there were several important mobilizations, but the real setback to Uribismo came with the strike initiated on April 28, 2021. It lasted for three months (see “Guardia, fuerza”, Brecha, 14-IV-21). “Uribe, paraco, el pueblo estáberraco” (“Uribe, paraco [paramilitary], the people are angry”) was the cry that exploded in millions of throats in the most remote corners of a country that was literally tired of war and, above all, of that dirty war of which the ex-president is the biggest proponent.

The successful television series Matarife. Un genocidainnombrable, debuting in May 2020, played a prominent role in the new awareness of young Colombians. Broadcast on YouTube, it chronicles journalistic investigations linking Uribe to drug traffickers, paramilitaries and corrupt politicians. Its author, journalist Daniel Mendoza Leal, had to go into exile in Spain because of repeated threats to his life.

The changes in the feelings of the Colombian people were already seen in the legislative elections last March, in which the left elected the largest bloc in its history and became the largest minority in parliament, although the followers of the Historical Pact—the center-left electoral front headed by Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez—do not have a majority in the chambers (see “El vórtice del huracán”, Brecha, 27-III-22). According to all the polls, the Historical Pact will come first, but there will be a second round on June 19.

The surprise

The two main candidates, Petro, for the left, and Federico Fico Gutiérrez, aligned with Uribe and the current president, Iván Duque, show fairly constant levels of support, according to the main polls. The leftist candidate is close to 40 percent but has not gained increased support since the parliamentary elections. The pro-Uribe candidate barely registers above 20 percent, but his candidacy is showing signs of wear and tear. The center, which until now was represented by Sergio Fajardo, former mayor of Medellín, is fading and has never managed to take off beyond 10 percent. On the contrary, support for the former mayor of Bucaramanga, Rodolfo Hernández, has been growing and now receives strong media attention.

One of the Colombian right wing’s most clear-sighted media outlets, La Silla Vacía, which in the previous elections supported the pro-Uribe Duque against Petro, is one of the promoters of Hernández. Its main argument is that Hernández can defeat Petro in the second round, something that the pro-Uribe candidate could not achieve. “If Rodolfo goes to the second round, he would take away a good part of Petro’s support from the center”, reasons La Silla Vacía, while “Fico would not get the support of any important figure of the center” (La Silla Vacía, February 25, 22).

The reasoning is sound: the winner will be the one who can compete for the votes of the center, that portion of the electorate, made up of the urban middle classes, that shuns both the left and the ultra-right. The “engineer” Hernández, although presented as the Colombian Trump by CNN, is attracting support and may be the next president, precisely because the image of him as a millionaire technocrat and an outsider from traditional politics—despite his 77 years, his past as mayor of Bucaramanga and the accusations of corruption against him (CNN, May 23, 2012). Hernandez may be a little “crude” for CNN’s tastes, but the media seem to seem to lap up his celebrate his outbursts. They haven’t condemned him for telling the RCN network in 2016: “I am a follower of a great German thinker. His name is Adolf Hitler.”

Beyond the speculation and the last-minute shifts, there is a climate of tension in the streets of Colombia. Petro himself has been warning of an eventual coup d’état and a fraud that would seek to prevent a triumph that his followers take for granted. Much will depend on the number of voters: if the historical level of abstention, around 50 percent, isn’t overcome, it is unlikely that the Historical Pact will win in the first round. The runoff, if it comes to that, seems more unpredictable. In addition to the militarization of society, which weighs heavily against any attempt to introduce changes, there are international factors that at this moment constitute greater obstacles than the survival of an oligarchy as rancid as the one that supports Uribe. Since 2018 Colombia is the Latin American leg of NATO as its “global partner” in the region. Nothing more and nothing less.

Courtesy La Brecha and Correspondencia de Prensa