New President, the extreme right and popular resistance in Colombia

On June 17th,
presidential elections for the period 2018-2022 were held in Colombia. The
extreme right-wing candidate Ivan Duque, supported by former president Alvaro
Uribe, obtained
10,373,080 votes (equivalent to 53,98%).

In this second round, Duque ran
against the ‘Human Colombia’ proposal, represented by Gustavo Petro, who won
the support of 8,034,189 voters (41,81%) expecting a transformation in the way in which the country has been ruled until now.

This election will
have consequences in different areas, which were already becoming apparent
before the new president officially took power on August 7th.

In the first
place, the worrying trend towards growing numbers of assassinations of social
leaders and territorial defenders has shot up exponentially. This growth trend
began in 2016, after the cease fire and the signing of the Havana Agreement
between the Colombian government and the former Colombian Revolutionary Armed
Forces (FARC, by its acronym in Spanish; now known as the political party
Common Alternative Force).

In July 2018, seven peasants were assassinated in
the village of Argelia, Cauca, a region where peasant and ethnic (indigenous
and afro-descendant) movements have organized to defend their territories from
foreign investments and against armed conflict. Between
January and June 2018, 123 activists were assassinated in Colombia.

In relation to
the peace process with the FARC, the
elected president has made public his intention to substantially reform some
elements of the agreement, mainly those related to the Special Jurisdiction
for Peace (JEP, by its acronym in Spanish). Days before the Argelia massacre,
the Congress
of the Republic ruled on how the JEP should function, approving deep changes
proposed by the Democratic Centre (Duque’s party).

Those changes impose limitations
on the assessment and judging of National Army members and changes in the
agreements around extradition cases. In this sense, the possibilities for
integral justice are reduced.

Integral
justice refers to processes of prosecutions, reparations, and reconciliation
which also have the power to take on State crimes and which, relatedly, can contribute
to broader social processes of reconstructing memory and truth in the wake of
conflict and human rights violations. Crucially, these processes must usually
include, for example, confessions by the public forces, revealing their
motivations and connections.

However,
beyond the dissapointing outlook inspired by the extreme right-wing victory, it
is important to bring up here a series of possibilities which have emerged as a
result of the years of public debate before and after the electoral
confrontation of 2018.

It is vital to
begin by indicating the importance of the eight million votes that supported an
alternative proposal, which placed itself outside the liberal-conservative bi-party
tradition that, in its multiple expressions, has ruled the country since its constitution
as a Republic in 1819.

This was the first time that a political proposal approached
this level of popular support without buying ballots, or relying on armed
pressure or other fraudulent or clientelist strategies. This is a milestone,
indicating the beginning of a new era in the struggle for governmental power,
in popular power building and, ultimately, in the exercise of politics.

This new
period wouldn’t be possible without the foregoing process of social and popular
movement building and strengthening that has been developed over decades, but especially
since the appearance of the Social
Indigenous and Communitarian Minga in 2005, as an expression of popular
organizing processes to reclaim rights and defend territories. It
is also necessary to mention the weapons turned in by the former FARC rebel group.

These two
processes have broadened the possibilities for consolidating articulations
among social organizations and movements, have allowed the participation in
politics of historically invisibilized sectors and, as a consequence, have
created opportunities for the re-organizing of forces in the popular field.

This new
organizational possibility has also been expressed in the dynamics of the electoral public debate. In three key ways, this expression goes beyond discussions amongst
social organizations and movements:

–
In the recent
elections, diverse social movements and organizations decided to support and
build the Human Colombia proposal from the local level, leaving aside political
and ideological differences in a bid for strategic unity at the electoral
conjuncture in 2018.

–
The mass
turning in of weapons by the FARC insurgency changed some of the terms of the
electoral and political debate. For years, and especially since 2002 elections
(when Alvaro Uribe was elected president in his first mandate), the majority of
the country’s problems have been presented as a result of the armed
confrontation with the FARC.

–
Historically
the corrupt dominant forces have used the war as an excuse to grab territories
and violate rights, and have made a profitable business out of these
practices.In the 2018 electoral process, an important part of the Colombian
population saw the real origin of this political practice. For the first time,
topics such as corruption, land concentration, and systematic violence by right-wing political and armed actors were at the core of the public debate.

In the weeks
since the presidential election, some announcements have been made regarding
economic, social and juridical reforms, as well as the composition of the new
government. Based on these statements we can identify issues which will be
central to the agendas of resistance movements between 2018 and 2022:

–
Manipulations of
issues in the Havana peace agreement and substantial modifications to the JEP, which
risk continuing the peace process.

–
The return of
forced eradication of so-called illicit use cultivation through aerial
glyphosate spraying.

–
The
impossibility of continued negotiation with the National Liberation Army (ELN
by its acronym in Spanish). This
negotiation seems to be vanishing with the conditions proposed by the elected
president.

–
The economic and
foreign investment agenda includes a tax
reform, reducing taxes for the business sector and redefining territorial
ones.

–
The continuity
and deepening
of territorial exploitation through the mining-energy and agro-industrial
model, opening doors for fracking.

In sum, the
announcements by the new president make explicit an agenda that rules in favour
of transnational capital and against popular sectors, both in the cities and in the
countryside.

What to do in terms of organization

In light of these threats to the rights of the
Colombian population, it is critical to imagine how the eight million votes for
¨Human Colombia,” as a rejection of traditional politics, can
effectively become a social and political organizational.

Facing a national government controlled by the extreme right wing, resistance movements must consolidate local powers and find the breaks in the antidemocratic model at the territorial level.

One initial
proposal is to aim for governmental power at the local and regional level, especially
in those provinces (departamentos) and municipalities where Human Colombia won
the majority of the votes. Facing a national government controlled by the
extreme right wing, resistance movements must consolidate local powers and find
the breaks in the antidemocratic model at the territorial level.

In order to do
this, it is critical to debate some of Gustavo Petro’s proposals, which are not
shared by popular movements and organizations. For example, the idea of
agro-industry as the core of economic development is opposed to peasant
agriculture as the axis of production and organization in rural areas.

In the
same vein, the proposal to commodify nature as an alternative to the
mining-energy model is infeasible from the radical environmentalist perspective,
since this is just one more mechanism to strengthen corporate control of territories,
whilst green washing.

Besides the
necessary debates on the Human Colombia proposal, the current conjuncture
demands, in order to sustain the social and political articulations around the
existing agreements, that movements move towards a debate based on
popular participation and, at the same time, to avoid new dispersions and
divisions that might negatively impact the delicate balance of forces achieved
during the electoral exercise.

In the face of the visible
threats including the return of 'Uribismo' and its national and territorial
power structures, democratic forces must reinforce and unite to coordinate
actions defending life, and to strengthen the resistance that, in the Colombian
context, is as significant as the extreme right-wing counter attack.