The government of hope has arrived…We are going to develop capitalism in Colombia.
--Gustavo Petro in a June 19 victory speech

The election of misleader Gustavo Petro as president of Colombia is a desperate move by the country’s capitalist rulers to pacify millions of angry workers with empty promises of a social “transformation.” On the heels of a humiliating Summit of the Americas (see CHALLENGE, June 22), his victory reflects the U.S. bosses’ decline in their old imperialist backyard. But while every electoral circus is a lose-lose proposition for the working class, liberals and fake leftists like Petro are especially dangerous.  Reforms by “anti-establishment” politicians will never meet workers’ needs. Liberal democracy is a dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class; the game is rigged to serve their interests. Capitalism everywhere is built on racism, sexism, exploitation, and violence. Only communist revolution, led by the international Progressive Labor Party, can transform society by smashing the vicious profit system and creating a world run by and for the working class. From Colombia to Haiti, from Mexico to Pakistan, workers will continue to rise up against poverty, state terror, gangster impunity, and racist inequality and need a Party like PLP to smash this system once and for all.
Racist inequality and state terror
Latin America has the highest level of economic inequality in the world, and Colombia has the worst income inequality and the least social mobility in Latin America (statista.com; Foreign Affairs, 6/19). Forty percent of the country’s population lives in poverty; 20 percent of young adults are jobless. The income gap has widened in the pandemic, especially in rural areas that are home to large indigenous and Black neighborhoods.
Enraged by the breakdown of public services, tax hikes, a plan to privatize health care, and more than five decades of civil war, hundreds of thousands of workers and students have mounted mass demonstrations, culminating in last summer’s “national strike.” At least 46 protesters were killed by Colombia’s kkkops (New York Times, 6/19). It was Petro’s job to steer the angriest workers with the least to lose—women, young people, the most impoverished sections of the working class, and Black and indigenous workers—off the streets and back into dead-end electoral politics. He did it well enough to beat Rodolfo Hernandez, a Trump-type businessman who praised Adolf Hitler and declared that Venezuelan women were “a factory for making poor children” (New York Times, 6/19). In a sign of workers’ disgust with the status quo, the old guard’s candidate, Federico Gutierrez, failed to make the runoff.
Guerrilla capitalist
Petro came of age as an urban “rebel” who refused to rock the capitalist boat. At age 17 he joined M-19, whose members “defined themselves as more reformist than revolutionary, closer to the teachings of South American liberation hero Simon Bolivar than those of Marx” (Americas Quarterly, 10/31/17). After 12 years as a noncombatant guerrilla and 16 months in jail, Petro jumped inside the bosses’ tent with both feet. Over the last three decades, mostly in Colombia’s Congress and Senate, this self-styled “socialist” has served as a willing capitalist stooge, moving steadily to the right as he got closer to real power.
From 2012 to 2015, as mayor of Bogotá, Petro fired hundreds of bus drivers, cut aid to the disabled, and closed community kitchens. Those who dared to demonstrate were bashed by Petro’s allies in the unions and brutalized by Petro’s police. Fitch, the U.S. credit agency, praised the mayor’s “conservative debt policy” (finance.yahoo.com, 6/22)—capitalist code for austerity attacks on workers.
In Petro’s latest presidential campaign, his third try, he promised big changes: land reforms, tax reforms, pension reforms, guaranteed employment, subsidies for single mothers, free higher education for all. Playing to reactionary identity politics, he recruited a Black woman as his running mate for vice president. But Petro was careful not to go too far or to alienate Colombia’s wealthy landowning elite. He promised not to expropriate private property and danced around the issue of abortion rights. To expand his voter base, he embraced allies of ex-president Alvaro Uribe, the fascist butcher who gave free rein to murderous paramilitaries and drug traffickers, and whose military slaughtered thousands of civilians and dressed them as guerrillas to earn bonuses (americasquarterly.org, 1/10). A booster of clean energy, Petro said he would ban new oil projects but leave existing ones intact—enabling oil and gas producers to keep drilling through 2026, when the great reformer has promised to step down after one term (finance.yahoo.com, 6/20).
Meanwhile, splits in the Colombian ruling class—and the nature of capitalism—will place severe limits on Petro’s agenda. His minority party can be outvoted in Congress, and the country’s constitutional courts are run by judges tied to the big landowners. Colombia has a narrow tax base and is awash in debt, and Petro will need the corrupt private pension funds to keep buying the bonds that keep the government afloat. Like pathetic Jim Crow Joe Biden, Petro will struggle to push through even weak reforms. According to a political science professor at Bogota’s Rosario University, he will “have to abandon certain parts of this program….[H]e does not have a majority to implement everything he has promised” (NYT, 6/20). Or as Bruce Mac Master, president of the National Business Association of Colombia, put it: “Petro is an economist. He understands economic issues” (Financial Times, 6/19).
Capitalism is built around maximum profit for the few at the expense of the many. History shows that any crumbs the bosses give us will be small and short-lived—and taken back in their inevitable next crisis.
Playing both sides
Colombia has long been the most reliable U.S. ally in Latin America and is now the region’s second largest recipient, after Mexico, of U.S. arms (visualcapitalist.com, 5/9). Beginning in the 1960s under President John F. Kennedy, and escalating in the Dirty War waged by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the U.S. promoted state terror in Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador. According to Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, Colombia’s former minister of foreign affairs, Washington “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades” (Huffington Post, 3/24/14). To this day, the U.S. “war on drugs” has done nothing to constrain Colombia’s cocaine industry. But with the CIA running point, the U.S. played a central role in funding the fascist paramilitaries and death squads that targeted trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights monitors, journalists, and other suspected "subversives” (Progressive, June 1998).
During the Cold War, when U.S. imperialism dominated the atmosphere, it sponsored coups against elected leaders who threatened its interests, from Guatemala to Brazil to Chile to Argentina. But with the rise of imperialist arch-rival China, the game has changed. Deals must be cut with politicians the U.S. might once have assassinated. With the latest wave of reformist “pink tide” misleaders now in place in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, and Mexico, and Lula da Silva mounting a strong comeback campaign in Brazil, the U.S. needs to hold on to its foothold in Colombia to slow the spread of Chinese influence in the hemisphere.
Like any good opportunist, Petro is playing both sides. While recognizing China as a strategic partner in trade and finance, he declared that the relationship between Colombia and the U.S. was “of great importance…and the historic closeness of this relationship must continue” (El Espectador, 2/6). Petro might not have been the first choice for U.S. finance capital, but the biggest bosses seem to think they can work with him. After the president-elect strongly hinted that he would name a “moderate”—possibly an ex-central banker—as his finance minister, Morgan Stanley, the multinational banking giant, heaved a sigh of relief: “In the near term, we expect the administration to look to broaden its coalition and do not foresee disruptive policy proposals” (Financial Times, 6/19). In other words, the rich will keep getting richer while Colombia’s workers sink more deeply into poverty.
Fight for communism!
The election of class traitors like Gustavo Petro can’t change the fundamental conflict between the capitalist bosses and the international working class. The only good boss is a dead one! Workers’ anger won’t be contained by a few limited reforms. In the end, only the destruction of capitalism can resolve these contradictions. Only communism can create the world we need. Onward, working class! Join PLP!