Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez, in addition to their family, this Sunday after the elections. JUAN BARRETO (AFP)
It is very understandable that the left of the whole world enthusiastically celebrates the triumph of Gustavo Petro.
Considering that he defeated a true grotesque of the most grotesque right-wing populism, it is even easier to understand so much international joy.
This absurd corrupt businessman, Rodolfo Hernández (whose political model was Trump, Bolsonaro and Bukele), who in his own words "wiped his ass with the law" and who even declared himself an admirer "of the great German thinker Adolf Hitler", was the incarnation of a straw doll.
Petro somehow confronted and defeated the caricature of a caricature.
This, however, does not make the winner of the Colombian elections a statesman.
I am going to try to explain why I do not trust Gustavo Petro at all, although doing so before he begins to govern has the characteristics of an intuition, if you will, of fear or injustice, and not of certainty.
The certainty can only be had when he really governs the country, and when Colombia has experienced at least the test of a few months of his government.
Meanwhile, like any other ruler, you have to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Before I experience their true form of rule, I won't be able to go much further than that famous nursery rhyme attributed to the English satirical poet Tom Brown: “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell, / The reason why – I cannot tell;
/ But this I know, and know full well, / I do not like thee, Doctor Fell”.
This, in turn, apparently comes from an epigram by Marcial: “Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare.
/ Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te”.
That is: “I don't like you, Wise Man, and I can't say why.
/ This is all I can say: I don't like you.”
Following these classic tracks, I dare to rhyme: I don't like you, Mr. Petro, / and my motive is uncertain.
/ But I repeat it, and I'm right: / I don't like you, Mr. Petro.
Hopefully the above is just a prejudice on my part and a wrong intuition.
The more wrong I am in my mistrust, the better for Colombia and the better for all of us Colombians.
However, my intuition also has real foundations: to begin with, Petro was a lousy mayor of Bogotá.
For four years, instead of ruling, he dedicated himself to fighting with friends and enemies.
His closest collaborators and allies, after a short time working with him, resigned slamming the door.
The director of International Relations of the Mayor's Office of Bogotá, Daniel García-Peña, in his resignation, branded him a "despot".
His partner in the armed struggle, the M-19 guerrilla, and one of the authors of the 1991 Constitution, the one in force in Colombia, Antonio Navarro Wolf,
He irrevocably resigned from the Government Secretariat when he had only been in office for three months.
The reason given could not be more ironic: “because of a toothache”.
Some of the strongest left-wing analysts voted for him (or better, against Hernández), holding their noses: the great jurist Rodrigo Uprimny, for example, director of the
think tank
most prestigious in Colombia (Dejusticia), did so despite the fact that "his caudillismo worries me" and despite the fact that "because of his populist attitude and some of his proposals, he represents risks for the rule of law."
He also lamented "some dirty strategies of his campaign, especially against centrist candidates."
A little further went the essayist Mauricio García Villegas when he sang his vote for Petro.
He did it, he wrote, despite "his dogmatism, his arrogance, his lack of intellectual honesty, and his inability to work as a team."
The truth is that, for them, voting for Hernández was more unthinkable and undignified than voting for Petro, but they could not deny the contempt that the new president of Colombia has always felt for democratic liberalism.
I did not vote for Petro, and much less would I have done so for Hernández, not only by intuition, nor by the previous arguments, but also by other concrete data.
Remember Wikileaks?
Well, in some of the documents leaked by Assange and his team, the successive visits of the politician Gustavo Petro to the Embassy of the United States can be read.
In his conversations with the representative of the great power in Colombia (which the ambassador summarizes in his cables), and perhaps to ingratiate himself with them, he speaks ill of and denounces leftist extremism to the comrades and colleagues of his own party at the time, Polo Democratic, including my dear friend Carlos Gaviria, the first candidate of the Colombian democratic left to get several million votes.
Carlos himself told me, not once, but several times,
the way in which Petro changed at night the decisions that the party leadership made during the day.
How?
Altering agreements.
Of this there is not only a dead witness, but also living witnesses.
For all of the above, I do not trust Gustavo Petro.
I have to admit, however, that he was also a very brave senator in his denunciations against Álvaro Uribe, against the appalling “false positives” and against the paramilitaries that supported the most abominable and bloody programs of that government.
There is something very good and redeemable in the legislative past (not in the executive) of Petro.
As a congressman he was a seasoned and determined politician.
Which of the two people will be the president of Colombia?
Since the function of a president is not activism or denunciation, but the carrying out of a program, I believe that he is going to be more of a mediocre administrator, a sectarian politician, an authoritarian chief, and a wily and resentful ideologue.
I would like nothing more than to be wrong, and for Colombia to have a great president.
In any case,
I do not like thee
, Mr. Petro.
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