Benedetti: We should seek a national agreement with Uribe 3:03
(CNN Spanish) --
August 7 will be a historic day for Colombia: a left-wing party will take power for the first time, after a tradition marked by successive right-wing governments.
The elected president, Gustavo Petro, will have to face a divided country.
In last Sunday's elections, the Historical Pact won with 50.44% of the votes, but its opponent, Rodolfo Hernández's League of Anti-Corruption Governors, reached 47.31%.
In a dialogue with María O'Donnell and Ernesto Tenembaum on the Conecta2 program, Senator Armando Benedetti, campaign manager and trusted man for Petro, warns that one of the main challenges is to achieve a national agreement.
María O'Donnell: It is the first time that the left will govern in Colombia. However, during the last stretch of the campaign, Gustavo Petro assured that things were not going to change so much and that there was no need to be scared. What does it mean, then, that he is going to govern the left? What would be the hallmark of the newly elected government?
Armando Benedetti: It
must be said very clearly that it is not that Petro has changed, what changed was the strategy for them to listen to him and this time we managed to get many more people to listen to him.
That left that is being talked about today, that we call progressivism here in Colombia, has nothing to do with that communism of the 1980s and 1990s. What it does have to do with is a new left that is being implemented, it has been implemented in Europe, which has to do with much greater social inclusion and with real access for all citizens to education, work, health, which is very difficult in this country, and also employment and housing opportunities.
If the votes of engineer Rodolfo Hernández and those of Gustavo Petro are added in the first round, they are almost 68%, what they are saying is not wanting more of the same.
They cry for a change.
That is what Gustavo Petro represents.
More than being left or right, it is a real change.
María O'Donnell: They have called for a great national agreement because parliamentary majorities are also needed. A key figure in Colombian politics is Álvaro Uribe, what role do you imagine for the former president of Colombia in that context?
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Armando Benedetti:
The national agreement was a very important point that Petro touched on in his speech and that is in the DNA of this government.
In fact, we met with the presidents and owners of the largest economic groups in the country and not to ask them for their vote or to finance the campaign, but to tell them that this space that we are opening here for conversation, for consensus, is the same as there will be after we win.
There is not going to be any imposition, it is not going to play to the majorities but quite the opposite.
One fact that the last election has just revealed again is that we are 50/50. If we don't understand that this is 50/50, we are destined for failure.
That is why we always want to seek agreement.
And in a personal capacity, I, Benedetti, said that this national agreement should pass through the hands of President Uribe.
In the last decade, of ten important presidential elections in this country, Uribe has won eight.
Therefore, what should be done is to seek an agreement with him on what is fundamental in agrarian reform, in social justice, in tax justice.
Also in what has to do with the environment, with the energy transition.
On those points, on the issue of development, on the implementation of the peace that has been cut short these four years.
Ernesto Tenembaum: In the traditional discourse of the president-elect, Gustavo Petro, Uribe was the symbol of the traditional political class that was linked to capitalism, drug trafficking and repression. Either Uribe changed or Uribe was not the one described by Petro at that time. Don't you see a contradiction?
Armando Benedetti:
I don't see the contradiction.
The language and public policies and attitude of an elected president of the Republic are not the same as that of a senator in opposition.
One thing is to be opposition and another thing is to govern.
I am sure that we are not in the plan to govern or go to make an agreement based on our program because if not that would end any type of conversation or consensus scenario.
What you have to look for in these programs is what they have proposed or implemented and see how you can find some points in the fundamental aspect.
María O'Donnell: In a country so divided in which there are signs of calm, don't you have the feeling that the demand for change that Petro represented in this election could quickly be frustrated?
Armando Benedetti:
Yes, that is a duality that one must have faced.
We did it in the middle of the campaign.
In the campaign, not only could you win with the left, you had to look for many people from sectors of the center, people from the establishment who were not contradictory to that postulate.
Here we have to have that balance, but that balance is much easier with ours because the very fact that there is a female vice president, Afro, that there is a person who was in the guerrilla who always contributed to the peace process, to have made the 1991 Constitution, recognizing that is a great change in society.
Include sectors of the center, Gustavo Petro's strategy 2:15
As I warned before, it is not so complicated or so difficult if you have the freedom to govern without as many ties as other governments have always had.
From that point of view, people today are already happy.
I have been doing politics for 25 or 30 years and never in my life had I seen it come out in Colombia… Not even in the local elections, in Bogotá the Plaza de Bolívar was filled, it was raining and the Plaza de Bolívar was full.
In my city Barranquilla there were about 14 or 15 parties.
Throughout the city, people took to the streets to celebrate in the different towns;
in Cali, which is another city.
That joy happened here in Colombia because they know that change is well led by someone who is given to change.
And if some are made, some in some curves on that path, it must be understood that there is also 50 percent of Colombia that did not agree with Petro's proposal or did not like it or was carried away by some ghosts of expropriation, that we are going to take the country to Venezuela, etc.
So that's where that dichotomy comes from, which I'm sure must be lived in favor of all Colombians, not just one faction.
María O'Donnell: With the victory of Gabriel Boric in Chile, Pedro Castillo in Peru, the current government of Alberto Fernández in Argentina, do you feel from the elected government that you are part of a new Latin American left? Do you feel related to the new governments of the region?
Armando Benedetti:
The one we feel most in tune with is Boric's and also quite similar to what is happening in Argentina, Bolivia and what is going to happen in Brazil.
It is no secret to anyone that what is being formed is an axis where they are going to blend in because in the end the course is the same, the idealism is the same and the proposals are too similar.
I think they are going to meet again, I don't know if randomly or historically, but we reached a scenario that we like to reach in the region where the left is, progressivism is walking.
Ernesto Tenembaum: I listen to him as a negotiator, a moderate man, a man who believes that majorities must be built with those who think differently. People who are like that in the world are often accused of being traitors, soft, lukewarm. Are you living it?
Armando Benedetti:
I don't.
I have a surprise, here I have a reputation for being very reactive, very emotional, very direct, very fighting, and so on.
I understand the process that we have lived in the last eight months.
I was with Petro for eight months, seven days a week, 24 hours.
In the campaign, which was quite tough, we managed to organize between November and May 29 for the first round, not for the second, a hundred demonstrations.
With this I want to tell you that, hopefully, I'm not going to put on the "New Benedetti" swag, but I do understand much more maturely and more calmly that if what I'm telling you is not done, we are doomed to failure.
Elections ColombiaGustavo Petro