The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, with Bolívar's sword in an urn to the right, delivers his investiture speech, in Bogotá. Carlos Ortega (EFE)
After two centuries of life as an independent state, the left finally occupies power in a country as presidential as Colombia.
It also does so with a former guerrilla, Gustavo Petro, accompanied by an Afro woman born into poverty in a historically marginalized area, Francia Márquez, as vice president.
“This is the Government of life, of Peace, and this is how it will be remembered,” Petro said in his inaugural speech.
“Life must be the basis of peace.
A fair and secure life.
A life to live tasty, to live happily, so that happiness and progress are our identity.”
The main idea of the speech is that his government is the second chance for the country: "Today the Colombia of the possible begins," he said.
August 7, 2022 is one of those dates that will have a meaning for decades in the history of Colombia: like May 10, which was celebrated for years due to the fall of the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1957;
on September 26, when the peace agreement was signed in 2016 or the most recent April 28, the beginning of the national strike that led to the largest social protests in memory in 2021.
And it is that the day of this Sunday was not indifferent for any Colombian: nor for those who voted for Petro and Márquez and await his government with very high expectations;
nor for those who historically held power.
It is the beginning of a new political era in the South American country, which raises questions and uncertainties.
Petro and Márquez framed their coming to power as a popular festival.
They extended the inauguration ceremony —normally a protocol act for the elite and international guests that the rest of the country only saw on television— to a string of cultural events —especially musical ones— with artists in squares and streets around the Plaza de Bolívar , in the historic center of Bogotá.
That celebration, in which they hoped to add 100,000 citizens during the day, is one more of the symbols with which Petro sought to show the epic of his investiture.
Another of them is the presence of samples of Colombian popular culture throughout the event.
In the massive party, with traditional rhythms from different regions;
in the official one with butterflies alluding to the work of the first Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez;
among the attendees with Afro-Colombian, peasant, indigenous dresses.
And another one is that the first leftist president of Colombia also wanted to bring the sword of Simón Bolívar to the ceremony.
The relic had been stolen in 1974 by the M-19, a guerrilla group in which Petro was a militant and which claimed Bolívar's ideas, and returned to the State when its members disarmed and rejoined civilian life.
However, hours before the official ceremony —which was attended as guests, among others, by the King of Spain;
the presidents of Argentina, Alberto Fernández;
from Chile, Gabril Boric, and Bolivia, Luis Arce—, the outgoing president and political opponent of Petro, Iván Duque, denied permission to remove the sword from the place where it is protected.
Given this, the first instruction that Petro gave as soon as he took office, when he spoke for the first time as president, was that the Military House carry the sword.
His first order was to delete Duke.
Minutes before, Roy Barreras, an ally of Duque who as president of Congress was in charge of taking office, gave the gesture of imposing the gang to Senator María José Pizarro, daughter of the commander who demobilized the M-19 and was later assassinated when he was a candidate. presidential.
Earlier, on Saturday, Petro had symbolically taken office before popular and indigenous movements in the midst of ritual acts, in a square in front of an iconic social housing construction that he led as mayor of Bogotá.
“A cold palace awaits me, so I receive this popular and spiritual mandate with great emotion.
So as not to forget the realities that we have to face from now on.
Things will undoubtedly change,” he said.
In a country with a shameful history of assassinations, "arriving alive is not a detail", as historian Pablo Stefanoni affirms: "And arriving alive and winning, is already going down in history."
At the end of the 1980s, four presidential candidates were assassinated: Bernardo Jaramillo and Jaime Pardo Leal, of the leftist Patriotic Union;
Carlos Pizarro, the father of the senator and candidate of the demobilized M-19, and Luis Carlos Galán, of the Liberal Party.
And although "historical" is a worn word, it is undoubtedly so that an Afro woman, an environmental activist who grew up in a peripheral area in the midst of poverty, is number two in the Petro government.
Francia Márquez comes from Cauca, one of the regions most affected by the violence still active in the country, and represents, as she herself says to the “nobodies and nobodies”, the eternally excluded.
After almost six decades of armed conflict and one of the oldest guerrillas on the continent, the extinct FARC, it is also transcendental that the left has managed to be a government through democratic means.
For Stefanoni and María Elvira Samper, a veteran Colombian journalist, this is a consequence of the peace agreement that former President Juan Manuel Santos signed with the FARC.
Petro speaks of achieving “total peace”.
That is, to advance in dialogues with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the last active guerrilla group;
and advance a policy of subjugation with other criminal groups, such as the so-called Clan del Golfo.
And this against the background of the strength of the drug economy, which continues to generate enormous profits and is the only profitable crop in many areas of the country.
About it,
he proposed an international change to end the prohibitionist approach.
"The war on drugs strengthened the mafias and weakened the States (...) it has led the States to commit crimes and has evaporated the horizon of democracy," he affirmed.
Achieving that “total peace” is one of the great challenges that his Administration will have, which begins with great expectations due to the promises of change that he made throughout the campaign and that in itself represents his coming to power.
A promise that he reiterated in his speech, which points out that the "second chance" is a string of changes: "We have proposed a tax reform, a health and pension reform, a reform of the employment contract, a reform of the education".
Indeed, Petro has insisted on the need to carry out multiple changes: the reform of the health system and pensions to strengthen the role of the State;
to thoroughly implement the point of the agreement with the FARC that implies a comprehensive rural reform, which includes a transformation of the agrarian system that gives land to the peasants who do not have it and support from the State for the development of the countryside;
to modify politics and justice to modernize the State;
to achieve an energy transition to replace fossil fuels with clean sources and eliminate the dependence of the economy on coal and oil exports.
To have the resources for all of this, making a tax reform will be his most immediate challenge in a Congress in which he does not have majorities of his own.
In his speech he made it clear that this reform is central, although focused on reducing inequality in one of the most inequitable countries in the world: “we propose a tax reform that generates justice (...) Taxes will not be confiscatory, they will simply be fair, in a country that must recognize as an aberration the enormous social inequality in which we live”.
Faced with this list of legislative reforms on the horizon, Petro has shown pragmatism by including politicians who do not come from the left and have good relations with legislators from other sectors in key positions.
From the campaign he approached Roy Barreras, a shrewd politician who has been on the right, the center and now the left, and who is the president of Congress until July 2023. And he appointed as interior minister, in charge of political relations , to Alfonso Prada, who made a career in the Liberal and Green parties.
Both were important in managing legislative majorities in the Government of Juan Manuel Santos, and they bring that experience to the new Executive to face the challenge.
That he is not the only one.
Apart from the usual challenges of the different portfolios and the ambition to implement a government of change, the economy poses a major challenge, as is the case throughout Latin America.
But with its own features in Colombia.
In the midst of global inflation caused by a lack of supply of products ranging from wheat to microprocessors, the Duque government maintained a million-dollar fuel subsidy.
With annualized inflation above 10% and a fiscal deficit that puts pressure on the exchange rate, the Government is faced with the dilemma of maintaining the policy of reducing the subsidy left by Duque, with the risk of putting more pressure on inflation and causing discontent , or maintain the subsidy and increase the State gap.
This amid the caution of a business community that has never dealt with a left-wing government and the promise to stop oil exploration and change the country's economic structure, when in 2021 48% of the dollars that came in from exports came for fuels and products from extractive industries,
But, more than that, the ceremony revolved around identity, or rather, identities.
That of Colombia, that of the government that is beginning, that of the left that it represents.
Petro began his speech by greeting by name and one by one the leaders and authorities present, but also a fisherman, a peasant, ordinary people.
After thus showing diversity, he gave a speech that closed with a government decalogue that promised several things, but above all a second chance that, he says, will unite Colombia.
“We will unite, between all of us, our beloved Colombia.
We have to say enough to the division that confronts us as a people.
I don't want two countries, just as I don't want two societies.
I want a strong, fair and united Colombia”, he concluded.
Thus, a new political era begins in Colombia under the great question mark of the global economy and great promises of change.
A change that proclaims itself to be leftist, but no longer extractivist, but environmentalist, feminist, ethnic.
A new Latin American left that shows its vitality in an inauguration in Colombia that sought to be the beginning of a popular party.
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