From soft coup to institutional breakdown, what is Petro talking about when he denounces conspiracies to remove him from power?

In the year and a half that he has been in power, Gustavo Petro has denounced several alleged opposition conspiracies to destabilize his Government and try to remove him from the Casa de Nariño.

The president, who in May 2023 warned of a possible plot by the military to overthrow him, last June signaled a “soft coup” to decimate the Historical Pact in Congress, and now insists with the thesis of an “institutional rupture” to evict the left from power.

The confrontation between the Executive and the control agencies – specifically the Prosecutor's Office and the Attorney General's Office – has escalated to a level hitherto unknown.

Petro's claims come amid fears of politicized justice that progressive governments in Latin America insistently denounce.

In several countries they talk about legal persecutions that target the presidents of the new pink wave, an idea that was discussed at the meeting of the Puebla Group in Santa Marta at the end of 2022. That conclave of progressive leaders from Ibero-America included in its agenda the concept that in the English-speaking world is known as

lawfare

, in which they have grouped together the dissimilar judicial processes that have affected leaders such as the Brazilians Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, the Ecuadorian Rafael Correa, the Bolivian Evo, the Argentine Cristina Kirchner or the Guatemalan Bernardo Arévalo.

Legal wars aim to cause reputational, political and legal damage, says former president Ernesto Samper, one of the coordinators of the Puebla Group.

“All the ammunition of

lawfare

has to do with affecting due process,” be it the presumption of innocence, the right to defense or the second instance, he has previously explained to this newspaper.

To legal wars, he warns, other strategies can be added such as sowing distrust around the economy or promoting a feeling of institutional instability with the aim of eliminating the bases of governance.

The dismissal of Petro himself when he was mayor of Bogotá is considered by that Group an emblematic case of

lawfare

.

The then attorney general Alejandro Ordóñez, an ultraconservative famous for his Catholic vision of the State, dismissed him and disqualified him for 15 years for failures in the implementation of a new toilet model in the Colombian capital.

Petro obtained precautionary measures in his favor

in the inter-American justice system, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights agreed with him in 2020, when it declared that the Colombian State had violated his political rights and that the powers of the Attorney General's Office, in charge of disciplinary sanctions against officials, should be eliminated. to remove officials elected by popular vote.

Several congressmen from the Historical Pact, the Government bench, are now preparing a complaint before the Inter-American Commission to denounce the “institutional breakdown” to which Petro has referred.

They had already gone to the inter-American system alleging political persecution by the control bodies, as Petro did on his day, when he made the ambiguous complaint of a “soft coup.”

That expression had already been used by the late Senator Piedad Córdoba in reference to “an artificial climate of unsustainable social unrest,” without details.

Although Petro later suggested that he was referring to decisions of the Attorney General's Office and not of the high courts, the episode was tinged with confusion—the Council of State has annulled the election of three senators from the Historical Pact for double militancy.

In this rarefied atmosphere, the positions of the attorney general, Margarita Cabello, and the attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, fuel suspicions.

Both were officials of Iván Duque and, at the time, his elections sparked an intense discussion about the balance of powers, the system of checks and balances and the independence of the control bodies.

If in the Administration of his predecessor it was feared that they were 'pocket officials', in Petro's they have revealed themselves to be staunch opponents.

The president considers that behind both the decision of the Attorney General's Office to suspend Chancellor Álvaro Leyva for three months for declaring the passport tender void, and the Prosecutor's Office to investigate a contribution of 500 million pesos from the teachers union to his party in 2022, the intention to remove him from power is hidden.

The renewed tension occurs the same week that the Supreme Court of Justice will meet to vote for Barbosa's successor, whose term ends next Monday, with no guarantees that there will be white smoke by then.

Until now, one of the main arguments of the Historical Pact bench to justify political persecution has been that the Attorney General's Office is not competent to disqualify public servants who have been elected by popular vote, since Colombia has not finished adjusting its regulations to what established by the Inter-American Court.

But the new complaint before the inter-American system goes further: it refers to the suspension of officials such as Chancellor Leyva, who was not elected by popular vote;

to the investigations and raids of the Prosecutor's Office;

to the alleged pressure on witnesses to incriminate the president;

and the alleged criminalization of political supporters such as Fecode, the teachers' union.

The counterweights

Do any of these points really raise fears of an “institutional breakdown”?

Constitutional lawyer Rodrigo Uprimny believes not.

“There are important institutional tensions between the president of the republic and the attorney general, and between the president and the attorney general, but there is no rupture,” he says in dialogue with EL PAÍS.

For Uprimny, this supposed rupture, which Petro has complained about in all languages, would imply “a radical break in the functioning of the rules that would make the continuity of the constitutional regime as established impossible.”

An example of a real rupture, he says, would be an arbitrary dismissal of the president or a coup d'état.

“None of that has happened.”

Héctor Riveros, an expert lawyer in constitutional law, agrees.

“The dismissal of the chancellor by the Attorney General's Office and the Prosecutor's Office's investigation into the presidential campaign do not mean a rupture.

On the contrary, they are precisely following an institutional procedure,” he explains by phone to EL PAÍS.

The technical definition of institutional breakdown, he states, is that the rules are broken to prevent the proper functioning of one of the public powers.

“One thing is what the president understands and another is what it means legally.”

For Petro, says Riveros, any procedure that could end in him leaving power before finishing his term is an institutional break.

“It's not necessarily like that.

The Constitution provides for specific mechanisms that can cause the president to leave office sooner, if he commits a crime.

Uprimny, former assistant magistrate of the Constitutional Court, recognizes that in any case there are excesses.

“Prosecutor Barbosa has made totally inappropriate statements about the president and has had attitudes that do not show impartiality,” he says.

And he adds: “Of course he can investigate whether or not there have been illegal contributions to presidential campaigns, it is his duty, but four years ago there were contributions that seem similar to the campaign of then President Duque and he did not investigate anything.

His bias is clear.”

For Uprimny, the same thing happens with the prosecutor: “There may be reasons to have temporarily suspended the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but he did not do anything similar with officials of the previous Government in similar cases.”

Although Riveros does not believe that there is an institutional rupture, he remembers that there are sectors of society that are working for the president to leave the Casa de Nariño early.

“That can happen.

There are some people, some political currents, who would like the president not to serve his four years, even if they do not say publicly that they want to overthrow him.”

The lawyer gives an example: "If before leaving, prosecutor Barbosa formally denounces Petro before the Commission of Accusations of the House of Representatives and the investigations into illegal financing of the campaign prove conclusively that the law was violated, “The president may be in trouble.”

Riveros recalls that this scenario has only occurred once in the last fifty years, when the then prosecutor Alfonso Valdivieso denounced that Samper, now promoter of the Puebla Group, had committed crimes in financing his campaign.

“Exactly the same thing could happen now,” says Riveros.

If the process advances, the president's stability will depend on the political support he has in Congress.

Unlike what happened with Samper, who controlled the parliamentary majorities, these endorsements are uncertain.

“The president is right to be afraid that they will try to overthrow him, but it does not necessarily imply an institutional breakdown,” he concludes.

Uprimny and Riveros agree that the prompt election of the new prosecutor by the Supreme Court of Justice would help calm things down.

“The Court has in its hands a shortlist with three excellent candidates,” says Uprimny.

There would be no reason for me to delay that decision.

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