“A new National Constituent Assembly does not seem necessary at this time.”
Antonio Navarro Wolff's message was brief, but forceful.
And significant, for coming from who it came from.
It was one of the first, almost immediate, reactions to President Gustavo Petro's proposal to launch a constituent process at a time when his reforms are stuck in Congress.
After signing the peace agreement, Navarro was one of the three presidents of the assembly that wrote the celebrated political charter that has governed Colombia for more than 30 years, the only one of them who is still alive.
He then represented the Democratic Alliance M-19, the political movement that emerged from the guerrilla to which both belonged.
The 1991 Constitution is his greatest legacy.
The unexpected announcement that the president launched on Friday from the city of Cali has dominated public debate since then.
“If this possibility of a popularly elected Government in the middle of this State and under the Constitution of Colombia cannot apply the Constitution because they surround it to not apply it and prevent it, then Colombia has to go to a National Constituent Assembly,” he said ecstatically before thousands of supporters in Puerto Resistencia, a neighborhood that became insubordinate during the wave of protests in 2021. The practically unanimous rejection came from the most diverse shores.
Largely, because Petro has assured on countless occasions that he did not intend to call a constituent assembly for any reason.
“My Constituent proposal is not for the current reforms,” the president clarified this Monday in an extensive interview with the newspaper
El Tiempo
that did not completely clear up the confusion.
“What we have to examine is what, in the text of the 1991 Constitution, has not been developed,” he argued in that talk, in which he ruled out, among other things, promoting the possibility of re-election or expropriating lands.
“The way of governing after issuing the Constitution of 1991 was the paramilitary way of governing,” he slipped.
The president maintains that the political letter was never applied, because “instead of building the social rule of law that he proposed, a mafia regime was built.”
Gustavo Petro in Cali, last Friday, March 15. Ernesto Guzmán (EFE)
This critical vision of a Constitution in which the M-19 was the protagonist – and which at other times it has exalted – is striking.
The story is known.
Navarro signed, together with Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, the last commander of the extinct guerrilla, what he proudly describes as the first peace agreement in contemporary Latin America.
Navarro was also the leader who persisted in his pledge despite the murder of Pizarro, then a presidential candidate, shot on a plane flying between Bogotá and Barranquilla in April 1990, just a month and a half after demobilizing.
They were turbulent times.
That presidential campaign ended with the murder of three other candidates, including the favorite, Luis Carlos Galán.
In this turbulent environment, the student movement of the seventh ballot made its way, a mobilization that paved the way for drafting a new political charter to replace the one of 1886. The AD M-19 was the majority force of the National Constituent Assembly – with 27% of the constituents–.
Very close were the Liberal Party and the National Salvation Movement, led by conservative leader Álvaro Gómez – who two years earlier had been kidnapped and later released by the M-19.
That is why a collegiate presidency was chosen made up of Navarro, Gómez and the liberal Horacio Serpa.
A postcard of plurality in the midst of a great national consensus.
“We decided that our list for the Assembly would include, not only former members of our organization incorporated into democratic life, but also many other sectors of Colombian political life,” recalls Navarro in his book
An assembly that transformed the country
.
It included liberal, conservative, left-wing, academic, cultural and even sports figures.
They ranged from the liberal Carlos Ossa Escobar and the conservative Álvaro Leyva Durán – Petro's suspended chancellor – to the poet María Mercedes Carranza and the soccer coach Francisco Maturana.
Also figures from the M-19 such as Rosemberg Pabón and Otty Patiño – today high commissioner for Peace.
“It was [Jaime] Bateman's old idea of calling for diversity, what he called 'the national sancocho,' if we wanted to adequately represent the country,” Navarro writes in those memoirs.
That role in the Constituent Assembly has been the legacy of the AD M-19, assessed Navarro, now a septuagenarian, in an interview with this newspaper in the campaign for the 2022 presidential elections that brought Petro to power.
“The constitution is a good framework, it is modern, advanced, egalitarian.
But if it is not converted into specific laws, and structures of those laws and exercise of Government, then it remains a general framework.
The constitution is good, we do not have to change it, we have to apply it in a progressive and democratic sense,” he said then.
Petro offered him a position in his cabinet, but he has chosen to remain removed from the political front line.
Navarro's vision contrasts with that of Petro himself.
“At the end of the day, in the Constituent Assembly the M-19 walked the path of surrender,” the president writes in
One Life, Many Lives
, his political biography.
“To preserve a democratic text, to take care of its fundamental pillars and, especially, the chapters related to the rights of the people, the M-19 renounced all revolutionary ideas.
Only history will tell if he made the right decision,” he says.
The same history that today is proposed to be rewritten.
As other protagonists of the public debate have recalled, from various sides, the 1991 Constitution not only has the tools for the social transformations that the president advocates, but was agreed upon by many groups, with the M-19 leading the way.
That political letter was a great national agreement, the same concept that Petro has invoked at various times during his mandate, but that he now says he does not see possible.
In response to the presidential announcement, former liberal ministers José Antonio Ocampo and Cecilia López, who held the Treasury and Agriculture portfolios in Petro's first cabinet, much more plural than the current one, agreed in that direction in response to the presidential announcement.
The Government bears the imprint of the M-19.
The first left-wing president in recent history has left former militants in the most sensitive positions.
Among others, he has entrusted total peace, his flagship policy, to historical figures of the guerrilla who signed one of the most successful peace agreements in Latin America, such as Otty Patiño himself and Vera Grabe.
They also occupy positions in the intelligence sector and in some diplomatic positions.
But that does not stop the president from questioning the great democratic achievement that the history books do grant him.
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