Gustavo Petro gives a speech at the Nariño Palace, in Bogotá, in March 2024.Fernando Vergara (AP)
If there is support that President Gustavo Petro has sought, it is that of the bases that promoted his election as the first left-wing president in contemporary Colombia.
Accustomed to defending himself against his opponents with passionate speeches and mobilizations of support, losing that support is—of all the possible things in the complex exercise of governing—what he can least afford.
Petro, who was a member of the former M-19 guerrilla in his youth and took the direction of politics since he was elected representative to the Chamber in 1991, has launched his most risky bet by raising the possibility of a National Constituent Assembly, when his Social reforms are about to sink in the Congress of the Republic.
The goal is to awaken what he calls a sleeping giant: the people.
The head of state spoke for the first time about mobilizing his people when he was in the sixth month of his Government, on February 14, 2023. By then, difficult terrain was looming for his health reform proposal, the first he presented. of a package of social initiatives to which labor and pension initiatives were later added.
None of the three has come forward.
In addition to bringing services closer to users in remote and vulnerable areas, the health reform seeks to create a model in which control of services is centralized in the State.
“Only if the people abandon their Government can change stop.
The change will be deeper and deeper to the extent that the majority of society accompanies us,” he stated the day he socialized the project, before a crowd in the Plaza de Armas.
More than a year later, the reform is at risk of being shelved.
After that first call to the streets, the Government went through a political hurricane that seemed endless: the departure of its Minister of Education, Alejandro Gaviria, a critic of the reform;
a shake-up with the change of seven of the 19 ministers, including the most moderate ones;
the end of the majority coalition in Congress, due to the lack of support from the Liberal Party leadership for the proposal.
The president continued to cling to the mobilizations as his safe place.
“The people cannot sleep.
It is not enough to win at the polls.
Social change implies a permanent struggle and the permanent struggle occurs with a mobilized people,” he encouraged in a speech to the unions on May 1, 2023, when he began to recover his essence surrounded by a team closer to the left.
He also sought support in the streets to confront the scandal carried out by his then chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, and the ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti, who in an act of political jealousy threatened to reveal secrets of the financing of the presidential campaign in the Caribbean coast.
The opposition decided to confront the president on his own field, with the call for multiple demonstrations.
Entering 2024, the confrontations did not stop.
The president warned of an alleged institutional rupture, arguing that the then attorney general Francisco Barbosa was forging a strategy to seek his fall, and then promoted a new mobilization, on February 8, to demand that the Supreme Court of Justice promptly elect the replacement of Barbossa.
After several attempts, the high court elected lawyer Luz Adriana Camargo, on March 12, from a shortlist sent by the president.
But that same day the health reform faced an almost insurmountable obstacle in the Seventh Committee of the Senate, where it had to undergo the third of the four debates it needs to become law.
The presentation that proposed shelving the project gained the support of 8 of the 14 members of that commission, which left it one vote away from seeing its end.
That was the trigger for the head of state to raise the alert among his ranks.
After 20 months of Government, the change is not advancing at the speed at which the president would like, and he decided to play a new card, the proposal of a national constituent assembly in which the tribunes once again take part.
In an interview with the newspaper
El Tiempo
, the president denied that his intention is to be re-elected or rescue the reforms stuck in Congress, and instead raised six topics for dialogue.
He said that the first step for the assembly would be to “organize the municipal committees, that is, the municipal grassroots organizations mobilize, get together;
to call the people to mobilization, to the streets, to debate, to exercise the constituent power that can already be exercised at levels that the Constitution of '91 allows, which are defined as open town halls, which are current mechanisms of citizen participation.
The senator of the Historical Pact, Clara López, explains in dialogue with EL PAÍS that it is not about creating new committees, but rather about strengthening the spaces for pedagogy and mobilization that already exist.
“This type of organization is typical of left-wing sectors and parties that do not focus their social mobilization only on the electoral stage, but rather continue the work of conversation, rapprochement, and listening.
The formation of the committees seeks to get more people involved,” she says.
The call, which shows that the Constituent Assembly is another way to achieve the mobilization of the Petrist bases, has taken shape with the call of the labor centers to marches on April 9, the 76th anniversary of the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the commemoration of the National Day of Remembrance and Solidarity with the Victims of the Armed Conflict.
Fabio Arias, president of the umbrella organization Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), assures that they will reiterate the call to Congress not to sink the reforms.
“We hope it is forceful enough, of significant magnitudes like those of November 21, 2019 and the social outbreak of April 28, 2021. We want to say that things have to change in the country, that economic groups cannot continue in the same way. “turn your back on the country, much less the Congress of the Republic,” he emphasized at a press conference.
Faced with the possibility of a National Constituent Assembly, the union organization has specified that it will be the subject of future discussions and has not offered open support.
Something similar occurs among indigenous peoples, another of the actors who have mobilized in favor of the Government.
Gerardo Jumi, general secretary of the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Colombia (ONIC), indicated that “the indigenous mingas are the sovereign instrument that the Colombian people have to support this Government and to demand that the Congress of the Republic must approve the major reforms.”
The debate on the Constituent Assembly does not erase other concerns, such as the violence in Cauca, one of the three departments—in addition to Valle del Cauca and Nariño—where the Government decided to suspend the ceasefire with the dissidents of the Central General Staff due to attacks against indigenous communities.
“We call on armed groups to respect the civilian population and remind the State that this is its constitutional function, to support the civilian population,” Jumi added.
That same sensation is repeated in other regions.
In Caquetá, the community organizations convened by the Government criticize what they see as insufficient presence in the territory.
Luis Arcadio Pardo, councilor for the ruling Colombia Humana in the municipality of Cartagena del Chairá, says that he would support the idea of a Constituent Assembly “out of respect for the party,” but complains that the Government has not looked towards his department.
“On the contrary, extortion and anxiety have increased.
(The dissidents of the extinct FARC) are already calling even residents of neighborhoods where they set conditions.
The change has been inverse, it has further strengthened the groups outside the law in this area.
They are not painting the tiger with the stripes that it is,” he laments.
Analyst César Caballero considers that the mobilizations in support of the Government have not been massive because other fundamental groups in the social outbreak of 2019 and 2021, such as young people, are not coming out.
“The Government is mobilizing its normal support base, which is not growing, but rather becoming visible.
They are not mobilizations that will make him gain governability,” says the manager of the consulting and polling firm Cifras y Conceptos.
President Petro has taken advantage of his tour this week through three Caribbean departments - Córdoba, Bolívar and Sucre - to reiterate his intention for a Constituent Assembly, which to materialize requires the support of the Legislature and that of at least 13 million Colombians, almost two million more than those who elected him as president.
“This Government fights as far as the people allow.
We will not go even one meter further than where the people want it.
Nor will we go one meter less,” said the president on May 1, 2023. On the eve of the mobilizations of April 9 and May 1, Petro redoubles its commitment to popular support in the streets that has been limited until now.
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