Jorge Enrique Botero

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, August 7, 2024, p. 25

Bogotá. Between lights and shadows, the first president of the left in Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who took office on August 7, 2022, assures that his would be the government of change, reaches the halfway point of his term today.

We walked through the central streets of this capital to ask ordinary citizens if they felt there had been any real change in the last two years, and we found that opinions were split 50-50.

“To this man “They have not let him govern because it affects the interests of the powerful, but despite all that, he has managed to obtain a pension for millions of elderly people who lived in poverty,” says Ramón, a man who sells handicrafts in the historic Rosario square. One of the oldest and most elitist universities in the country operates there, where we only hear epithets and derogatory adjectives. Petro was a great parliamentarian and a skilled politician, but the Casa de Nariño was too big for himsays Gloria, a law student.

The picture is not so black and white in the economic newsrooms of the media, where there is agreement that the Colombian economy slowed down between 2022 and 2024, but not everyone agrees that the country was flirting with a recession.

In 2023, an unexpected turn of events reversed the negative macroeconomic trend when the government, responding to a widespread complaint from bankers and investors, decided to influence the Banco de la República to lower interest rates from 25 points to 13.

The Federation of Merchants (Fenalco), a staunch critic of the government, said that the country will not be able to follow a positive economic path. With the constant departure and arrival of ministers and vice-ministers, the government has not had a stable team to manage finances..

Despite having approved reforms that benefited millions of workers, the Petro government has still not managed to secure popular and union support to push through its initiatives.

The only force that supports him without hesitation is the agrarian movement, with a long tradition of resistance and struggle since it was betrayed by the traditional parties in the early 1960s.

Although this belligerent peasantry never fails to respond to the president’s calls to occupy streets and sidewalks, local analysts believe that this will not be enough if the confrontation becomes more acute. Jaime Leyva, who has followed the agrarian movement for almost 50 years, told The Day that President Petro He is in charge of paying the country’s historical debt with agriculture.

Following the election results of July 28 in Venezuela, which proclaimed the victory of Nicolás Maduro, leaving a trail of doubts in the international community (including Washington), Petro has good reasons to assure that If an agreement is not reached in Venezuela, there will be a war in America.

Four insurgent armies that dominate a good portion of Colombian territory and have decades of experience in the forest; a counterinsurgent army of at least 13,000 men that occupies the main areas dedicated to the cultivation and processing of coca, as well as illegal mining; in addition to dozens of small urban armed bands in various cities of the country, Colombia is seen as the main battlefield of the American war that Petro warns about.

It is already a custom in Colombia that half of the mandate of the rulers becomes the start of the race to the Casa de Nariño.

Although the polls do not care about Petro, since in his visits to the regions and popular neighborhoods it is easy to detect an intact fervor towards the 2022 candidate, there are already many activists and militants on the left who consider that the only way to contain an ultra-right discourse, like Milei, Bolsonaro or Trump, will be to find a figure who – without radicalizing, as much as Petro does – manages to keep the less retrograde forces of the old government in power. establishment.

The elections are already being weighed down by the shameful acts of corruption that have occurred over the past two years, leading even the least politically-informed citizen to believe that –when it comes to dishonesty– everyone is equal.

According to Leyva, the people closest to the president would be slowly cooking up a candidacy around the politician Roy Barreras, currently Colombia’s ambassador to London and who was a key player in Petro’s election in 2022.