A historical alternation has engaged in Colombia. For the first time in its history, the country will have at its head a leftist president, Gustavo Petro, former member of a Marxist inspiration guerrilla warfare, the M-19, which had abandoned the armed struggle in 1990, And an Afrodestering Vice-President, the feminist Francia Marquez.
In a country renowned for its level of violence, this victory was obtained at the end of a presidential election which went smoothly, despite the passions it raised, and which was marked by a strong participation . The opponent of Gustavo Petro, a right -wing populist eccentric, accepted his unaccompanied defeat, and the conservative and centrist camp excluded from power also congratulated the winners. They thus testified to a political maturity which one can only congratulate ourselves, just as one can only praise the will of Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez to place the fight against global warming at the heart of their action.
The roots of this unprecedented alternation are largely to be found in the vast protest movement that had ignited the country a year ago. A project to increase VAT on basic foodstuffs had pushed thousands of Colombians into the rue des Tens, faced at the same time with a third devastating wave of COVID-19. This project, that President Ivan Duque (who could not stand out this year) had been forced to withdraw, had shown that the deep inequalities that affect the country had reached a breakdown.
the anteroom of difficulties
Hardly repressed demonstrations in Colombia echoed those that occurred in Chile in 2019 and in 2020, also to protest against inequalities that have become unbearable in the country which took the place of a model of neoliberal development. The latter had led in December 2021 to the victory of a former student official, Gabriel Boric. This victory was added to that, in Peru, of a former trade unionist supported by a Marxist party, Pedro Castillo.
The push of the left to Latin America, also verified in recent years in Argentina and Mexico, is indeed general. It is also part of a distance from societies with a long dominant conservative Catholicism. The advances obtained in terms of abortion by feminist movements in Argentina, Mexico or Colombia, a pioneering country also in matters of assisted suicide, demonstrate it.
This thrust could be extended in Brazil, during the presidential election scheduled for this fall. It highlights the fact that, faced with the rise of poverty, the scarecrow that long constituted Venezuela, a counter-model of social devastation under the guise of reducing inequalities, complacently agitated by the Latin American right, n ‘Fry no one.
Bearer of hopes, victory in the elections is however only the anteroom of difficulties for the left in Latin America, as evidenced by those with which Pedro Castillo and Gabriel Boric are confronted. For Gustavo Petro, the global economic prospects that are not very encouraging are added to a delicate political equation: a deeply fractured country and the absence of a majority in the Congress. His long political experience, in the Senate and the town hall of Bogota, will not be too much to cope with it.