The New Colombian Government and the Planetary Challenges
The New Colombian Government and the Planetary Challenges
The election of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez as president and vice-president of Colombia on June 18 of this year, and sworn into office on August 7, constituted a watershed in Colombian history in multiple ways. In a country mired in the intense, decades-long social conflict caused by staggering inequality and political violence, that erupted in massive protests in 2019 and 2021, bringing the country to a standstill; the new government represents an unprecedented hope for many in several vital ways.
One, it is the first Left government in the country’s 212-year history as an independent republic. Second, Francia Márquez is the first black woman elected as vice president. She is a genuine grassroots environmentalist and feminist organizer, who has played a crucial role in the campaign leading to the June 19 victory. She has led an unprecedented movement based on the concept, Soy porque somos (I am because we all are), echoing the well-known southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. She instilled a grounded yet visionary discourse in the public imagination, based on the appeal to the nadies (literally, the nobodies1)), on whose behalf she promises to govern. Through this speaks to the idea of a continual struggle ‘hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre’ (until dignity becomes a habit) in a country that seems to have lost the sense of dignity of life. Unlike most leftist politicians schooled in worker-centered socialist perspectives, Márquez came of age politically within an Afro-Colombian movement of rural origin called PCN (Proceso de Comunidades Negras or “Black Communities Process”). PCN focuses its political work on defending territories and cultures of black communities.. Márquez brings to the public sphere the debates about an intricate connection between racism, patriarchy, extractive development, and armed conflict. Her new vocabulary, forged in social struggles –including ancestrality, the care of the Great House (earth), and Vivir Sabroso (Happy / Joyful Living)– destabilizes the very foundations of the neoliberal nation-state.
Third, the coalition that brought Petro and Márquez into power, known as Pacto Histórico, or Historical Pact, is a progressive, open and pluralistic emergent political force that seeks to transcend the sectarianism characterizing most of the Latin American left. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Pacto Histórico is the first government in Latin America, and perhaps in the world, to formulate a comprehensive program centered on the defense of life, with important focus on social and environmental justice, peace, climate change, and an agroecological transformation of the current corporate agricultural and food systems.
Rooted in an earlier coalition of center-left and left groups created for the last presidential elections of 2018, known as La Colombia Humana (The Humane Colombia), the Pacto Histórico was the result of an intense process of movilizations and consultations by Petro and Marquez throughout the entire country, especially in the territories most affected by inequality and armed conflict.
Titled Programa de Gobierno del Pacto Histórico, 2022-2026. Colombia, Potencia Mundial de la Vida (Historical Pact Government Program, 2022-2026, Colombia, a Global Life Power), the program is explicitly “built from the territories and the voices of its peoples the beginning of a transition, which will immediately make a dignified life possible, overcoming violence and bringing about social and climate justice, while consolidating the conditions for a great peace that allows the entire Colombian society to have a second chance on earth.” 2)
To understand the proposal of the Historical Pact and what is at stake, we must consider its relationship with what grassroots organizations in Latin America call “civilizational crises and transitions”. From a planetary perspective, the civilizational project embodied in capitalist globalization has reached its absolute ecological and social limits, a situation for which Latin American indigenous peoples have coined the compelling concept of Terricide. Terricide is strikingly evident in Colombia and has been ranked as one of the most unequal, corrupt, and violent countries in the continent and the world. It has the second-highest rate of internally displaced persons globally. All of this is reflected in the poverty of a large part of Colombian population 3), the intolerably skewed land tenure system (1% of owners own 80% of arable land) and the devastation of territories caused by large-scale extractive mining and agricultural operations. In Colombia, 8 million hectares have been seized during the last thirty years, often violently displacing millions of peasants from their territories. Many of these territories have been occupied by extensive cattle ranching, agrofuels, and large-scale mining.
The Historical Pact’s Program addresses these problems head-on, which is why it is explicitly framed as a transition. Unlike corporate transitions, imbued in the illusion of unlimited growth and capitalist accumulation, the Historical Pact proposes that the transitions must be comprehensive. They should seek to transform extractive economic models by fostering its reintegration with social and ecological systems. Many of the key dimensions and concepts of the Program point to this objective, such as social and environmental justice, society of care, vivir sabroso (living joyfully) , energy transition, food sovereignty, a post-extractive life-centered economy, health for life and not for business, a new policy paradigm for illicit crops anchored in the territories and the communities, and the democratization of knowledge and education. The Program echoes the just transition proposed by the Ecosocial Pact of the South, signed by thousands of movements and intellectuals from all over Latin America. 4)
The energy transition proposal has generated a lot of international expectations. It places the energy transition within the broader socioeconomic, political and cultural transformations, and proposes:
1. a gradual de-escalation of economic dependence on oil and coal (currently these lines represent 32% of exports);
2. prohibits exploration and exploitation of unconventional oil fields, fracking pilot projects, and the development of offshore wells; and
3. places clear limits on the extraction of current fossil fuel reserves, prioritizing key activities and constituencies within the country5).
The proposal envisions a significant change in the energy matrix, placing Colombia at the forefront of the climate fight and providing conditions to protect its biodiversity and valued ecosystems.
The Program is also the foundation of what the government calls “total peace”. While previous governments based their policies for peace on the increase of the military force, thus fueling the infernal cycle of violence, the Historical Pact seeks to deal with the armed conflict by transforming the economic, political, cultural and environmental structures that generate the conflict in the first place, establishing the material conditions for peace while repairing social and territorial injustices.
Our hypothesis, upon reading the Program in a “civilizational key,” is that the Program could be a portal towards socio-ecological and anti-patriarchal transitions for Colombia. Whether it ends up being genuinely innovative and not merely reformist (even if it has to go through all kinds of reforms), will depend on many factors. The Historical Pact proposes to reconnect the economic and the political spheres (sundered apart by modern thought, based on the fiction that the market is disembedded from politics and that it has its own universal laws), focusing on the care and regeneration of life, a characteristic feature of what Latin American feminists call “politics in the feminine.” The transformative dimension of the Program lies not only in its progressive content but perhaps more profoundly in the process of developing the program itself and how it proposes to achieve its objectives. For example, it proposes a national conversation about other possible futures, something that governments, international organizations, corporations, and academia continue to evade. The long-term vision is to gradually dismantle the model of ‘capitalism by dispossession’ through a historical pact with the Earth and with the “nobodies.” In doing so, the program recognizes the knowledge and agency of social movements, undermines modernity’s exclusion of non-human entities from politics, and de-fetishizes the role of the expert in the design of public policies and decision-making processes. To do so, Petro, Francia Marquez and their team organized gatherings in different regions of the country, proposing specific subjects to deal with, and they listened to the demands and proposals of the participants. More recently, in August 2022, once the Pacto Historico was already in power, Petro gathered with peasants in the Catatumbo, a region that has been marked by the drug economy. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the transition towards food production in the region. Instead of imposing an agenda, Petro proposed holding a second meeting with coca growers to listen to their alternatives, while stressing the importance of the farmers reaching an agreement among themselves to reduce coca production.
Many people in the country, especially the young and many among the impoverished, feel for the first time an unusual collective opportunity to dream without fear of a Colombia that recovers the lost pleasure of coexistence. Faced with the destructive model of recent decades, the Historical Pact seems to offer the possibility of significant transformations, a reorientation of human ethics, and a transformed being in and with the Earth.
It is impossible to predict how the strategies proposed by the Historical Pact will evolve but two factors will be key in this regard. One, how the left government will tackle the right wing in Colombia that has often used violence to perpetuate itself; second, how the current government will remain grounded in people’s struggles and movements.
This has in fact begun to happen as we write this note. A month into the new government’s tenure, an important confrontation is taking place between the national government and social movements in the Northern Cauca region. Historically this region has been the site of intense struggles against the expansion of sugar cane plantations, led by indigenous peoples but also involving black communities. In the face of a new wave of land takeovers by indigenous peoples, the government has called for dialogues and asked the movements to stop the occupations for the time being, until the proposed land reform bill is implemented. Unfortunately, the government also employed two tools that have been historically used to criminalize social protest. First, it used the term “invaders'' to refer to the indigenous movement leading the occupations ( which the indigenous peoples call the movement for The Liberation of Mother Earth); second, it threatened to use force to evict the occupiers, while demanding respect for private property. This case shows that political dangers for the movements lie not only with the right, but also stem from the very rules of the Nation-State and its bureaucratic apparatus. For the government, this is a reminder that to implement real change it must remain vigilant and critical of its own practices. For the movements, this case tells us that it would be naïve to think that the program of the Pacto Histórico will be easily implemented. The limits of achieving meaningful transformations through engagements with the State is something that the most radical pro-autonomy movements are very clear about.
The main challenge for the current government is to gradually but steadily transform the productive structure of the country under the principles of social and environmental justice, rooting itself in the feminist principles centered on care and regeneration of tapestry of life, reducing inequality, poverty and dependency on fossil fuels. For this, the government must restore to people the legal and material means necessary for constructing their territorial and political autonomy. The challenge for social movements is not to succumb to the temptation to delegate decision-making power to the State just because there is a government that understands their needs. Social movements must take advantage of this historic moment to strengthen their autonomous capacity to construct grassroots transformative processes, for it is at this level that sustained and real alternatives emerge.
About Author(s)
Lina Álvarez Villarreal is a Colombian activist researcher. She is interested in unveiling the practices/knowledges that give existence to a politics of an inhabited earth, and in contributing to weave a dialogue between those geo-historical practices. She is currently teaching political theory at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá.
Arturo Escobar Is a Colombian activist-researcher, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, post-development, regional transitions, and ontological design. He taught anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill until 2018.