It is difficult to predict whether Petro will be able to secure his presidency in the future, but his victory marks that the fortress of Monroe Doctrine is no longer indestructible, and its historical significance cannot be underestimated.
Gustavo Petro (front, second from left) shakes hands with supporters at a polling station in Colombia's capital, Bogotá, on June 19. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Text | Pottery short room
On June 19, the results of the second round of voting in the presidential election of Colombia, the third most populous country in South America, were announced, and Gustavo Petro, a 62-year-old left-wing politician and candidate nominated by the "Colombian Historical Convention Electoral Union", defeated Hernandez by a narrow margin of 50.44% to 47.31%, becoming Colombia's first left-wing president since independence in 1810.
From partisan to the first left-wing president
Born in 1960 to an ordinary peasant family in Colombia's cordoba province, Petro was born to a family of ordinary peasants, and when he was a teenager his parents moved to the prosperous city of Zimbabwe to make ends meet.
Here, Petro became active in the left-wing student movement, allegedly joining the left-wing armed rebel guerrilla "Movement of 19 April (M-19)" at the age of 17. During a long struggle with the right-wing government forces supported by the United States, he became a leader and, inspired by the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, gave himself the pseudonym Gabriel García Márquez.
Arrested by the government in 1985, Petro flatly denied allegations of "killing" and "drug trafficking," calling himself "a political leader rather than a killer." In the end, authorities could only sentence him to 18 months in prison for "illegal possession of firearms." According to himself, while serving his sentence, he felt that "the illegal armed struggle had become obsolete" and resolved to find "another path of struggle" after his release from prison.
After his release from prison, he resumed his studies, obtaining bachelor's and master's degrees in economics in just a few years, and studying in Belgium and Spain. In 1990, M-19 and the government reached a peace agreement to renounce armed struggle in favor of legal struggle.
Petro returned home to join his long-lost comrades-in-arms and formed the M-19 Democratic Alliance, a legitimate political party. Since then, he has created and created a number of left-wing parties and party alliances, and has been elected to the House of Representatives, Senators and Mayor of the capital Bogotá, becoming a "center-left left" politician with strong influence.
He ran for president of Colombia twice in 2010 and 2018, ranking fourth and second in the vote. In the 2018 election, Petro gave center-right candidate Duke a strong challenge, and it was not until the second round that he lost 41.77% to 54.03%, who was elected president.
Ahead of this election, six political parties representing "center-left," ecology, feminism, and indigenous interests reached an early agreement to hold an internal caucuse on March 13, with unreserved support from all six party supporters, regardless of whoever wins. As a result, Petro won by an absolute advantage of 80.50%, and then invited Marquez, a black female environmental activist with the second highest percentage of votes, to be the vice president candidate partner.
On May 29, the first round of voting was exposed: Petro won 40.34% of the vote to top the first, the far-right nonpartisan populist candidate, known as "Colombian Trump" Hernandez ranked second with 28.17% of the vote, both entered the final. Gutierrez, a candidate for the center-right coalition "United Colombia" who has been in power for more than 200 years and has the full support of the United States, received only 23.94% of the vote, ranking third among the seven legitimate candidates, and the remaining four candidates did not receive more than 5% of the vote.
Although the two parties in the United States, especially the Republican Party's right wing, "stained Petro red" in every way, and the right-wing political forces also issued various intimidations, Petro eventually won by a narrow margin, and his partner Marquez also became the first black female vice president in Colombian history.
Interestingly, castillo, the losing vice presidential candidate, is also a black woman, so in fact, Colombia is destined to have a black female vice president after the current election.
It was a close-score, thrilling, but "clean" election victory. Both the outgoing President Duke and his defeated opponent Hernandez said that the election process was flawless and that he was convinced.
Voters cast their ballots at a polling station in Bogotá, Colombia, on May 29. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Another rout of monroeism
Colombia is widely regarded as the most "right" country in Latin America: it has a deep-seated social foundation of Catholic conservatism and a long and stubborn upper-class, military, pro-American stance.
Since 1999, the United States and Colombia have reached a "joint anti-drug agreement" that allows the United States to use extraordinary means such as the military and the CIA to "arm drug control" in Colombia. At the same time, through bilateral extradition treaties, the United States extradites real and false drug lords to the United States for trial, in an attempt to cut off the dumping of Latin American drugs on the United States, and at the same time to consolidate the dominance of the United States in Colombia and even in south America.
With Colombia's pivotal strategic position, the United States has always allowed right-wing pro-American forces to firmly hold a place in Latin America, where the "anti-Monroe Doctrine" is huge. Colombia has also become a habitual springboard for the United States to influence the political situation in Latin America and suppress "unpopular countries". In return, Colombia has received more than $13 billion in annual economic and military aid from the United States for more than 20 years.
Ahead of the first round of elections, the United States clearly expressed its traditional support for the center-right. Before the second round of elections, platforms such as the Americas Summit in Los Angeles were used to express "concerns" about the left's rise to power. In the United States, especially with the mediation of Republican politicians, the center-right who lost the first round actively mobilized, and almost all the votes were cast for Hernandez, who was not originally a fellow traveler, but they still lost.
While the U.S. government seemed unmoved on the table, with Secretary of State Blinken even routinely congratulating him, Republican politicians and former diplomats were already lamenting that "the days when the United States could move freely in Colombia are over."
Of course, the reason why Petro was able to win this election was also influenced by other factors. For example, the center-right internal pre-election "palace fight", forcing the hottest candidate in the polls and big data to show the withdrawal of former Finance and Public Credit Minister Zulu Aga, and guaranteeing the "most reliable position" but unpopular Gutiérrez; Another example is the collapse of the center right in the first round, and Hernandez is a figure who has publicly praised Hitler and exposed the scandal of misconduct, so that the United States, especially the Biden administration, is not convenient to support.
However, stripping away these technical problems, a series of "general trends" and "national conditions", coupled with the arrogance and hegemonic mentality of the United States itself, led to the historic rout of Monroe Doctrine.
Although Colombia's "paper" economic data is not bad according to Latin American standards, it is essentially a country with huge disparities between rich and poor and deep social contradictions. According to the World Bank, Colombia's poverty rate will be as high as 42% in 2022, the unemployment rate will reach 11%, and wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, drug lords and "American affiliates".
Colombia is an agrarian country, but the United States-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which is imposed by the United States and embraced by the right, has forcibly opened its doors to American agricultural products and facilitated the large-scale and cheap purchase of Colombian resource products by American capital. While creating a large pro-American class, this also exacerbates social poverty and class inequality.
In particular, at the behest of the Trump administration, the Duke administration deliberately delayed the implementation of the peace agreement reached between the Colombian government and the rebel guerrilla Farc in 2016 after coming to power in 2018. In particular, there is a reluctance to push for "alternative planting" work aimed at exchanging guerrillas for abandoning armed struggle and fundamentally solving the socio-economic problems of the "poisonous areas".
According to third-party statistics, in 2020, the joint action of the United States and Colombia cleared a total of 130147 hectares of coca fields, but less than 1% of subsidized alternative cultivation under the peace agreement.
While the bloody civil war between government forces and Farc lasted five years (2011-2016) resulted in 260,000 deaths and more than 7 million people being left homeless, the civil war in rural Colombia has lasted for 60 years, with people yearning for peace, stability and food.
The center-right, with the support of the United States, has delayed the implementation of the peace process, and has only taken care of the interests of the United States and the privileged classes in the fight against drugs, without regard for the livelihood of the poor in the "toxic areas" and the vast number of rural communities, triggering a strong rebellious psychology. Isaacson, director of defense research at the Latin America Washington Office, noted that constituencies disappointed with the implementation of the peace agreement "have become almost one-sided in Petro's box office."
America's hegemonic mindset, wishful thinking, and arrogance have exacerbated the collapse of this Monroe fortress.
For a long time, Latin American folk have been very disgusted with the Monroe Doctrine and are extremely tired of the "teachers" who claim to be hegemons and command the United States. Successive US governments have used the "anti-drug and anti-terrorism" to arbitrarily interfere in Colombia's internal affairs, "enforce the law" on Colombian soil, and directly arrest Colombian citizens to the United States for trial, which has made many Colombians angry but dare not speak out.
The use of Colombia as a base to interfere in the internal affairs of left-wing neighbors such as Venezuela has been resisted by the vast majority of The people. Even Hernandez, who lost the second round, has made it clear that way. Although the United States made some compromise gestures in the Obama era by formally abandoning the Monroe Doctrine, Trump and now Biden have "reversed the car".
As mentioned earlier, the original free trade agreement between the two countries was regarded by many Colombians as "the driving force behind the plundering of Colombian wealth and exacerbating Colombian social injustice". And Biden actually launched the so-called "America Economic Prosperity Partnership" (APEP) framework under the pretext of the Americas Summit, trying to withdraw the little "bait" of "opening the US market" in the original free trade agreement, but forcing Latin American countries to accept the "enhanced version" of US dominance. Because of this, some Latin American analysts have pointed out bitterly that "the results of the second round of elections in Colombia are the biggest gains of the Los Angeles Summit of the Americas."
Isaacson pointed out that in recent years, the United States has habitually positioned its relations with Latin American countries as "competing with Russia and China", while ignoring the will of Latin American countries themselves, "If you hold this ridiculous 'Cold War 2.0' mentality from beginning to end, the collapse of American influence in Latin America will only be the beginning."
A former US ambassador to Colombia also pointed out that at the critical moment of the Colombian election, the US government actually allowed the US ambassador to Colombia to be vacant for a long time, and its slackness and arrogance reached the point of heinousness, planting weeds, and the harvest could only be weeds.
Another era of the rise of the left
A political scientist at the University of the Pacific in Peru noted after the election that the United States and the Latin American right had "failed once again miserably in their efforts to intimidate voters with the 'red peril'".
"Again" is because last year Peru elected left-wing president Castillo, Chile elected the 36-year-old left-wing president Gabriel Bolic, and "Brazil Trump" Bolsonaro's public opinion rating is also shaky, and the Latin American left-wing trend, which was once frustrated by Venezuela's economic and social unrest, has risen again.
Many analysts have pointed out that natural and man-made disasters have exacerbated the disparity between the rich and the poor in Latin America since independence, and revived the left wing that advocates "fairness" and "equality". Among them, the new crown epidemic has had a huge impact on the Latin American economy, causing at least 12 million middle-class people to "get rich and become poor" in the first year alone, while the United States has intensified its unilateral egoism of "both horses to run and horses not to eat grass", which has further exacerbated the gap between rich and poor in Latin America.
Unlike the previous wave of left-wing leaders, the new generation of Latin American left-wing leaders is more moderate, more fashionable, and cautious and pragmatic in their diplomatic strategy, including with the United States, which also makes their re-emergence less resistance. At the beginning of his election, for example, Petro emphasized "national reconciliation" and "embracing with competitors.".
Of course, after all, it is a narrow victory, so Petro's governing foundation is not stable, and the United States and conservative pro-US military parties and vested interests will create many constraints on their social reforms. During his tenure as mayor of Bogotá, he was also accused of being "arbitrary", and political platforms such as "no longer launching new oil and gas energy projects" are also controversial, and it is difficult to predict whether he can sit in the presidency in the future. But in any case, his victory marked the fact that even the strongest bulwark of Monroeism in Latin America was no longer indestructible, and its historical significance could not be underestimated.
Written by / Tao Short Room (Columnist)
Edited by / Ma Xiaolong
Proofreading / Chen Diyan