June 22, 2022
Election of activist presidential team to combat structural violence in Colombia
Colombia just elected Gustavo Petro as the country’s first leftist president and environmental activist Francia Márquez Mina as the country’s first Black vice president. They have promised social and environmental justice and peace. Their proposed platform includes universal health care, public education and banking, and rejecting proposals to expand fracking and mining in favor of investing in clean energy, and land reform. And they want the 4,000 richest Colombians – and richest companies – to pay taxes as the rest of the country does. These are basic measures to reduce the entrenched structural violence in Colombia.
Petro was previously mayor of Bogota and had been a member of the leftist revolutionary group M-19. Francia Márquez, is a lawyer and environmental leader who has been a courageous and prominent land and water defender who was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018.
Their victory was attributed to massive mobilization of the voters. Ana Judith Blanco of Sinergias, a highly-regarded Colombian NGO, stated: “people went out to vote massively. The indigenous people, the Afro-descendants, the feminists, the youth, the ‘nobodies’, the entire Amazon region voted for Petro and Francia Márquez.” The vote “was a record in the country’s history. There are winds of change. Although it will not be easy to govern this country, at least there is hope now. We hope that this is indeed the government in which the people ‘vive sabroso.’ ”
They have big challenges to implement their platform, given the current political environment in Colombia. Manuel Rozental, a Colombian physician and activist says ” the establishment in Colombia runs for corruption, for mafias, for transnational corporate interests and for an army that supports all this and gains a lot of profit and benefit from this. So, there is a new government that has to rule on within this structure. The structure has not changed…..He has 20 members of Senate on his side. He needs 54 to pass any initiative. He can achieve 40 or 44 with alliances. So he would have to ally himself with the far right to achieve anything.”
This may the first time that the seven largest and most important Latin American countries with the biggest markets – Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil (where ex-President Lula is leading the polls) – will all be ruled by leftist governments.
Excellent coverage by Democracy Now! , the Wire, and Toward Freedom: See below
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/6/21/gustavo_petro_francia_marquez_mina_colombia
https://thewire.in/world/colombia-gustavo-petro-latin-america-pink-tide
