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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

A Turning Point for Colombia

Two nationalists—a former guerrilla and an outsider septuagenarian—vie for Colombia’s presidency.

Bogota,,Colombia,October,22,,2017:,Unidentified,People,At,The,Enter
(Fotos593/Shutterstock)

After decades of armed conflict and conservative rule, supporters and detractors of former mayor and ex-M19 guerrilla Gustavo Petro thought it all but certain Colombia would elect its first openly leftist president. That was until 77-year-old businessman Rodolfo Hernandez blindsided analysts in May’s first-round vote, finishing with 28 percent to his opponent’s 40 percent of the vote.

To be sure, Petro’s first round victory is unprecedented in a country long weary of leftist candidates. Just as striking, however, is the humiliating, third-place finish of center-right candidate, Federico Gutierrez. A recent mayor of Medellin, Gutierrez had the backing of around 70 percent of incumbents in Colombia’s Congress, three former presidents, the business elite, and lame-duck President Ivan Duque (2018-2022) of the right-wing Uribismo.

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Named after former president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), Uribismo can rightly be credited with reversing a dire security situation at the height of the Colombian conflict. Uribe also presided over a period of strong economic growth at the height of the commodities boom. In turn, Uribistas have governed Colombia for 14 of the past 20 years, winning four of five elections.

The cost of Uribe’s success, however, came in the form of crimes by state and state-sponsored paramilitary forces. When times were good, most Colombians excused or ignored these crimes. Now, as millions have slid back into poverty in the wake of the pandemic, the same crimes are sources of immense vitriol from voters and a surging opposition.

Add to this a mounting list of scandals from the bungled procurement of coronavirus vaccines to the vice president’s close narco ties, and it’s no wonder 80 percent of Colombians say the country is on the wrong track. In short, Uribismo and the clientelist parties that typically back it have effectively dug their own grave, enabling the rise of not one but two outsider populists.

Predictably, international outlets have already cast the race as one between a left and right-wing populist, describing Hernandez as the “Colombian Trump.” Yet, foreign analysts have irresponsibly shirked the ways in which Petro and Hernandez are more alike than different. Indeed, with his penchant for Twitter and skill at owning Colombia’s (neo)lib elites, it is in some ways Petro that is the more Trumpian of the two candidates. For his part, Hernandez is a decidedly anti-ideological figure.

As populists, however, both candidates sell themselves as anti-establishment crusaders and tribunes of the masses. Both command hordes of fanatical supporters, both critique neoliberalism, and both are proponents of industrial development.

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In a recent interview, Hernandez stated, “We have to make the country productive. These crooked politicians have destroyed the countryside. We’re even importing yuca, can you believe that? It’s a disaster. These yuppies destroyed the countryside, destroyed our productive industry. We must rebuild.” Similarly, in a January debate, Petro retorted, “applauding the mass import of basic staples is national suicide. We need to guarantee food sovereignty and initiate a process of agroindustrialization—we need to produce corn here, wheat here, avocados here, agroindustry here.”

Hernandez and Petro have a point. In light of struggling supply chains, the war in Ukraine, and a dying domestic agricultural sector, inflation has soared and Colombia’s dependency on costly imported staples has deepened. Consequently, both candidates have taken aim at the crown jewel of Colombia’s neoliberal order: the United States-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

A product of globalist groupthink across four administrations (Bush-Obama, Uribe-Santos), the agreement is currently on pace to eliminate domestic rice production in Colombia by 2030, a staple for a majority of the population. Consider for instance, as the candidates have, that the importation of subsidized agricultural goods may actually be contributing to the oft-discussed record levels of coca production by Colombian farmers.

As such, Petro and Hernandez have vowed to renegotiate Colombia’s free-trade commitments, prompting panic from President Duque. Remarkably, both candidates can be described as nationalists for a modern era. Just who are the two candidates, and what can their trajectories tell us about how they would govern?

Raised in the Andean city of Zipaquirá, at a young age, Gustavo Petro joined the urban M19 guerrilla in the late 1970s. Founded by militants of the former Conservative Party and later populist-nationalist dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1954-1957), the M19 took up arms in opposition to the results of 1970’s presidential elections. Marked by irregularities, the election led to the defeat of the favorite, Rojas. An admirer of the former dictator, Petro has long held (as many Colombians have) that the election was stolen.

Given its origin, the M19 was not overtly leftist at its onset. Regardless, the group ultimately made common cause with other Marxist guerrillas like the FARC. As well as is known, Petro himself was never directly involved in any of the M19’s armed operations, undertaking mainly activist and charitable causes in Zipaquirá. By 1990, both Petro and the broader M19 demobilized, though he was detained and arbitrarily tortured by Colombian security forces. Since then, Petro’s association with the M19’s heinous acts, such as 1985’s bloody Palace of Justice siege, have long haunted him.

Petro, however, is nothing if not a talented orator and politician. He went on to pursue a career in Congress at a time when few leftists occupied either chamber. During the 2000s, Petro was instrumental in the investigation of members of Congress and the Uribe administration for links with extremist narcoparamilitaries. Known as the parapolitics scandal, the investigation led to the conviction of dozens of congressmen, as well as Uribe’s chief of security.

By 2011, the former guerrilla was elected mayor of Bogota, a post that exposed his deficiencies as an administrator. Petro, like other populists from Donald Trump to Pedro Castillo, experienced infighting and high turnover within his cabinet. His relations with the city council were strained and many of his most ambitious projects were poorly executed, such as his bungled reform of the city’s trash-collection service.

With much of the city flooded in uncollected trash, Petro was temporarily and illegally removed from office by the Colombian solicitor general. In a show of things to come, the procedurally flawed manner by which the mayor was deposed caused a media frenzy and upstaged the debacle of his trash collection scheme. Petro, to his credit, is nonetheless remembered fondly by the city’s poorest for significant investments in education, infrastructure, and social services.

By the time Petro left office in 2016, the hated FARC agreed to demobilize after lengthy peace negotiations. An earth-shattering and widely contested event in Colombian politics, the peace deal led to a flourishing of leftist politics throughout the country. Petro, a supporter of the peace deal, contested 2018’s presidential run-off against Ivan Duque. Though Duque won handily, Petro’s vote share was historic, earning him a seat in the Senate under the terms of the new peace agreement.

Upon his return to congress, Petro honed his most Trumpian of rhetorical instruments, Twitter. From the comfort of his keyboard, Petro has excelled as a masterful troll of Uribismo and the media. His every word often triggered chain overreactions from journalists, such as when he touted hydroxychloroquine during the Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, in response to Petro’s lead in the polls in late 2021, President Uribe delivered a tirade against the frontrunner as the “neocommunist mentor of [Hugo] Chavez.”

Consequently, Petro Derangement Syndrome has endowed the red menace with universal name recognition. The more numerous and vainglorious the attacks against him, the more popular the silver-tongued ex-guerrilla becomes. Like 2016 in the U.S., the bulk of Colombia’s 2022 campaign has consisted of other candidates reacting, attacking, and panicking over various proposals and statements made by Petro. In the end, this has led the former guerrilla to consistent rhetorical victories on the substance of the issues, most notably on the topic of domestic industry.

Petro stresses a national-industrial rather than socialist track, citing South Korea rather than neighboring Venezuela as a model for development. He rightly notes that the country’s myopic insistence on free trade and the export of primary products are more likely to promote instability than development. Uniquely to the region, Petro’s nationalism has a green tint. In his view, the statism of leaders such as Chavez and AMLO merely alter the character of resource dependency at the cost of the environment. Surprisingly, Petro’s opponent largely agrees on several key points.

On first glance, “el ingeniero,” as many of his supporters call Hernandez for his career in civil engineering, is easy to write off. His anti-corruption rhetoric likens him to hollow corruption fighters such as AMLO, Jair Bolsonaro, and Nayib Bukele. Beneath the façade of anti-corruption, however, lies a brilliant and unorthodox businessman and politician.

As a businessman, Hernandez amassed a fortune of over 100 million U.S. dollars building housing for the poor in the Santander capital of Bucaramanga. His financial success, however, came at a horrible personal cost. Hernandez’s father and daughter were kidnapped by the FARC and ELN, his daughter presumably murdered by the latter guerrillas. No doubt these events influenced his no vote in the plebiscite for the 2016 peace accords, though he now says he is in favor of implementing the agreement and negotiating with the still-active ELN.

Hernandez took an interest in local politics and served several terms on the Bucaramanga city council during the 1990s and 2000s. Years later in 2015, he won the mayorship of Bucaramanga in a surprise upset as an independent running on an anti-corruption platform.

Known for his foul-mouthed diatribes against corrupt or uncooperative city councilors, Hernandez has scaled back the give and take politics of his predecessors. Unsurprisingly, his term suffered strained relations with a city council that refused to approve most of his projects. In a televised meeting, the mayor famously slapped a city councilor, allegedly for soliciting a bribe. Like Petro, Hernandez was temporarily removed from office over the incident and has since referred to the affair as “an exercise in branding.”

In the end, Hernandez’s mayorship did not live up to its most audacious promises and outright failed in some areas, such as crime. Most notably, the staple of the engineer’s 2015 campaign was a promise to build over 20,000 affordable homes for the city’s poorest. Lacking support from the city council, this did not come to fruition.

Still, Hernandez’s administration has some accomplishments to show for itself. By the end of his term, the mayor could tout meaningful investments in public education, improved infrastructure in poor neighborhoods, and a budget surplus slashed from a colossal deficit. His populist, no-nonsense style moreover endeared him to much of the city, leaving him with an over 80 percent approval rating by the end of his term in 2019.

From there, Hernandez carefully cultivated his run for the presidency in 2022, collecting signatures for his campaign as an independent, running the rounds on national media, and organizing a sophisticated social-media operation through Facebook Live and TikTok. The fact that for so long, the country’s political and journalistic classes had written the engineer off as a cantankerous buffoon allowed him to largely escape media scrutiny.

Remarkably, Rodolfismo has been consistently unsectarian. While he is often compared to Donald Trump because of his age and crude language, Hernandez has thus far avoided demonizing swathes of voters or ideological camps, something that also distinguishes him from Petro.

Note, our blond septuagenarian is not bereft of crass statements. These, however, such as the claim that migrant Venezuelan women are walking "baby factories,” are more liable to make ordinary Colombians laugh than panic. Instead of excoriating the perennial boogiemen of fascism, communism, bigotry, or what have you, Hernandez focuses his ire on the “conniving thieves” of Colombia’s political class.

Thus, Rodolfismo has the benefit of being able to appeal to voters of virtually any political stripe. Among his numerous campaign promises, he pledges to: (1) reduce the number of seats in Congress; (2) admit failure in the war on drugs and erect centers for safe drug consumption and rehabilitation; (3) reduce the VAT tax from 19 percent to 10 percent; and (4) construct a superprison sweatshop comprised of prisoners from Colombia’s massive carceral population.

Realistically, many of Hernandez’s proposals are profoundly unserious, making it hard to gauge his sincerity. Like AMLO in Mexico, Hernandez has pledged to hold daily, 7 a.m. press conferences and cut back on government amenities in a bid towards austerity. On corruption, the most realistic of his promises are to reward informants with up to 20 percent of funds recovered from corrupt contracts. A good idea potentially, but difficult to execute.

Nonetheless, the engineer’s folksy demeanor and skill at excoriating the country’s failed leaders, from President Duque to the hackneyed marionettes of his presidential opponents, is nothing if not endearing. Lacking the respective stigmas of leftism and Uribismo, Hernandez can successfully appeal to voters hungry for change as well as those that are populist but fearful of leftism. This puts Petro in a bit of a bind as, theoretically, the pool of voters for him to draw from is limited in the run-off.

The night of the vote, Federico Gutierrez (perhaps the most ridiculed by Hernandez) endorsed his former rival before votes had finished counting citing the threat of Petro. Theoretically, between Hernandez’s 28 percent and Gutierrez’s 24 percent, the engineer should be a shoo-in for the presidency. In a race between two outsiders, however, the name of the game is anti-politics. As increasing numbers of the very same parties, presidents and business interests line up behind the apparently less threatening Hernandez, the more competitive his opponent becomes. Wisely, former President Uribe has remained uncharacteristically silent since May, at long last cognizant that his contributions help rather than harm Petro.

Predictably, the machinery of Petrismo has taken to branding Hernandez as Uribismo’s Plan B, and highlighted an ongoing corruption investigation from his time as mayor. Hernandez himself maintains (as he has throughout the campaign) that he is open to endorsements but will not revise campaign proposals or negotiate positions in government. In short, as polls tighten, June’s run-off looks to be nail-biter. Ironically, the election could well be decided by the few middle- and upper-class voters repulsed by the malas costumbres (bad manners) of both candidates.

On that note, respective fears of authoritarianism have some grounding. Petro was previously a supporter of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuela regime, though he has since become a consistent critic. Hernandez, too, has expressed admiration for controversial figures such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Unlike Chavez or Bukele, however, neither candidate stands to control a majority in Congress, and both will face stiff opposition at various levels. More troubling are the threats of popular (AMLO or Bukele style) and unpopular (Pedro Castillo) dysfunction, as well as establishment cooptation and instability (the status quo).

Optimistically, perhaps a President Hernandez could successfully bully the Colombian establishment in a direction more attuned to the country’s national interests rather than those of foreign investors. Ironically, recall that regardless of the outcome, the loser of June’s run-off will assume a seat in the Senate. Might it be possible for a President Petro and Senator Hernandez to cooperate on shared priorities? If history is any indicator, we should not hold our breath.

Still, if nothing else, the elections of 2022 are, in no uncertain terms, historic. Colombians have offered an utter repudiation of a failing order. Time will tell what course it may bring.

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