On 19 June 2022, Gustavo Petro became the first left candidate ever to win the presidency in Colombia, defeating the right-wing real-estate magnate Rodolfo Hernández by 50.4 to 47.4 per cent in the second round.footnote¹ The turnout, at 58 per cent, was the highest for a quarter-century. Petro’s electoral bloc, the Pacto Histórico, had already won 48 out of 268 congressional seats in the March 2022 legislative elections. To set these victories in perspective, it’s necessary to grasp the nature of the power bloc that ruled Colombia for over 150 years under an oligarchic Conservative–Liberal duopoly, which then gave way to the hard-right counterinsurgency regime of Álvaro Uribe from 2002. With Washington’s backing, Uribe intensified the Colombian Army’s long-running war against guerrilla forces in the hinterlands; casualties, according to the country’s Truth Commission, include some 450,566 dead and another 121,768 ‘disappeared’, as well as 50,770 kidnapped and 8 million displaced, the vast majority poor peasants. Uribe and his successors—Juan Manuel Santos (2010–18) and, especially, Iván Duque (2018–22)—also backed harsh neoliberal measures against the urban poor.

The electoral victories of Petro and his Vice-President Francia Márquez—daughter of Afro-Colombian miners and a courageous campaigner for their rights—built upon the huge urban protests that have rocked the country in the last few years. Millions of protesters, los nadies, ‘the nobodies’—many of them young, working-class people from urban peripheries with minimal education and access to public services—took to the streets, paralyzing Colombia’s cities again and again in 2018, 2019 and 2021, confronting the riot police with exemplary courage, stamina and discipline, in order to bring the ‘horrible night’—a phrase from the national anthem—of uribismo to a close. The oligarchic media tried and failed to label the protesters as arsonists and looters. Instead, students and youth from working class and peripheral neighbourhoods were demanding alternatives to Colombia’s lockdown neoliberalism, violent patriarchy, narcotics economy and organized crime.

Petro has pledged to improve public health, education—tuition-free college, forgiveness of student debt—and pensions; to strengthen labour law, offer job prospects to the impoverished youth, fight racial and gender discrimination and mitigate endemic violence, poverty and environmental destruction in the mining, energy and agro-industrial zones, like those of the Pacific southwest where Márquez has been campaigning. As well as backing the green transition, pledging no new contracts for fossil-fuel extraction, Petro has vowed to revive the faltering peace process with former farc insurgents and to implement the Colombian Truth Commission’s recommendations for talks with the still-untamed eln. His government is normalizing bilateral ties and migration flows with neighbouring Venezuela. The Colombian Ambassador to Venezuela has met with Maduro and said the two presidents will meet before the end of the year.

Given Petro’s guerrilla past in the 1980s, his staunch support for the social-democratic articles of the 1991 Constitution, his announcement that he would revise free-trade agreements and his plans to prohibit the aerial spraying of exfoliates, such as glyphosate, over the coca regions—a us-led policy which has driven small farmers off their land and into the hands of organized crime—Washington took the election result relatively well. Biden’s Secretary of State called Petro the day after the election and, as the State Department put it, ‘discussed how the us–Colombia integrated counternarcotics strategy’ aligned with Petro’s goal to diminish rural violence.footnote² Juan González, Biden’s Cartagena-born National Security Advisor on Latin America, and Samantha Power, now at usaid, were more explicit. In August, González told an audience of 2,000 businesspeople at the annual congress of the National Association of Industrialists (andi) in Cartagena: ‘Forty years ago, the us would have done everything it could to avoid having Petro elected. Once in power, we would have done everything to sabotage his government.’ Today, however, in a ‘spirit of dialogue’, Washington would help the Petro government to ‘reconfigure’ the key issues—anti-drug policy, security, peace—‘according to the interests of both nations’. On the same trip, Power was blunter: ‘we need to have a deep discussion in terms of delimiting the programme that we are going to implement together.’footnote³

Petro has been more outspoken than many leaders of the contemporary Latin American left about the character of the ruling bloc in his country. As he told El País last year, the Colombian electoral system has been ‘co-opted by de facto regional totalitarianisms, where the population lives in fear and candidates are under the control of those who have the weapons and the money—the Colombian mafia operating within the institutions of the state.’footnote⁴ Few have denounced the rule of these narco-merchant-landlords, who control swathes of the country through armed clientelism, more publicly or effectively than Petro. Colombia’s violently conservative society and politics have long seemed to mark its history off from neighbouring countries like Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela or Peru. The temptation now is to see Colombia as having finally caught up with the second wave of Latin America’s ‘pink tide’, or to align its youth-led, anti-neoliberal uprisings with those that in 2018–21 swept cities in Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Panama—pushed back by repression and Covid, only to resurface following the pandemic, which took a greater toll in Latin America and the Caribbean than any other world region.

Both perspectives highlight important commonalities. This essay, however, will seek to ground the meaning of Petro’s electoral victory in the context of Colombian history, before going on to consider the wider regional landscape. By the late 1990s, a crisis of political representation among traditional parties was widespread in Latin America. Yet only in Colombia had the oligarchic parties of the nineteenth century maintained their grip over the electoral system, excluding new popular forces from independent parliamentary representation of any significant sort down to the end of the twentieth—an exclusionary system which was also marked by repeated episodes of civil war and factional slaughter, scarring the country in the 1890s–1900s, the 1940s–50s and the 1980s–90s—when counterinsurgency warfare allowed the narco-linked right to take power as part of a broad coalition in 2002 under Uribe, marginalizing the remnants of the old Liberal-Conservative dyarchy. In what follows, then, while we adopt a hemispheric view of us–Colombia relations—especially of transnational conglomerates, investment flows, narcotics, finance and trade, licit as well as illicit—for the most part we look inward, to endogenous factors, to explain the Petro–Márquez victory and examine what it may portend.

To challenge Colombia’s entrenched social structure will be a tall order. Yet changes are afoot. Will they prove substantive and lasting, in terms of state institutions and the redistribution of wealth, as opposed to symbolic and ephemeral? Will they spur Colombia’s far right to re-organize under new leadership? Will it be possible to alter the structure of the extractive export economy, in order to redress Colombia’s extreme concentrations of wealth? Will Petro reform the us-backed Colombian police and military, or rein in the neo-paramilitary organizations operative through much of the country? Can he protect the rights of citizens to assemble, protest, express opinions and vote without fear of homicidal state and para-state repression? Or will continuities, particularly in the elephantine bureaucracies of repression, but also in finance, education, land and health, outweigh changes in society? At this stage, we can sketch only partial answers to these questions and offer educated guesses to those that will unfold over time, in the context of broader regional developments, especially in Brazil and Venezuela. We are at once hopeful, in light of Petro and Márquez’s road to the Casa de Nariño, traced below, and sceptical, because of the powerful forces they are up against—and the mixed messages already sent by cabinet appointments and congressional alliances.