66 - An Upcoming Choice in Colombia: A Trump or a Sanders?
Imagine Sen. Bernie Sanders facing off against former President Donald Trump. That is the choice Colombia’s 38 million voters have when they go to the polls Sunday to decide their new president. The first round gave left-leaning Gustavo Petro 41 percent of the total vote; Trump-like populist Rodolfo Hernandez, a Tik-Tok campaigner, 28 percent; and John McCain-like Federico Gutierrez, 24 percent.
Petro, 62, was mayor of Bogota, the Colombian capital, for eight years. Hernandez, 77, was the mayor of Bucaramanga, a small colonial city in Colombia’s north, for three years. Gutierrez was mayor of Medellin, once home of a feared cocaine cartel. He was the law and order candidate, and was backed by outgoing President Ivan Duque. Washington preferred Gutierrez, snubbing Petro.
Both final presidential candidates are anti-establishment personalities; both seek to up-end Colombian politics as usual. But they are otherwise in no way similar. Respected opinion polls show the race neck and neck, with Hernandez (coming from almost nowhere, like Trump in 2016, and surprising the political class) with a slight lead. It appears that those who voted for Gutierrez, and fear a leftist, will now back Hernandez Sunday.
A boastful millionaire real estate developer, Hernandez is campaigning hard against corruption (of which Colombia has much) and promises if elected immediately to declare an emergency so that he can annul democratic procedures and lock up all of those corrupt Colombians. Thus, like Presidents Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Hernandez seeks to ride populist disgust with crime and malfeasance in Colombia to autocratic victory, and then to rule as Trump wished he could have ruled in the United States and the others have succeeded in dominating their own countries.
Hernandez is already on trial for corruption in Bucaramanga, accused of steering contracts to favorites. In another pending court case, he is charged with violating trade union rights. The parallels with Trump are close, if not exact. So are his loud-mouth statements, his physical attacks on opponents, and his disdain for the law.
Colombians are beyond annoyed with rising prices, high unemployment levels that have now reached 12.12 percent, rising educational costs, massive immigration from collapsed next-door Venezuela, and increased crime and violence. From 2020 to 2021, Colombia’s nearly 14,000 homicides meant a big jump from 24 to 27 killings per 100,000 persons. [Venezuela in 2021 led the globe with 83 homicides per 100,000, followed by Papua New Guinea (80), South Africa (77), Afghanistan (76), and Honduras (75)]. Canada almost reached 2 per 100,000 in 2021. Two revolutionary groups still trouble the countryside, and narcotics gangs also kill.
Petro campaigned as a rumpled believer in climate change and alternative energy, seeking to transition Colombia away from the burning of fossil fuels to a greater reliance on solar, wind, and hydropower. Yet, Colombia derives nearly 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings from coal and oil; industrial leaders are not supporting Petro.
As a committed socialist, Petro promises to tax the richest 4,000 Colombians and to combat the massive unequal nature of incomes in Colombia. According to World Bank data, Colombia’s Gini-coefficient number is 51 (100 equals completely unequal), meaning that the top 20 percent of Colombians receive the bulk of the nation’s per capita GDP. The most unequal country in the world is South Africa, at 63. Brazil’s number is 49, Canada’s 29.
Petro’s failure to reach 51 percent of the vote in the first electoral round was based on widespread worries that his government would seize companies and private property. He was likened unfairly to Venezuela’s ruinous socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Petro wants to reform and improve Colombia’s health care and pension systems. He also attacks rampant corruption in Colombia, but without the apocalyptic and unrealistic claims of Hernandez. In 2021, according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Colombia ranked among the very corrupt culprits, in 87th place of 180 countries. In Latin America, Uruguay was 18th, Costa Rica 39th, and Brazil 96th. Canada was 13th and the United States 27th.
The outcome Sunday hinges on whether a majority prefers, and is prepared to risk, a drastic pivot away from privilege, and against support for the nation’s existing class structure, and endorses Petro’s striking modernization of the state. The voters’ only other choice – like those in the Philippines who welcomed President Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown and random killing of supposed drug peddlers – is to hope that the extreme methods endorsed by Hernandez will actually improve the lives of poor and abused Colombians. Hernandez also seeks to legalize cocaine, but never says how.
Right-wing populistic power-wielding by over-confident egotistic leaders elsewhere, such as in Brazil, has accomplished little, not even against corruption. Indeed, corruption and kleptocracy flourishes everywhere such a regime has installed itself. Colombia may be next.
This is a fuller and more detailed version of an article by me on the Colombian election that appears today in the Globe & Mail, Toronto