An elderly man, lounging on the sofa of a yacht, contemplating women in bikinis surrounded by guys with smartphones. The last images of Rodolfo Hernández before the second round of the Colombian election were a tropical replay of the “bunga-bunga” nightmare of Silvio Berlusconi, the TV presenter who became prime minister in the 1990s and plunged Italy into nihilism. His burlesque campaign has the power to reduce Colombian democracy to an impromptu beauty contest.
Confronted for the first time since its independence in 1819 with a transformative election, which ends a cycle of alternation between the same elites, Colombia has gone through the last two weeks in torment. The right has put its ghosts in the closet — the now unpopular Álvaro Uribe, the dominant figure in national politics, has been erased — and has staked everything on “petrophobia”, fanning the anti-communist ghost and spreading traps, starting with the innocuous but compromising “petrovideos”, name of leaked images of Petro’s campaign that flooded the national media.
The decaying presidency of Iván Duque has tried to reignite social conflicts by arbitrarily detaining young people involved in the Colombian spring 2019 protests and warning of the risk of riots if the left is defeated. Petro responded to the authoritarian escalation by integrating centrists and conservatives into his campaign, in the image of former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus and Alejandro Gaviria, former minister of Juan Manuel Santos.
He fled the armored vehicles and took refuge among the popular sectors of Colombia, spending days and nights with fishermen on the Magdalena River or in the Afro-descendant neighborhoods of Quibdó, near the Pacific coast. In his last public interventions, he fulfilled the ritual of providing guarantees, from which the right is almost always exonerated, assuming fiscal responsibility and respect for the Constitution. However, his questioning of the electoral process, based on weak arguments, left something to be desired.
The conversion of the former guerrilla into guarantor of the institutions was decisive to guarantee victory in the second round. The narrow victory increases the responsibilities of the future president. Petro will have to form a government with all Democrats, contain any protests against the electoral process and transform popular mobilization into a government project.
The electoral outcome in Colombia, the continent’s third largest economy, a member of the OECD and an ally of NATO, will change the destiny of Latin America. Petro’s election accelerates the programmatic renewal of the left on the continent, underpinning Gabriel Boric’s victory in Chile. It is with him and Petro that the future Brazilian government will have to reinvent regional integration, create a strategy to combat global warming that reflects the priorities of the South and negotiate in unison industrial and energy cooperation with China.
Two years before an election that could define the future of American democracy, Latin America didn’t have a minute to lose with yet another adventurer.
