Gustavo Petro
The Politicians of the Future and the Blockages of the Present
Recent times have given plenty of reason for pessimism. There have been many strong threats to three sources of stability and civility in social relations: democracy, peace and the minimum guarantee of ecological sustainability. The spirit of time, while degrading institutions, relations between citizens and the state and relations between states, also degrades relations between people in workplaces, communities and families and, finally, degrades relations between human life and non-human life, which we commonly call nature, as evidenced by the increasingly extreme and frequent extreme weather events.
But as is typical of humans, in the midst of the storm there are signs of calm, in the deepest tunnel of anguish there is hope in the light at the end of the tunnel, in the midst of oppression there is always someone who resists, in the midst of conformism there is always someone who says no, as the late singer of the anti-fascist resistance in Portugal, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, sang to us. In “dark times”, the title of a book by Hannah Arendt, we need to value everything that can rescue the dignity of human life. After all, the great enigma is that we exist instead of not existing. In a universe where so much had to coincide for particularly conscious beings to emerge, beings who are aware of the existence of their own consciousness and reflect on it.
In politics, the world has been sparse in providing us with leaders who arouse our particular admiration. The small politics of business and of current and permanent crises invites the emergence of minor, sometimes very minor, politicians. This third decade of the millennium has been particularly sparse and, for this reason, leaders who stand out deserve special attention.
In the current context, there are two possible types of competent politicians. The first type refers to politicians who manage the current politics imposed on them by national and international political forces in the best way possible. This should be the obligation of any good political leader in this day and age. To give examples, I think that, at a national level, the best example I know of is President Lula da Silva of Brazil, above all because he is doing so under the worst possible conditions (right-wing social and media hegemony and a mostly right-wing Congress). In terms of international politics, two competent Portuguese political leaders fall into this category: António Guterres, Secretary General of the UN and António Costa, President-elect of the European Council. Either of these politicians (we can only speculate about António Costa) can be considered a competent leader within the authorized field of manoeuvre granted to them. They are competent leaders in the management of the past because they preside over forms of national or international institutionality which, as I said, show signs of being on the verge of collapse, be it the collapse of democracy or the collapse of peace. They run the risk of being the gravediggers of the institutions they were elected to save.
For this reason, the spotlight should be on the other type of politician, the good politicians of the future, the politicians who dare to commit themselves publicly to issues that go beyond the scope of maneuver that national and international political forces want to impose on them. These are the politicians who use their position to expand the narrow scope of authorized freedoms. These politicians run serious risks precisely because of the civil and political disobedience that their practice entails.
For me, the most distinguished political leader in the world is Gustavo Petro, President of Colombia. I have known President Petro for many years, but I have to say that I was surprised when I read his speech at the first UN General Assembly he attended. It was the first time I had heard the president of a country speak with such technical competence and political conviction about the great taboo problem of our time: the likelihood of the sixth extinction, the extinction of the human species due to the ecological catastrophe that is approaching. He clearly showed that if we don’t stop consuming gas, oil and coal, humanity runs the risk of extinction.
We can imagine the threat this poses to all economic, political and financial interests and the powers that represent them. This is the issue most radically banned by the international political forces that control the world’s (and therefore the UN’s) political agenda on climate change and its rosary of regular and pointless COPs. This is the topic that par excellence goes beyond authorized freedoms because it calls into question the dominant capitalist and neo-colonialist (dis)order. It was one of the most important speeches delivered in the UN’s large auditorium since its foundation.
From that moment on, I felt that Petro was a politician marked by the dominant powers of the world, a target to be shot. They gave him a little more time, hoping that his speech would be a fleeting manifestation, a passing vanity of a new politician on the international scene wanting to make a name for himself. The truth is that Gustavo Petro has maintained the same speech at every international meeting he has attended, and he has done so with increasing skill and vehemence. As a result, he has had a few moments of friction with some of his most important continental allies, particularly Lula da Silva.
His most recent and incisive speech took place on 27 September at the congress organized by the constitutional court in the city of Manizales. It’s an anthological speech. I quote a particularly important step:
“At the Davos (Switzerland) meeting two years ago, to which I was invited, the people who went there, who call themselves the rich of the world, super-rich, they now call them billionaires, with a big “b”, because of the enormous amount of money they have accumulated, expressed in their own words that humanity was experiencing a pluricrisis, that’s the name that was invented: the pluricrisis. Several crises at the same time.
We had just gone through Covid, the disease, there was at that time, as we suffered here in Colombia, a food shortage that led to an increase in hunger around the world due to the price of inputs and food itself on a global scale, it caused inflation in Colombia during the transfer of government, we were living through the war that was starting in Ukraine, we were living through the climate collapse, we are still living through it, and it was considered as more the crisis and economic stagnation. The five crises that they elucidated in the middle of their social club, which through the media are expressed as the ideas of the people who have accumulated the most capital in the world in relation to humanity.
Five crises at the same time which, in my opinion, are related and which deserve a detailed analysis of each of them, which we couldn’t do right now, but because they are interrelated, why war?, why hunger?, why poverty and the social inequality that goes with it?, why economic stagnation? They are related to climate collapse, which I no longer call a crisis.
Climate collapse
The name has changed, because a few years ago it was called climate change…But since the burning of the Amazon rainforest began this month, the concept has to be changed from crisis to collapse, because the burning of the Amazon rainforest, in science, is one of the points of no return, a concept they have constructed, which we should never have reached and which we are already experiencing. This issue is not discussed in politics, it is not in the political debate, neither on the right nor on the left, that the problem of climate collapse comes up in human discussion.
It’s science, and when science starts a debate it’s because politics and the systems of ideas that surround politics, political discussion, have been completely left behind, they’ve become outdated. I would add economics, my profession, to politics, because it is economics that generates the crisis or the climate collapse.
And this, let’s say, is the central point of this issue, it’s not like the last five extinctions of life on the planet, which we’ve already had five of, all for climatic reasons, all of them. Some species is saved and reproduces the next life cycle until a new climate shock comes along, it disappears and something makes a new species appear, a new life system. It’s already changed five times and this is the sixth time this has happened on planet Earth.”
While President Petro was talking about the point of no return in ecological collapse, his political enemies were thinking of another point of no return: ending his presidential term through an institutional coup d’état, of the kind that overthrew or disabled other progressive presidents in Latin America from 2009 onwards: Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2009), Fernando Lugo in Paraguay (2012), Dilma Rousseff (2016) and Lula da Silva in Brazil (2018), Evo Morales in Bolivia (2019), Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2020). Just over a week after Gustavo Petro’s speech in Manizales, the National Electoral Council accused President Petro of fraud in the financing of his 2022 election campaign, a charge that could lead to the loss of his presidential mandate by the Chamber of Representatives.
There are many national reasons for this mobilization of Petro’s political enemies, but let there be no doubt that the lawfare or legal war that is now beginning (or is manifesting itself because it has been announced for some time) will be followed by mediafare or media war and that the international repercussions that will be given to it are due to the need to silence a voice that was gaining too much credibility with too many people. A voice and a message that capitalism has understood better than anyone: Petro’s proposal implies the end of capitalism and neo-colonialism as we know them today.
International capital has remarkable historical experience in knowing how to deceive and divide the left, and it will do so in this case. But historical experience also shows us that it is much more difficult to fool the people. And in this case, the Colombian people know from their own experience, in their communities, in their forests, in their rivers, the catastrophic consequences that Petro is talking about. If the Colombian people rise up in support of Petro, the coup will fail. ¡No pasarán!