Petro government in Colombia confronts lawfare, Alvaro Uribe’s return, and U.S. intervention

Colombian President Gustavo Petro must remain alert: Between domestic lawfare, the return of a far-right rival, and the threat of U.S. intervention, his government is under pressure on multiple fronts. | Ivan Valencia / AP

President Gustavo Petro’s Historic Pact government, in power since 2022, is a first in Colombia’s history. No other party ever aspired to serve all Colombians. Its existence depends on push-back against Colombia’s peculiar mix of corporations, big landowners, financial moguls, and narco-traffickers. Difficulties are cropping up now that call for sharpened resistance.

Prospects for re-election of the Historic Pact in the 2026 elections are not bright. A soft coup is playing out in the form of “lawfare.” That’s the tool establishment forces have used in recent years to remove left-leaning presidents in Paraguay, Honduras, Brazil (two of them), Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru.

U.S. officials are comfortable, it seems, with restoration of the old order in Colombia. This article should be seen as a “heads-up” to anti-imperialist activists in the United States—a warning of what could be to come.

Criteria for defining a political party in Colombia have changed, far in advance of the upcoming elections. In response, and also for tactical reasons, Petro has sought to convert the Historic Pact from a “convergence” of political parties into a single party with the same name.

At its congress in November 2024, the Patriotic Union (UP) party, “broke the ice” to advance the proposal. The Colombian Communist Party (PCC) followed suit. These parties joined with Petro’s Human Colombia Party (Colombia Humana), the Democratic Pole, and the new “Progressive Movement” to establish the new party at a meeting Dec. 17 in Bogota.

Election rules had called for political parties obtaining less than 15% of the vote in a national election to lose their “judicial personhood” and no longer be able to participate in elections. They applied to each party in the old coalition. An observer explains that formation of a single, larger party provides the smaller entities with protection against “the sustained victimization by the establishment against parties and movements of the Colombian left.”

(The UP and PCC had been granted judicial personhood as a token of reparations for past oppression. For two decades after the PCC and demobilized FARC guerrillas established the UP in 1985, the two parties experienced wholesale massacre of their members.)

The new Historic Pact Party will “formulate a proposal to create a broad front with allied sectors and movements that are not part of the unified party.” It will choose candidates for election to Congress and the presidency. The five smaller parties joining the Pact will retain their own programs, activities, and identities.

Appealing to voters

Meanwhile, there are the two kinds of difficulties looming over the Historic Pact’s quest for electoral victory in 2026. One is about peace in Colombia, and the other relates to the government’s mixed record on social and political reforms.

Candidate Petro committed his government to making good on the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Colombia’s government. Implementation, however, has stumbled: 1,702 social leaders and 500 former insurgents have been killed since 2016.

Improvement under Petro’s watch has been nil. Killers took the lives of 188 social leaders in 2023 and 172 more in 2024. His government does get credit, though, for pursuing peace negotiations with the ELN and other irregular military formations.

But peace in Colombia took a hit in Medellin on Dec. 27. Speaking to reporters, Alvaro Uribe, right-wing extremist and former president (2002-10), announced he was running for president in 2026. He praised “Operation Orion,” which began as a two-day-long assault against insurgents by soldiers, police, and paramilitaries in Medellin in 2002. It finished six months later with dozens of civilians having been killed and dozens more disappeared.

The upshot is that Petro in 2026 will be confronting Colombia’s political personality emblematic for pursuing internal war. Fortified by widespread public nervousness about violence, and backed by Colombia’s oligarchy, Uribe has a lock on support from the national security crowd.

As for appealing to the broader public, the government so far has fallen short in fashioning a reform program. Colombia’s Congress is hostile territory. The Historic Pact in 2022 had itself won only 20 seats in the Senate and 24 in the House of Representatives, while the Congress as a whole has 108 Senate seats and 188 seats for Representatives. A commentator reports that the government’s “plans of broad unity [in the Congress] crumbled rapidly.”

The opposition blocked the government’s proposed labor and tax reforms. Plus, “healthcare got shipwrecked in its passage through Congress, becoming the government’s most notable defeat.”

The Senate in June 2024 approved a watered-down government proposal for “guaranteeing the fundamental right to education.” The Congress in July approved pension reform legislation that for the first time enables two million poverty-stricken senior citizens to receive financial assistance.

Petro’s government used administrative action to acquire hundreds of thousands of acres of land and distribute them to “small farmer, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities.” Later on, a constitutional court invalidated the government’s land purchases. The government on its own created 13 new campesino reserve zones, reduced deforestation in the Amazon region, and cut back on extraction of fossil fuels.

African-descended Francia Márquez, Colombia’s vice president, serves as Minister of Equality and Equity. She and her colleagues, not the Congress, have devised programs aimed at consolidating guarantees of rights for Afro-Colombians, youth, sexually diverse people, and handicapped Colombians.

Lawfare on display

While re-election difficulties make up one dark cloud for the current government, lawfare is another. Its trail is convoluted.

Machinations by right-wing officials emerge out of government agencies. They are holdovers from previous conservative governments. The dominant media, invariably aligned with Colombia’s business class, provides an assist.

Colombia’s lawfare practitioners seek to render a progressive government dysfunctional, blunt the Petro government’s electoral appeal, and/or remove him from office. There are these instances as evidence:

• When Petro was serving as Bogota’s mayor, Alejandro Ordóñez of the prosecutor’s office (Procuraduría) in 2013 fined him, dismissed him, and prohibited him from holding public office for 15 years—all for moving trash collection from private hands to public control. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights invalidated the actions. Ordóñez also inflicted a $3 million fine against Petro for buying street sweepers that supposedly were unnecessary.
• Having charged Petro for receiving illegal campaign contributions from the Colombian Federation of Education Workers (FECODE) in 2022, Attorney General (Fiscalía General) Francisco Barbosa in 2023 ordered the union’s offices to be ransacked to collect evidence.
• Barbosa removed Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva from office because the official had fired a company monopolizing the supply of passports to the state and found another one. He then prosecuted Nicolás Petro, the president’s son, for allegedly appropriating campaign funds in 2022.
• When Barbosa ended his four-year term of office in February 2024, the Supreme Court of Justice refused to choose one of three candidates nominated by Petro to replace
• The National Electoral Council on Oct. 8, 2024, presented charges against Petro for failing to report financial contributions from FECODE (noted above) and from the Workers’ Trade Union (USO in its Spanish-language initials) to his 2022 campaign. The Council similarly charged the campaign’s treasurer and the Human Colombia and the Patriotic Union political parties.
• During 2023, the Council of State nullified the elections of three senators and one representative affiliated with the Historic Pact. Their alleged offense was “double militancy,” a term signifying past association with another party.

The U.S. hand

Then, there is the U.S. factor.

Colombia, the only Latin American ally of U.S forces in the Korean War, hosts U.S. military bases, provides military training to U.S. allies in the region, and facilitates the supply of mercenary soldiers to U.S. allies elsewhere in the world.

The U.S. government supplies Colombia’s military with weapons and intelligence. First and foremost, it has provided crucial assistance to Colombia’s internal wars against leftist insurgents and narco-traffickers.

Prominent people in Washington are once again closely watching what’s going on in Colombia.

Michael McCaul, chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, had this to say about the National Election Council’s investigation into Petro’s campaign financing:

“I am deeply concerned about credible allegations against Gustavo Petro and his presidential campaign. I fully support the Colombian institutions in their investigation of the matter. The truth must come out for the integrity of our bilateral relationship and for the good of the Colombian people.”

Summarizing from Colombia, analyst Horacio Duque sees governance there being exercised “by the oligarchic ultra-right to crush any tendency of reordering Colombian society [toward] fundamental human rights and democratic freedoms.”

Alvaro Uribe, Duque argues, seeks the “absolute domination of the state through prioritizing issues of security and control of the territories within the presidential campaign that is already taking shape.” Uribe would be exploiting “gaps, difficulties, frustrations, and obstacles confronting the current progressive government headed by President Gustavo Petro.”

For Colombians, the period between now and the 2026 elections is going to be a rough one.

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CONTRIBUTOR

W. T. Whitney Jr.

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, and lives in rural Maine.