It’s Hard to Be a Leftist Leader in Colombia

Bogotá—Manuel Martínez, a technician in Colombia’s Finance Ministry, is under no illusions about the immense challenges his boss, Gustavo Petro, faces as the country’s first leftist president. “The space for change is very limited. We try to understand where the cracks are and push on those that will bear the most fruit.” This is an apt—if mixed—metaphor of not only Martínez’s work, which focuses on how to finance Colombia’s “energy transition,” but also Petro’s first two years in office, a time marked by some notable successes—and several failures.

Petro’s June 2022 victory shook Colombia, which has been ruled by conservative forces for most of its 200-year republican history. Petro’s path to office was atypical. At age 17, he joined an urban guerrilla force, the 19th of April Movement. This force demobilized in the late 1980s, and Petro helped convert it into the M-19 Democratic Alliance political party. After stints in Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives and Senate, Petro served as mayor of Bogotá. He came second in the 2018 presidential election, which Iván Duque, the far-right disciple of ex-president Álvaro Uribe, won. In 2022 Petro prevailed alongside his running mate, Francia Marquez, a human rights and environmental activist and the first Afro-Colombian vice president.

Since taking office on August 7, 2022, Petro has pursued an ambitious agenda, with mixed results. One reason for this is that Petro’s Historic Pact, a coalition of left and center-left parties, has never held a congressional majority. To form one, Petro brought centrist and right-wing parties into his first government. This allowed him to pass a progressive tax reform in November 2022, his most important legislative victory to date. The law increased taxes on Colombia’s top earners and established higher royalties on the extraordinary profits in the extractive industries. Colombia’s Finance Ministry estimated that the new law would increase government revenues by 1.3 percent of GDP in 2023 and 2024. Petro’s grand coalition fell apart in April 2023 amid the president’s push for multiple reforms simultaneously, including a divisive overhaul of the health sector.

Many criticized Petro for this strategy. A government official, who requested anonymity to speak openly, told me, “It was an error to schedule all the reforms at the same time in Congress, and the health reform was the hardest.” The crux of the issue was Petro’s push to increase the state’s role, and diminish that of the private sector, in financing and providing healthcare, with centrist parties strongly opposing this. Without a congressional majority, Petro has been forced to compromise significantly to pass any legislation. According to this official, “Now reforms are advancing but with many concessions. For instance, the labor and pension reforms. They both started out as good, progressive reforms, but to pass them there have been huge concessions, making them less good.”

César Bowley Castillo, a scholar of Colombian social movements who is from Bogotá and pursuing a sociology PhD at UCLA, feels Petro “did the right thing by breaking the coalition,” since it led to a more ideologically coherent government. But he agrees that Petro’s reforms have been watered down and “designed to be passed by this Congress. Doing these in-between things points to the contradictions of having a reformist government under capitalism.”

Bowley Castillo used a pension reform passed in June as an example. “It isn’t progressive. It provides a very small pension for the vast majority who don’t have a pension, but instead of taking from the top, it reduces pensions slightly for [middle-class] people like university professors just beginning in their positions.” Despite his misgivings, Bowley Castillo said, “The pension reform could be significant. It’ll provide a couple hundred thousand pesos a month for the poor. And it’s good politically. If your grandma gets a pension that she’s never had before,” that should help build Petro’s base.

One of Petro’s most ambitious initiatives is Total Peace, in which the government simultaneously negotiates with all the major armed forces operating in Colombia. Through this policy, enshrined in law in November 2022, Petro has sought to end the armed conflict that has wracked Colombia for decades and left hundreds of thousands dead. The policy follows the 2016 peace agreement between Colombia’s government and its largest guerilla force, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), brokered by ex-president Juan Manuel Santos, and departs from the hawkish approach of Santos’s successor, Iván Duque. As noted by critics and an often-hostile press, Total Peace has failed to end violence in areas like Cauca, which has a large Indigenous and Afro-Colombian population who have faced decades of dispossession and violence, often related to illegal extractive industries. Yet at the same time, the policy has achieved important successes, such as a significant reduction in injuries and deaths of state security forces from 2021 to 2024, and a yearlong ceasefire between the government and the National Liberation Army (ELN). The ceasefire ended August 3, and there is pressure on the government to renew it.

Reviews of Total Peace are mixed. As Bowley Castillo told me, while the policy has not yet succeeded, “we should recognize that it’s a totally different approach to anything that previous governments have done.” An anonymous government official commented, “It’s very ambitious to negotiate with all the armed groups all at once, and it could end well, or it could end badly.”

Like many leftist presidents, Petro has struggled with what many see as unrealistic expectations. This is particularly visible with respect to corruption, with Petro suffering from a recent scandal involving officials he placed in the state’s disaster management agency, which Colombia’s comptroller says has cost taxpayers at least $60 million. Bowley Castillo said, “This really hurts, because the left isn’t judged by the same standards as the right. The left is supposed to bring change, and so when there’s a corruption scandal, it’s devastating.”

Bowley Castillo also discussed the resistance Petro has faced from the press, business, and the judiciary. In December 2023, Colombia’s Constitutional Court “held that it was unconstitutional for Petro to charge taxes to gas and oil companies on top of the royalties that the companies pay for the right to drill for oil and pump the gas.” This reversed a key piece of the 2022 tax reform and deprived the government of significant revenue it had been counting on.

When asked to name Petro’s most significant achievements, several analysts I spoke with mentioned foreign affairs. Bowley Castillo said, “Petro’s been a leader on Palestine, and this has created space for other Latin American leaders to take similar stances. Petro has now stopped shipping Colombian gas to Israel. And he’s been a leader on climate. He’s also reestablished relations with Cuba and Venezuela, something no previous president would have done.” Lala Peñaranda, the Latin America coordinator for Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, who is based in and from Bogotá, concurred, highlighting Petro’s policies on Gaza, Venezuela, and climate change as among his biggest accomplishments.

Petro’s stance on Venezuela is particularly noteworthy, as he has tried to straddle a challenging middle ground of recognizing and working with Maduro on issues of mutual concern, without shying away from criticizing Maduro. This position differentiates Petro from other “radical” leftists in Latin America, such as Argentine President Evo Morales and Bolivian President Luis Arce, who have unambiguously supported Maduro, and moderate leftists, like Chile’s Gabriel Boríc, who have adopted a sharply critical view toward the Venezuelan leader. Petro’s stance is clear in his handling of the disputed July 28 Venezuelan election, which was marred by irregularities and is widely seen as fraudulent. Petro has not rejected the results outright but taken a stand similar to Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexico’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, expressing reservations about the result and demanding that Venezuela’s National Electoral Council produce precinct-level voting records and allow for an independent audit. Petro has also called for dialogue between the government and opposition and for an end to US sanctions.

Beyond his foreign policy, Petro is best known abroad for his stance on climate, especially his pledge to stop new production of oil within Colombia. Steven Schwartz, an assistant professor of anthropology at Colorado College who researches renewable energy in Colombia, said, “He’s the first Latin American president who isn’t an oil freak.” And Schwartz added, “He’s not talking about green capitalism, but about a just transition.”

Not everyone is as enthusiastic. César Loza Arenas, president of Colombia’s oil workers’ union, which supports Petro, told me, “We’re with the energy transition…but we can’t stop investing in oil and gas.” Oil, Loza Arena said, is Colombia’s leading export. He noted that stopping domestic oil production would minimally reduce global production but would devastate Colombia’s finances. As a result, Loza Arenas favors a gradual energy transition.

The difficulties of translating Petro’s climate policy into action are a central preoccupation for Manuel Martínez in his work in the finance ministry. “The real possibilities for climate financing in Colombia are not in our hands. There can’t be a substantial increase in climate financing without touching the debt. We must talk about the international financial structure.” Martínez proudly noted that Colombia has been in discussions with Kenya, Germany, and the UN economic commissions on Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa, about reforming the international financial order, with attention to the nexus between climate, debt, and nature.

While it contrasts with the right-wing image of Petro as a flame-throwing anti-capitalist, Martínez insists that “there’s no energy transition without the private sector. We need private banks. And there’s an interest by the private sector to invest, but the cost of capital is the problem.” Colombia currently has high interest rates, inhibiting private investment. (For most of 2023, Colombia’s rate was over 13 percent, well over twice the US rate; following multiple cuts in 2024, Colombia’s current rate is a still-high 10.75 percent.)

Another significant challenge to Colombia’s energy transition is what Martínez calls “the neoliberal structure of the state.” This is most visible in the Fiscal Rule, established in 2011, which sets strict budgetary limits. According to Martínez, “The Fiscal Rule means the entire structure of the state has fiscal responsibility as a law. This is extremely rigid, and it impedes any thinking about doing a developmentalist project that promotes investment in strategic areas, and I don’t just mean climate, but also reindustrialization.”

Martínez explained that this law is “the way that large investors, risk agencies, and foreign capital exercise control over the state. If countries don’t comply, there are penalties, but complying means you have to abandon any chance for change.” There has been discussion of ending the Fiscal Rule or creating “a green fiscal rule, where green projects wouldn’t be bound by the fiscal rule.” But Martínez said, “It’s very hard to change right now, because we don’t have the political capital.”

Petro’s first two years in office have been far from easy. His record reflects his own errors and the profound challenges of enacting progressive change in the Global South. Petro can, nonetheless, point to notable accomplishments. But with presidential reelection prohibited and Colombia’s current Congress locked in until 2026 elections, Petro will face an uphill battle to build upon and deepen these accomplishments in his final two years in office.

Can we count on you?

In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.

We’ve already seen events that fill us with both dread and cautious optimism—throughout it all, The Nation has been a bulwark against misinformation and an advocate for bold, principled perspectives. Our dedicated writers have sat down with Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders for interviews, unpacked the shallow right-wing populist appeals of J.D. Vance, and debated the pathway for a Democratic victory in November.

Stories like these and the one you just read are vital at this critical juncture in our country’s history. Now more than ever, we need clear-eyed and deeply reported independent journalism to make sense of the headlines and sort fact from fiction. Donate today and join our 160-year legacy of speaking truth to power and uplifting the voices of grassroots advocates.

Throughout 2024 and what is likely the defining election of our lifetimes, we need your support to continue publishing the insightful journalism you rely on.

Thank you,
The Editors of The Nation

Gabriel Hetland

Gabriel Hetland is an associate professor of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at University at Albany and author of Democracy on the Ground: Local Politics in Latin America’s Left Turn.

More from The Nation

They have been lionized, targeted, exploited, and oppressed for decades. And they have stories to tell.

Nevin Kallepalli

The growing visibility and power of Indigenous movements have created enormous potential for fundamentally changing our world in a positive fashion.

Aviva Chomsky

Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestine Olympic Committee, says sports can be a nonviolent tool to resist occupation.

Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff

Paris will almost certainly be remembered as a successful Olympic site. Such recollections, however, will leave out those who suffered under its weight.

Jules Boykoff and Dave Zirin

If we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it soon—as in right now—it’s going to be too late. 

Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox