President Gustavo Petro, an expert in war tactics, ambushes and counter-ambushes, has set off the alarm and has said that he feels that his Government is being cornered. These are big words coming from a left-wing leader who has imposed the political agenda in recent months and has maintained the initiative to get the country talking about whatever he, literally, felt like.
Feeling cornered, in political terms, is feeling tied up, without the ability to maneuver or initiative, to meet the proposed objectives. And Petro’s great objective is to leave a deep mark on the history of Colombia, transforming society, promoting reforms postponed for decades and fulfilling the most important dream of Colombians: the end of the war and the beginning of a long period of peace. total. Cornered, in this case, could be understood as a yellow light to avoid the total failure of an ideal country.
For this political project, Petro went to the guerrilla war with the M-19 in the eighties, participated in the successful peace process of the Barco Government in 1990, promoted the 1991 Constituent Assembly that promulgated the Constitution on December 4 July of that year, which paved the way for reconciliation in Colombia. Since then, he has been a protagonist in politics, risking life and freedom, in a permanent challenge to the dynamics of a polarized country incapable of silencing the guns, defeating corruption, defeating drug trafficking and overcoming the shameful indicators of poverty. and marginality that condemn more than half of the population to misery in a hypercentralized country.
That President Petro feels cornered and continues with his public denunciation that they are going to overthrow him, with a soft blow or a hard blow, sounds like a desperate cry for help from the president so that the people come to his defense. The person calling for mass mobilization is a left-wing ruler, who has his sights set on the 2026 elections and wants to re-elect his program, but has not found the way to tune in to public opinion. Polls keep him tied to low popularity.
It has also crashed into an insurmountable wall of leaderships that do not share an audacious and inopportune proposal, which turned politics upside down: the call for a National Constituent Assembly. Forced by the weight of the opposition of jurists, academics, former presidents, political parties, opinion leaders and signatories of the FARC peace, it has mutated into a narrative of calling for the constituent power of the people, which makes the postponed and blocked reforms possible. in Congress.
The truth is that Colombia has spent the last few months trying to understand the legal and political tongue-twister that the president set in motion when he first spoke of a Constituent Assembly, bypassing the constitutional channels, without passing a law through Congress, where There is an environment for an initiative of that dimension; nor by the Constitutional Court, where the magistrates act with absolute respect for the Charter.
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“Now it is about that promise becoming realities, that is, that change is not just another word, but rather a reality… That is why the constituent power of the people is needed more, because they are cornering us,” expressed the head of state at an event in Ipiales, Nariño, in his usual tours of the territory, where he carries out electoral campaigns and constitutional pedagogy – often of an intellectual height and sophistication that the grassroots people do not understand – and seeks to maintain the connection with the social sectors, to demonstrate that it is possible, beyond the corruption scandals of the UNGRD, for State resources to reach the communities directly, through organizations and community action boards. His objective is to deepen participatory democracy and transform people’s lives, through a regional agreement table, in which the Government and social organizations oversee public resources.
Although many leftist intellectuals consider that the concept of constituent power, omnipotent and all-embracing, which is born from the people, has no constitutional control and has the autonomy to de facto modify the Political Charter, this thesis is far from the Colombian legal system. The Constitutional Court has been emphatic that any reform of the Charter must follow the established path. The support of the ELN and the FARC dissidents for this thesis only generates more doubts than certainties to this idea, which the president does not renounce.
In reality, what is perceived is that Petro is sowing in fertile soil in the social sectors, qualifying leadership and indoctrinating the base on the scope of participatory power, to accelerate a profound change in politics, the economy and territorial planning. His thesis does not seem possible today, but a statesman, and above all a revolutionary, thinks in the long term. Hence his insistence on seeking the re-election of his political project, and the consolidation of the processes underway. From that perspective, the left would need not one, but several consecutive terms to realize its ideal of a new country and a new Constitution.
The constituent power, then, is understood by the Government as the engine of profound changes, which will have to be activated at full speed throughout the territory. That process, from the left, is a conception of a prolonged and unarmed popular campaign, with the Constitution as a tool for demolishing the past and building the future. The paragraph that former Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva invokes as support to convene a Constituent Assembly could be at the negotiating tables with the insurgency, in this or another future government. No group will sign the peace so that the agreement is broken. And returning to 1991, when the desire for peace mobilized the country for a Constituent Assembly, continues to be an objective that matches perfectly with the ideal of today’s rebels.
Invoking constituent power and activating it is a move in a chess game in which Petro is moving the pieces quickly, without having on the other side an opposition with imagination and leadership to anticipate the moves and propose solutions. The right-wing opposition has been more accustomed to the parquet, so popular in Colombia, which is a zero-sum game in which rivals are chased on a board, trying to capture them and put them in jail, while dice are thrown in seeking advantage and victory at any cost.
“Let’s start, and that is called constituent power, without fear, in the south of Colombia, so that it expands throughout Colombia,” the president insisted in Ipiales. And he added that the opposition is scared with the mobilization of the people.
Petro, heated and cornered, will insist on mobilizing constituent power and calling for a national agreement. The opposition and political parties should seriously think about exploring the path of agreements, in which some immovable ones would undoubtedly arise to make them possible: the non-reelection of Petro, compliance with the electoral calendar, defining the scope of a legislative reform that guarantees the heart of the change that Colombia demands, absolute compliance with the Havana peace agreements with the FARC, support for possible new peace pacts, and progress towards true decentralization. With a national agreement, perhaps Petro would once again feel the freedom that he misses today, while he fights not to let himself be put in the corral that the right wants to impose on him, which dreams of saber rattling to tangle the cables of a Government that, with the sun behind his back and over a slow fire, he cooks his dreams of re-election.
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