Old Ghosts

Alejandro Éder, the mayor of Cali, asked last week when Colombia had gone back to 1989. On Saturday, 7 June, in Bogotá, a fourteen-year-old had shot Miguel Uribe Turbay, a senator and potential candidate for the presidency, in the head and chest. (It was apparently a contract hit: the boy had been offered $5000.) There were candlelit vigils throughout the country. Uribe Turbay, whose mother was kidnapped and murdered by Pablo Escobar in 1991, is in stable condition after surgery.

In the following days, there were car bomb, grenade and shooting attacks on police stations and municipal buildings in the country’s south-west that left at least seven dead (including a five-year-old and her grandfather) and fifty injured.

FARC ‘dissidents’ – rump groups of cocaine exporters in business with Mexican criminal organisations – have claimed responsibility. For Colombians old enough to remember, this latest round of deadly attacks recalls a nightmarish time marked by political murder, car bombs, and spiralling crime and violence in both urban and rural areas, committed both by and against the police and army.

When I taught at the Universidad Nacional in Medellín, I attended public events in 2017-18 commemorating murdered students at which veterans of the peace movement expressed their fears of a return to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when homicide was the leading cause of death among men and second among women. The conflict continues between the government and remaining left-wing narco-guerrilla groups, including the ELN, and the remnants of the right-wing narco-paramilitaries, active in at least 20 of Colombia’s 32 departments.

The peace accords signed in 2016 by the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC narrowly failed to pass a public referendum and were never implemented. Demobilised FARC soldiers were murdered with impunity during the presidency of Ivan Duque (2018-2022). The demobbed FARC doctor I wrote about in February is from Caldono, Cauca, where one of the FARC car bombs exploded. The town’s central square is now rubble. After burying his murdered wife next to her parents in April, the doctor returned to el monte, where he’s spent most of his adult life.

On Wednesday, 11 June, President Gustavo Petro arrived in Cali for a security meeting with Éder and Governor Dilian Francisca Toro. A thousand Indigenous people from Cauca, predominantly Nasa, followed him. They had recently been to Bogotá, where they marched, protested and occupied buildings at the Universidad Nacional to demand the government negotiate in good faith and honour promises already made. For now, the government has returned to a variant of the Bloque de Búsqueda (‘checkpoint’) strategy of the 1990s, this time presumably without the heavy hand of the DEA: Marco Rubio and Petro are not on the friendliest terms.

Fragmented following the demise of Álvaro Uribe (currently on trial for bribery and witness tampering), the political force that dominated Colombia from 2002 to 2022 seems united for the time being in opposition to Petro. Uribe Turbay (no relation) was vying to be the candidate for the uribista Centro Democrático. His wife, Maria Claudia Tarazona, along with a new generation of leaders on the far right, has called for a silent ‘march for life’ on Sunday, 15 June.

The idea is to remember the families of soldiers, police and politicians in the fight for ‘security’ against ‘terrorists’ and ‘criminals’. The vocabulary comes from Uribe. Opposition leaders refer to themselves as ‘slaves’ under Petro’s ‘tyranny’ (in which they are free to say such things, and much else besides, without fear of repression).

Times have changed, even since 2019, when the ELN detonated a car bomb at a police academy that killed 21 and injured 68. The FARC’s military capacity, evidently, is a shadow of what it once was. Yet there is a widespread and not unjustified perception that the country is, once again, spiralling out of control, with crime and violence on the rise, and the government mired in incompetence and corruption. The far right is busy turning fearmongering to political advantage.

Petro had hoped to get Congress to sign off on a popular consultation on a package of proposed reforms, but declared them by decree instead, even as trade unions led marches in major cities to support his agenda and a debate on labour reform proceeded through the Senate. So far only a disastrous healthcare reform has passed, while other legislation has stalled in Congress.

Reform by decree is unlikely to work, and Petro is far less popular than he was when he took office in 2022. His government has aged quickly and poorly. His former minister and presidential hopeful, Gustavo Bolívar, is promising a return to the agenda that grew out of the 2021 uprising. He has been polling even with the TV host and far-right candidate Vicky Dávila, at roughly 11 per cent. Should the ELN and the FARC’s remnants manage to sustain their attacks, that could change; after all, when Uribe announced his candidacy in 2001, he was polling at around 5 per cent. If any force in Colombian politics has nine lives, it is uribismo.