Gustavo Petro's Victory Brings an Opportunity To Reverse Inequality in Colombia
Running on a platform of gender equity, progressive taxation, and environmental protection, Colombia’s first leftist president could bring much-needed change to a deeply unequal nation.
August 14, 2022
By Omar Ocampo
On June 19, the Colombian public elected Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez as the nation’s first leftist president and Black vice president. To many, their historic victory symbolizes a potential end to a structural contradiction that has afflicted Colombia’s democracy for the past one hundred years: the paradoxical coexistence of a stable representative democracy and high levels of political repression and violence, particularly towards movements and parties working to build a more progressive and equal society.
One does not need to look very far into the past to find evidence of collective targeting of known political detractors. For example, over 4,000 activists, leaders, and presidential candidates of the first openly leftist and oppositional party, Unión Patriótica, were systematically assassinated after achieving some initial electoral success at the local and regional level in the mid-1980s. Supporters, too, were targeted. Civilians were forcibly displaced or killed by illegal armed groups with the explicit goal of violently reorganizing districts and municipalities to deny Unión Patriótica a local or regional base of support. Traditional political elites and their wealthy patrons made it clear that alternative political projects grounded in social justice were not to be tolerated even in a competitive democracy.
And while the threat of political violence has not ceased, analyst and current Colombian Senator Ariel Ávila recently remarked that the struggle to create a political space for the excluded and marginalized has resulted in the ascendancy of Petro and Márquez. As an Afro-Colombian environmental activist, Márquez and her connections to grassroots social movements increased Afro-Colombian and indigenous voter participation in the Pacific region of the country, ensuring a strong base of support for an egalitarian political program, that guaranteed their victory.
That a former activist and the son of farmers are now leading one of the most influential countries in Latin America is especially notable given the country’s deepening inequality. A report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018 revealed that social mobility for low-income families in Colombia is extremely low. In fact, it is almost nonexistent. It takes the bottom 10 percent a mind-boggling eleven generations to even come close to the country’s mean income. If we define the length of a generation to be 25 years, it requires 275 years for a low-income family to enter the middle-class.
More:
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/gustavo-petros-victory-brings-an-opportunity-to-reverse-inequality-in-colombia/