Colombia's Leader Is Gambling On A Legacy

Time’s Up: Colombia’s Leader is Gambling on a Legacy Colombia Colombian President Gustavo Petro was in Haiti recently to highlight relations between the two countries. For Petro, a leftist and former insurgent who has fewer than 10 months left on the single term that he is allowed under the law, the visit was a chance to “elevate his international stature as a champion of social justice,” the Miami Herald wrote. Haiti spiraled into chaos after 17 former Colombian soldiers allegedly killed the late President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. Now, Petro is trying to help the impoverished Caribbean nation rebound. Around 1,000 Haitians, for instance, are now training in Colombia in the hopes that they will help bring more security to their native land. Such international trips often occur when heads of state face uphill battles abroad and a lack of progress on their agendas at home, observers say. A proud member of a cohort of leftist leaders now in power in South America – think Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and President Gabriel Boric of Chile – Petro is a vocal critic of American President Donald Trump and US-style free-market capitalism, according to Colombia One. Since he was elected in 2022, however, Petro has failed to usher in the sweeping changes he promised. Still, in a rare victory in realizing part of his campaign pledge to overhaul pensions, the health-care system, and labor laws, and reduce inequality in the country, Petro recently enacted new labor reforms that tilted the balance of power to workers but drew the ire of the international business community, the Associated Press reported. The reforms included paying more for work on Sundays and late evening shifts, and a raft of worker protections, including requiring delivery apps to employ workers as full-time employees or contract-based freelancers rather than under the table. Employers warned that the reforms would increase costs and result in layoffs, noted Bloomberg. Analysts told the Dialogue that Petro steamrolled the reforms through Congress by threatening to bypass lawmakers, and now wants a referendum to achieve his aims. Petro also pledged to establish “Total Peace” by negotiating with all armed groups in the conflict-riven country. However, a surge in violence by illegal armed groups has gripped the country, added United Press International. This rise in violence comes despite a peace deal signed by the central government in 2016 with some rebel groups. In early June, Miguel Uribe, a right-wing senator and candidate for presidential elections next year, was shot in the head in the capital, Bogotá. Days later, armed groups killed at least seven people in and around Cali, the third-largest city. “We made a lot of sacrifices so that Petro could become president,” a local leader from Catatumbo, a violent region, told the Economist, adding that his sacrifices may have been in vain. In January, he was forced to flee his home due to the violence. “‘Total Peace’ looks battered,” wrote the Economist. Now, the president has less than a year to leave his successor with a country that secures, rather than discredits, his ideological vision and cements his legacy. In June, however, he announced that he would include a vote on whether to call a constituent assembly in next year’s general elections. Such an assembly hasn’t been called since the constitution was established in 1991, a document which enshrines many social rights. Yet Petro’s proposal to create an assembly to rewrite the constitution is unusual, analysts say, and many are worrying what he intends to change, possibly those reforms he couldn’t get lawmakers to approve. “If the institutions that we have in Colombia today are not capable of living up to the social reforms that the people, through their vote, decreed … then Colombia must go to a national constituent assembly,” he said in a speech last year. But lawmakers, justices, and many legal experts oppose such a move. “The Constitution of 1991 still works,” a legal analyst at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia told EFE, a Spanish-language news agency. “Rewriting it is not a legal shortcut, it’s a political gamble.”