COLOMBIA: A CANARY IN A COAL MINE / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Colombia: A Canary in a Coal Mine?

Latin American governments can no longer ignore the problems they had pre-pandemic.

By: Allison Fedirka

Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has understandably commanded the world’s attention. 

So it was sometimes easy to forget that every country on every continent had its fair share of social, political and economic problems, but now that the pandemic is becoming more manageable for many (though, tragically, not all), countries can no longer ignore them. 

Not only did they not go away, in many cases the pandemic and its associated countermeasures made their problems worse. 

Social unrest has been particularly hard to mollify; doing so typically requires either financial measures a government cannot currently afford or structural changes it cannot hope to pass quickly.

Take Colombia. 

The recent wave of protests there is in some ways an extension of those that were essentially put on hold when the pandemic hit. 

Among the grievances were communal violence, the peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel group, corruption, poverty and so on. 

Not being able to gather in public, demonstrators weren’t able to demonstrate, creating a false sense of security for the government, even as it failed to address the protesters’ concerns.

As far as protest culture goes, Latin America is something of a connoisseur. 

Public demonstration is a trusted tool for citizens and politicians alike to air their views, issue demands and pressure their audience into negotiation. 

The demands of protesters can vary greatly, from getting a bonus welfare payment to negotiating better wages to serious or frivolous social causes. 

Yet the effective protests that the government can address tend to share a common element: a clear group of participants with a clear demand that can be met through a specific course of action. 

What makes the latest protests in Colombia distinct is that the protesters have used the government’s latest tax proposal as a springboard to take issue with socio-economic structures of the country more broadly. 

In that sense, the government is having to do more than recover from a pandemic; it’s having to reassess essential economic and political relationships with the society it governs.

What Happened

In the final weeks of 2020, Bogota confirmed plans to introduce major tax reforms in 2021 to stabilize and ignite growth in the economy. 

One of the main goals of the reforms was to reduce fiscal gaps and ensure the country’s capacity to service debt. 

It satisfied the government’s need to maintain investor confidence in markets and ensure economic stability. 

(Credit rating agencies and other financial institutions had made statements saying Colombia’s investment grade status could be at risk without fiscal reform.) 

Foreign direct investment, after all, plays an important role in the Colombian economy. 

The middle and working classes, however, felt differently. 

They believed the higher taxes and reduced discounts created a greater burden on middle-class and poorer citizens and not enough burden on the wealthy. 

Nationwide protests erupted April 28 and have continued ever since.

 

But the protests were never really about the tax reforms. 

If they were, protesters may have gone home when the government withdrew the bill on Monday. 

(It’s points like this that protests in Latin America tend to calm down.) 

But they didn’t. 

They continued to rally, compelling Bogota to dispatch security forces to maintain order in urban areas and eliminate blockades to allow for the free passage of cargo, and persuading President Ivan Duque to invite representatives from the opposition, private business and local governments to talk about the reforms and reshape them going forward. 

But complaints from across the political spectrum came forward. 

Some were concrete, others abstract, but there was no designated leader and no organizing body to unify the demands. 

It’s become nearly impossible for the government to resolve the protests effectively or quickly.

The dominant rhetoric around the demonstrations also hints at something deeper. 

Naturally, people from various parties have blamed different groups for infiltrating the protests and instigating violence. 

Such accusations are common practice in Latin America – and sometimes they’re even true. 

More telling, though, are two comments by leading politicians from opposing sides of the aisle. 

On the conservative end, former President Alvaro Uribe called on people to resist the “dissipated molecular revolution,” a term adopted by conservative academics in the region to explain dynamics observed in Latin American protests. 

It makes two main points: First, that political groups gradually change how individuals think and lead them to reject existing shared societal values. 

Second, protests bring the state to a point of extreme disorder such that the government has an excuse for a strong security response.

The voice on the other end of the political spectrum is opposition leader Gustavo Petro, who said that the protests mark the beginning of the end of neoliberalism in Colombia. 

The next phase, he says, will be marked by repression.

Both comments suggest that a large segment of the population now questions the neoliberal economic model in place, and new ideas are emerging. The significance of this claim should not be overlooked. A state’s ideas about the domestic economy are intimately linked to its politics, and thus its foreign and trade policies.

Hard Road Ahead

This is hardly Colombia’s only deep-rooted issue. 

The country’s politics and security services are still adjusting to the 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). 

The war with the FARC lasted more than 50 years and left countless scars on society, and a piece of paper alone doesn’t translate into political and social harmony. 

In addition, the government is still in talks with the National Liberation Army, and it’s still combating dissident FARC groups that remain active in the black market and drug trade.

There’s also the decadelong deterioration of the Venezuelan state and economy, which acts as a drain on the Colombian government’s attention and resources and has sucked the region into the U.S.-Russian power struggle. 

Finally, Bogota must prepare its economy, which has benefited greatly from the production and export of hydrocarbons, for a world of moderate oil prices and transition toward renewables. 

For better or worse, addressing these issues requires a break with the status quo.

A restructuring of the government’s relationship with society doesn’t have to be catastrophic. 

Take Chile, which started a similar process in fall 2019. 

A decision to raise metro fares sparked mass violent protests across the country, followed by a series of government concessions and reforms. 

The process included major issues, like restructuring military funding, and culminated in the initiation of a process to change the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. 

Chile still has social and economic issues to address, but unlike Venezuela, its history illuminates a path for remaking the social contract without complete collapse or complete rejection of current models. 

It will take time before it’s clear whether Colombia can do the same.