32 The Americas The Economist May 14th 2022
F
or monthsopinion polls have made
Gustavo Petro, a leftist populist, the
frontrunner in Colombia’s presidential
election, which is due to take place on
May 29th. But Mr Petro’s challenge is not
just to defeat his rivals, chief among
them Federico Gutiérrez, a centreright
former mayor of Medellín. It is also to
stay alive. Earlier this month Mr Petro
cancelled a twoday campaign trip, for
reasons of security. His team said it had
information that La Cordillera, a para
military group, was planning to kill him.
This threat conjures up ghosts from
Colombia’s past. In 1989 Bello spent a day
in the southern city of Palmira watching
César Gaviria campaign. He was followed
by three ambulances, one equipped with
an intensivecare bed. He spoke from
behind a bulletproof rostrum, sur
rounded by a huddle of six policemen
clutching Uzi submachineguns. Mr
Gaviria had replaced Luis Carlos Galán, a
Liberal reformer who was gunned down
at a rally three months before. By the
time Mr Gaviria was elected president in
1990, two more candidates, both left
wingers, had been shot dead.
Those were the days when Pablo
Escobar, the boss of the Medellín drug
mob, had declared war on Colombia’s
political establishment. The country is
much improved since then, thanks first
to a security buildup, though one not
free of abuses, by Álvaro Uribe, president
from 2002 to 2010, and then a peace
agreement with the farcguerrillas in
2016 by his successor, Juan Manuel San
tos. The murder rate fell by almost two
thirds between 2002 and 2017.
But security has deteriorated since
then. Iván Duque, the current president,
has failed to make the most of the peace
agreement. In November he claimed to
have dismantled the Gulf Clan, the largest paramilitary drugtrafficking organisa
tion, when troops arrested its boss, Dairo
Antonio Úsaga. But this month, hours
after Mr Úsaga was extradited to the Un
ited States, the Clan shut down a large
swathe of northwestern Colombia with a
fourday “armed strike”.
Mr Duque has politicised the security
forces, naming as commanders people
close to Mr Uribe. According to prosecu
tors, several retired officers have links to
the Gulf Clan. When Mr Petro alluded to
that in a tweet after six soldiers were killed
by drugtraffickers in April, General
Eduardo Zapateiro, the army commander,
attacked him for using their deaths for
“campaign narratives” and offered other
criticisms of the candidate. Many opposi
tion figures saw this unusual political
intervention as unconstitutional, and
called for General Zapateiro to be sacked.
But Mr Duque defended him.
If Mr Petro wins, he would be Colom
bia’s first avowedly leftwing president.
He was once a member of m19, a
nationalist guerrilla group. But that is not
the reason he alarms many Colombians.Rather it is because until recently he was
an enthusiastic supporter of the late
Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s elected au
tocrat. He now presents himself as a
moderate and has pledged not to expro
priate any businesses. But some of his
proposals still seem quite extreme. He
promises, for example, to guarantee
public employment to all the jobless
(unemployment stands at 12%) and to
persuade the central bank to print money
to finance the government. He wants to
reestablish diplomatic relations with
Venezuela. Other proposals are opposed
by reactionary landowners and cattle
farmers, such as a plan to tax idle land.
Colombia is a country of checks and
balances. The powerful constitutional
court thwarted Mr Uribe’s attempt to turn
himself into president for life. The cen
tral bank is independent. Mr Petro would
lack a majority in the Congress, although
he might secure one eventually.
Mr Petro wears a bulletproof vest and
does not announce his venues until the
last minute. If he were to be killed it
would be a moral indictment of Colombi
an democracy that would risk a down
ward spiral into violence. In 1948 Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán, a demagogic populist who
like Mr Petro was a crowdpuller, was
shot dead in Bogotá, the capital. He had
said, paraphrasing the Gospel of St Luke,
“If they kill me, there will not be left one
stone upon another”. And so it came to
pass: the centre of Bogotá was almost
destroyed in days of rioting. Colombia
was plunged into ten years of violence in
which perhaps 180,000 people died.
That should be a warning to any
wouldbe assassins and their sponsors. If
he is elected Mr Petro may prove to be a
bad president. But it is up to Colombia’s
institutions to restrain him and only
they can do so peacefully.Colombia’s tragic history of political murder still haunts the countryBelloStaying alive
utes—and, with it, access to the owner’s
banking app. On April 25th a young man
was shot for his phone by a fake delivery
driver. After the phones have been hacked
to gain access to the banking app Pix (see
Finance section), they are sold.
But the group has pretensions to be
greater. It loftily claims to be motivated by
a desire to help the “oppressed of the sys
tem”, rather than just to make a juicy profit.
The gang’s rules are designed to benefit a
“fraternity of crime”: it provides loans,
weapons and a network of contacts to help
illicit enterprises flourish. It acts like a“government of the crime world”, says Bru
no Paes Manso, who cowrote a book on it.
Indeed some think the group is behind
the dramatic fall in crime in the state of São
Paulo. Since 1999 its homicide rate has
plunged by 80%. It has gone from being
one of the most dangerous places in Brazil
to one of the safest. Although police take
credit for the decline, academics point out
that the biggest falls occurred in the most
violent suburbs, at around the time that
the pccbegan to make its presence felt in
such places. To end the gang wars of the
1990s, the group created its own parallelcourt system in which to settle disputes,
says Mr Feltran. It mediated among gang
members’ families, churches and other
members of civil society.
Today order is maintained by members
known as disciplinaswho hand out punish
ments, such as beatings, to those who
break their rules. Many residents find
them less threatening than the police, who
killed 6,000 Brazilians in 2020. (Police in
the United States, by contrast, killed 1,000
people that year.) One of the group’smax
ims is, “Crime strengthens crime.”Itpays
to be strong where the state is weak.n