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Today, Colombia votes on a shift to the Left

Colombia heads to the polls today to reject the far-right politics of Iván Duque and Álvaro Uribe and assert that the average Colombian is much more progressive than the traditional politicians who represent them.
 
by  Luciana Cadahia / Tamara Ospina Posse 
 
Part 3 - Social Upheaval
 
The elitist image of the Colombian people as politically unreliable dates back to the nineteenth century. The contemporary stigma, however, is a by-product of a confluence of two factors: the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and the doctrine of the “internal enemy” promoted by Álvaro Uribe.

The interlocking doctrines have served the Colombian right to brand any expression of political activism or dissent as an act of terrorism. And even as both doctrines have waned, their lingering effects continue to damage the exercise of left-wing politics, freedom of thought, and social movements in Colombia.

Building steam in 2019 and exploding in 2021, it took a monthslong, nationwide social upheaval to break through the media smokescreen and make the world aware of the Colombian people’s daily plight and discontent. The government repression that ensued — including Dantesque scenes of violence from the May 3 national strike — also revealed to a global audience two Colombias locked in battle.

On the one hand, there is a political class linked to organized crime and backed by paramilitaries and the police, willing to fire at point-blank range on demonstrators, maintain clandestine torture centers, and commit arbitrary arrests and outright violence against youth, black, peasant, and indigenous movements. As always, behind them were the desperate attempts by the media to paint democratic demands as acts of vandalism and expressions of irrational violence.

On the other hand, there was a mass movement numbering in the millions willing to stand up to paramilitary violence, forced food shortages, and government hostility tactics, just to hold the streets for more than two months and send a clear message to the whole world: the economy of war and forced dispossession in Colombia must come to an end.

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