In his last speech as president of Colombia before Congress, less than 20 days before closing his term, Iván Duque said that his government fulfilled its purpose of “positively transforming Colombia” despite the fact that it faced “the greatest challenge that has confronted any Colombian President”. “Nothing stopped us from transforming the country,” he said. He sounded triumphant.
Minutes later, when he said that he had supported the implementation of the Peace Agreement, dozens of congressmen yelled at him “liar!” That, in a Capitol accustomed to ignoring the speakers, but not to booing a president, was so unusual that the president of the Senate took the floor from the president of the Republic to ask for silence and admonish his colleagues.
Four years earlier, on August 7, 2018, nobody interrupted Duque’s inauguration speech, who called for the union to seek agreements. “I do not recognize enemies. I have no political contenders,” said the youngest president in more than half a century. He was a politician without much wear and tear, who had been recognized by his colleagues from various parties as a thoughtful and studious senator, who had campaigned as the moderate face of a Uribe movement that seemed to renew itself.
That contrast between the Duke who took office without political friction and the one who was booed goodbye is the reflection of a president who never managed to connect with the country, who also experienced profound political change during his four-year term. A change that, like most historical transformations, had been brewing from behind, but exploded between 2018 and 2022.
With him, Colombia has had a rapid economic recovery after the pandemic (grew 10.6% in 2021a historical record) and achieved rapid vaccination, albeit after a prolonged quarantine, but many social indicators, such as unemployment or the number of people who say they are hungry, have not recovered.
He focused on implementing only a few points of the Agreement that his predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos, formed with the FARC guerrillas, and did not help unleash its transformative potential. For example, he did not advance in rural reform in a country that never carried out a substantial agrarian reform or in a political reform or in regulations that guarantee citizen participation. In contrast, he was strongly committed to the reincorporation of ex-combatants.
In addition, during his tenure hundreds of social leaders have been assassinated in a phenomenon that he could not control as it continues to increase. And in international politics, although he promoted a policy to welcome a good part of the enormous Venezuelan migration, he aligned himself with the United States and tried to create a right-wing bloc in the region, which he especially promoted with his failed strategy of the “diplomatic siege” of Nicolás Maduro, with so much faith that he said he had few hours left in government and gave his support to the parallel administration of the Venezuelan opposition Juan Guaidó, who failed to overthrow Maduro.
Duque received a tired and divided country. A country that, after the enormous effort to sign the Peace Agreement with the FARC, had lived through the novel of the failed popular endorsement of October 2016, when the No he beat the Yes by a narrow margin amid low turnout (only 37.43% of those able to vote). That division was endorsed when the left went for the first time to a second presidential round and Gustavo Petro obtained almost 42% in it.
The division was exacerbated in 2018 and 2019, when Duque refused to give political representation to parties other than his own and that he began to respond to the hardest Uribe bases. First, by forming a cabinet of technicians, people close to him and his co-supporters in positions of greater power, such as the Ministries of the Interior, Defense or Foreign Relations. Thus, despite his moderate speech during the campaign, he endorsed that the government would be right-wing.
He endorsed that seal when he objected to the law that defined how the JEP would work, the transitional justice agreed with the FARC. Although from the outset there were multiple alerts that legally he could not object to a law that had already been reviewed by the Constitutional Court, and his objections did not go to the heart of it, the political message was powerful: he was not going to bet on implementing the Agreements as he was programmed. Indeed, she did it in a partial way and focused on the least transformative.
Duque ended up defeated legally, since the Constitutional Court endorsed that he could not object to it; but above all he was hurt politically, because that objection was added to the annoyance over a tax reform that included more taxes on products from the basic basket, in addition to the fact that he had built his own leadership and would not have proposed a clear course for the country.
In addition, recent social gains have stalled, with an increase in poverty since 2018
Thus, a government without a flag – tried with the “orange economy”, its fizzy idea of focusing the economy on innovation, or with “peace with legality”, the commitment to give a critical turn to the implementation of the Agreement with the FARC – ended up facing the largest national strike in decades, in which there were from peaceful mobilizations of thousands of people to violent protests, including massive cacerolazos in several cities, even in neighborhoods that do not vote for the left.
The protests led to a curfew being decreed in the big cities for the first time in almost half a century, but that did not stop them from stopping or worsening two days later when a police officer killed a young protester, Dylan Cruz. .
Colombia revived the ghost of the Bogotazo riots, the wave of violence that shook the capital after the assassination of the popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, in 1948. Social mobilization, which in those decades was limited by fear and violence, awoke. And with it, a different country was revealed, that of some urban youth who had not known Pablo Escobar’s bombs, the paramilitary massacres or the guerrilla kidnappings.
That Colombia was the opposite of the one that chose Duque.
Before that, with the quarantine due to the virus, the country seemed to return to its usual course, and Duque managed to achieve a goal for his government: lead a health war, save the country from a lethal threat. He created a daily television program to teach and create a feeling of closeness. His favorability, which according to Gallup had fallen from 47% at the start of his term to just 23% in February 2020, soared to 52% in April. That was a peak that passed soon (by June it had already dropped to 41%) and to which he never returned.
With the brutal economic impact of the pandemic, with the largest drop in GDP since there are records in Colombia, more than five million jobs lost that are only now being recovered, deteriorated urban security and what could be the beginning of a new wave of armed conflict in several regions, Duque became such an unpopular figure that he achieved the worst results in favor of any president in more than 30 years of the Gallup Poll.
The epilogue was obvious. It is not only that Gustavo Petro was elected president in June 2022, the first president of left-wing parties in Colombia, but that Uribismo was so beaten that it did not bring a candidate to the polls. And that none of those closest to the president and his party have made it to the second round, since many right-wing voters preferred to support Rodolfo Hernández, a septuagenarian businessman who broke into the campaign through social networks. The same networks in which many protest events were organized and in which Duque is often criticized; the same networks that are part of the daily life of that new Colombia, urban, young and anti-Duke.
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