Colombia's President Petro was the target of a possible attack in July, says defense minister

[Judi Lynn]

Updated 4:27 PM CDT, August 8, 2024

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombian President Gustavo Petro was the target of a possible attack in July, when he took part in a public event in downtown Bogotá, Defense Minister Iván Velásquez said Thursday, without providing evidence or elaborating further.

. . .

Petro participated in the traditional military parade on July 20 to commemorate the 214th anniversary of Colombia’s independence from Spain, after arriving several hours late to the event. Petro said at the time that his tardiness was due to “information that had to be corroborated with the United States embassy, and a lack of coordination among my security detail.”

On Wednesday, Gustavo Bolívar, one of Petro’s closest allies in his cabinet, insisted to the press that the president arrived late on July 20 because there were “security concerns” and a warning from the U.S. embassy.

. . .

It is little surprise that these Mafia-like interests are willing to take any measure necessary to prevent Petro’s victory. Gustavo Petro has dedicated a large part of his political career to investigating and denouncing this network of corruption, drug trafficking, and far-right political conspiracy that is largely responsible for the violence and terror for which Colombia has, unfortunately, come to be known.

. . .

Petro, a former rebel and the first leftist president in the country’s history, has received threats through social media since he took office in 2022, as he himself reported to the prosecutor’s office. He also received threats during the 2022 election campaign, so it was common to see him surrounded by bodyguards and soldiers when he delivered speeches in public squares.

https://apnews.com/article/colombia-petro-threat-attack-defense-minister-c71cd395064ed786eac6900ff51bfef5

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From 2022:

05.23.2022

Right-Wing Death Threats Won’t Stop Gustavo Petro From Becoming Colombia’s Next President
BY
TAMARA OSPINA POSSE

Left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro has been fighting Colombia’s far-right paramilitaries for decades. The revelation of a recent plot to murder Petro is unsurprising, but his campaign still appears strong ahead of Sunday’s election.



On May 6, the campaign of presidential candidate Gustavo Petro announced that it had uncovered a credible threat to the life of the left-wing politician. The attempted assassination would have taken place during his visit to Colombia’s coffee-growing region on May 3 and 4. The Petro team presented a detailed security briefing to the attorney general’s office that documented a plan by La Cordillera paramilitary organization to target the progressive candidate, who leads in all the polls for the presidential election due to be held on May 29.


La Cordillera is well known for its paramilitary activities in Colombia, which include drug trafficking and hired assassinations. There is also evidence linking La Cordillera to politicians, members of the police, the Colombian army, and the Judicial Investigation Police (SIJIN), as well as local businessmen close to former president and far-right political caudillo Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

The Paramilitary Nexus
Links between criminal organizations and public officials are unfortunately all too common in Colombia. The close relationship between the state, paramilitaries, and drug trafficking dates back to the 1980s, when the US-backed “war on drugs” began to intensify and the country saw escalating political violence.

. . .

Should he win, Petro’s Historical Pact government would have the mission of transforming the country into a true democratic republic. This would mean undoing the power of the existing oligarchy defended by Uribe, the paramilitaries, and the small group of powerful families that have enriched themselves by laundering drug money and embezzling from the national treasury.

More:
https://jacobin.com/2022/05/gustavo-petro-death-threats-right-wing-colombia

[Judi Lynn]

1. Colombia Elites and Organized Crime: Introduction

by Hannah Stone
9 Aug 2016

The power of Colombia’s elites is founded upon one of the most unequal divisions of land in the world. As of the early 21st century, one percent of landowners own more than half the country’s agricultural land.1 Under Spanish rule, Colombia’s agriculture was organized on the hacienda system, in which “landless peasants” worked, often as sharecroppers or indentured labor, for the landowners. The fight for land redistribution began with the struggle for independence and continues to this day.

This is one part of a multipart series concerning elites and organized crime in Colombia. Read the full report (PDF). See other parts of the series here.

Bolstered by a relatively stable economy, Colombia’s elites have been able to repeatedly block attempts to redistribute land or carry out significant political reform. The country largely avoided the military coups and economic crises that beset its neighbors in the 20th century, but this very stability helped store up a legacy of social problems that remain unresolved. Colombia is, “the only Latin American country in which the traditional parties and elites neutralized all political reform efforts,” Francisco Thoumi argues. “There were never reforms that challenged the power structure and weakened its control over society.”2

Land and Trade – Colombia’s Elites
The landowning elite of the 19th century used its land to develop agriculture and cattle ranching businesses. For the first half of the century, the economy remained small, isolated and undeveloped, with a low level of exports, dominated by gold. The development of the tobacco and then coffee export industries from 1850 helped create a merchant class. The associated export booms disproportionately benefited the economic elites — both landowners and commercial middlemen. While much of Colombia’s coffee was grown on small farms, the industry was run by a wealthy elite of distributors who controlled the sale and export of the crop.3 The coffee boom of the 1910s to 1930s was also the motor for the country’s industrialization. Centered on the city of Medellín, it catapulted the city’s merchant-industrialists “to national pre-eminence.”4

. . .

Since independence, the local landowners and ranchers have often maintained private armies and successfully resisted attempts to centralize control and increase taxation. As Nazih Richani puts it, “large landowners, cattle ranchers and the agribusiness elite conspired to resist the growth of state power.”9 As a result, the tax base has remained weak — Colombia had South America’s second smallest tax revenue per capita into the 1990s.

Liberals and Conservatives
Power was administered in these isolated regions through two dominant political parties — the Liberals and the Conservatives. Both represented the interests of the elite. Broadly speaking, Conservatives defended the Church and were closer to the landowning class, while Liberals favored a secular state and were closer to the commercial class.

More:
https://insightcrime.org/investigations/colombia-elites-and-organized-crime-introduction/