In recent days, President Gustavo Petro has repeatedly said that a coup d’état against him is underway, or in the making, a ‘soft’ coup. As he had pointed out several months earlier, the threat would not come from military barracks, as it would be a “sophisticated” strategy, a “Colombian-style coup d’état.” The version of the origin has varied or, better yet, it seemed to be a multi-headed hydra, ranging from “oligarchs” to high-ranking judges, from drug traffickers to politicians. “The coup will not be carried out with soldiers, who all have orders from their constitutional commander not to raise a single weapon against the people. It will be carried out with ties and desks,” he wrote on Friday on his X account.
The most notorious leader of the coup, according to the president, is the National Electoral Council (CNE), an administrative body made up of politicians who serve as magistrates. The CNE is currently studying, and is close to deciding by vote, whether the current president’s electoral campaign exceeded the legal limits on financing. Created by the 1991 Constitution, the CNE has been criticized for decades because it is made up of lawyers who represent the parliamentary factions in Congress: that is, the political class. Several of its nine magistrates are, as they have always been, former parliamentarians. They have in their hands a report against the president’s campaign, written by two members who are not aligned with the government: the former Uribe congressman Álvaro Hernán Prada, of the opposition Centro Democrático party, and Benjamín Ortiz, of the divided Liberal party. But the nine members of the CNE who will vote on the motion are from various parties, several aligned with the president or directly elected as magistrates by his coalition, the Historic Pact. The latter part, favorable to Petro, has not been mentioned by the president.
The president’s accusations have also been leveled at other judges, those of the Council of State, one of the country’s highest courts that Petro has applauded in the past. This Council decided in August that the CNE does have the function of investigating the president’s campaign, something that Petro’s lawyers had refuted. “It is unusual to talk about a coup d’état,” the president of the court, Milton Chaves, replied to Noticias Caracol. In its decision, the Council of State made it clear that the CNE can only administratively sanction a president, with penalties such as a fine, and does not have the authority to remove the president. That is, in simpler words, it cannot carry out a coup. On Friday, in the face of Petro’s multiple accusations, the CNE again spoke out in response to the president’s fear: “there is no legal possibility that calls into question presidential immunity.”
But the coup is more complex, says the president, pointing to other politicians in the legislature. “With votes from the president’s political enemies in the electoral council, and then in the commission of accusations, they will seek to remove him without having committed any crime,” he wrote in X on Sunday, September 8. The Commission of Accusations of the House of Representatives is the only body that can make a political and legal judgment of a president. The hypothesis of the president is that a sanction of the CNE would cause that Commission to open a process against him, a foreseeable consequence. But from there to making a decision, there is a huge gap. The Government, in general, has had the majorities in the House, and the 16 members of the commission are a mirror of the plenary.
In addition, the commission rarely moves judicial files: almost all former presidents have been accused there, but in-depth investigations have been almost non-existent. So much so that it is informally called the “acquittal commission.” Only one case against then-president Ernesto Samper (1994-1998) was advanced, for the fact that drug money went into his presidential campaign. But the plenary session of the House, which must endorse any decision by the commission to accuse a president before the Senate, voted in favor of the liberal president. Even that scenario would take a long time and is not close to moving forward.
But President Petro is not talking about that future time, and he shouts a parallel from past history. Petro returns to the day in 2013 when the then Attorney General Alejandro Ordóñez dismissed him when he was mayor of Bogotá, an arbitrary decision that was later annulled by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Attorney General’s Office had the right to an administrative sanction to an official elected by popular vote, said the IACHR and later repeated by the Council of State and the Constitutional Court, but not to dismiss. “That time the people of Bogotá were decisive. Six times they filled the Plaza de Olívar,” Petro recently recalled in X about the mobilizations in his favor. The now president appeals to the same faithful followers now, and called for the mobilization next Thursday, September 19.
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But this time the president has not been removed by Ordoñez or these institutions, which Petro claims want to put an end to the popular will. This warning repeated daily of a coup d’état from the institutions (also called lawfare) does not have, at the moment, a solid basis.
In the last two years, President Petro has also denounced the coup from other fronts. He accused, for example, former presidents of calling for sabre rattling. “Those who rewarded themselves for making peace are calling for a coup d’état,” said Petro in May about former President Juan Manuel Santos, who signed a peace treaty with the FARC guerrillas, when the latter said that the public forces should act if President Petro does not respect the Constitution and calls, outside the norm, a constituent assembly. “Uribe supporters want to imitate the way in which there was a coup d’état against Allende,” he wrote a month earlier, in April, when a group of truck drivers called for a march against insecurity on the roads. Months earlier, in August 2023, the president also said that a protest by transporters over an alleged increase in the price of diesel fuel, which did not occur, “is the kind of lies with which they spread the idea of a soft coup.”
It was precisely after the recent truckers’ strike in Colombia, which did occur, that the president began to expand on the accusations of a coup and began to speak not only of the intention to remove him from power, but of assassinating him. “It is the mafia that pays for the president of Colombia to be assassinated or removed from office as quickly as possible,” he said at a meeting of community media on Thursday. “There is a coup underway financed by the political mafia and it is being silenced, as it was silenced with Allende,” he said on Monday, comparing his situation to that of the Chilean president who died defending the presidential palace from a military coup in 1973. On Saturday, at an event with thousands of his followers, he spoke of a plot to assassinate him with explosives that would be detonated from a truck when the president passes by. Some smugglers, he said, “are putting up the money to see if Petro disappears before December.”
That point, that of a coup that could turn into an assassination, is the most recent thesis. So far, the president has not indicated what evidence he has of these assassination plans, a major warning that has set off few alarms yet, since it appears as one more step in the claim, already growing, of being the victim of a soft coup. It is a cry from Petro that will probably grow, since the CNE plans to vote on the negative report on the presidential campaign this week.
“They put the money in to see if Petro disappears in December, I’ll tell you: with the money they put in they bought two dump trucks and the idea they have is to fill it with dynamite and explosives, and with inside information about my routines, blow up the dump truck as I pass by,” @petrogustavo. pic.twitter.com/hqRQFkt2oo
— RTVC News (@RTVCnoticias) September 14, 2024
If last Sunday, in a long message on X, Petro appealed to popular mobilization to defend himself from what he calls a coup, this week he raised the tone even more, appealing to a revolution. “There is no other way to stop a coup d’état, which takes us generations ahead of violence, than with a people’s revolution,” he said at the meeting of popular communicators. The president has warned of a coup so many times, without it happening, that it will be difficult for the popular bases to come out with the same urgency, for now, as they did a decade ago in the streets of Bogotá.
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