Four years ago, in the elections for mayors and governors that were held in Colombia in 2019, the beating was for the all-powerful political class, the same one that has made corruption and vote buying its trademark and seal. When they least expected it, Colombians voted to open the field to new independent parties and voices that rescued the hope that many of us had lost since 2016, when we were not able to endorse the peace agreement signed by the Government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC. , and peace slipped through our fingers.
Four years have passed since then and the outlook for these new elections could not be more disconsolate. Everything indicates that we are going backwards, like crabs, back to the same rot as always and that the great loser is going to be hope.
Four years ago, in the 2019 elections, Colombia experienced an epiphany. When many of us Colombians already believed that it was impossible to change the way of doing politics in the regions, the unexpected happened. For the first time, Colombians voted to open the field to a series of independent movements and parties that appealed to the vote of opinion. Curiously, among those new voices was not Gustavo Petro’s left. His movement, Colombia Humana, obtained 0.3% of the votes and only managed to elect Julian Conradoa former FARC guerrilla who was a composer of revolutionary corridos, as the new mayor of Turbaco, a small town near Cartagena.
The novelty and oxygen came from a relatively new party, the Green Alliance, which had made an effort to choose center-left candidates who had no ties to the electoral machines.
In Colombia, parties have become offices specialized in providing endorsements to politicians with unpresentable resumes. Since the parties no longer represent much, the power of regional politics has fallen to mafia power structures that we Colombians know as clans.
The new voices that were elected four years ago hit these clans and their arrival in power created the illusion that there were going to be changes in the way of doing politics in Colombia. This breath of fresh air was especially felt with Claudia López’s triumph in Bogotá.
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It was the first time that an overwhelming woman, with progressive ideas, a lesbian, who had also dedicated her life to denouncing the corrupt and political crooks who cohabited with the paramilitaries and drug trafficking mafias, came to direct the destinies of the capital. . Her party, the Green Alliance, was also a new bet that contrasted with the other parties that only appear at election time to fine-tune their “cvy” (how am I doing in the return). These clans function as electoral machines where votes are bought as if they were a commodity and campaigns are financed by contractors who aspire to be compensated with contracts once their candidate is elected.
In the 2019 elections, the Green Alliance proposed a different path and Colombians voted for that illusion. But the party not only won in Bogotá, but also in Cali with Jorge Iván Ospina, a left-wing politician, son of an M-19 guerrilla who had already been mayor of that city. In Manizales, an intermediate city where there was not much vote of opinion, Carlos Mario Marín, a politician who was profiled as one of the most promising figures in the community, was elected by that same party.
A separate chapter was the triumph of Daniel Quintero in Medellín, the second city in Colombia, recognized for being a fortress of Uribism. Quintero was a young politician who had started in the Tomato Party, a movement that used to take down all the corrupt politicians who squandered Medellín’s budgets. Quintero ran an express campaign without many resources and it swept. His victory was not only a defeat for Uribism but also the unmistakable sign that good news was coming for the boring and predictable Colombian politics. However, what came was disappointment.
The Green Alliance, the party that was going to be the great hope for change, is facing the worst crisis in its short history. It is divided, inundated by internal fights between those who want to support Petro’s Government and those who think that anti-Petrism is the way to come to power in the next presidential elections of 2026.
Claudia Lopez, of whom so much was expected, is leaving the Mayor’s Office without leaving much of a legacy and with very low popularity ratings. His xenophobic outings against Venezuelans, whom he pointed out as being responsible for the increase in insecurity in the capital, the insistence on macartizing the young people who went out to protest after the pandemic and the crude way in which he ended up using the power of the Mayor’s Office. To pave their aspiration for the presidency, they showed a spirit that was unknown to them. The Claudia López of today has become a politician who does more of the same and she seems willing to sell her soul to the devil in order to reach the Presidency. Of that independent and detached Claudia López, who dared to say things by her name that many of us knew and admired, not even a trace remains.
Let’s not even talk about the mayor of Cali. He is going to leave in the midst of corruption scandals and misgovernment that has that city prostrate. And as for the mayor of Manizales, who was going to be the great hope of the Green party, he was involved in a scandal for having used city funds to sign a memorandum of cooperation that sought to teach English to his subjects with a country that does not exist. called Libertland.
And Daniel Quintero, in Medellín, from being the great hope, ended up behaving like any chief. He had a good start when he managed to regain power over the Medellín Energy Company, one of the most important in the country, but along the way he became entangled and ended up allied with highly questioned political forces, which drag their tails of straw. He ended up resigning from the Mayor’s Office to support his candidate, who does not seem to be rising in the polls. In Medellín he is going to win Fico, Federico Gutiérrez, the candidate of the Notablato, from the right, from the center and even from the center-left. Quintero’s administration was so disastrous that he managed to unite everyone against him.
In these elections there are candidates who are already chosen due to the power that the clans have. This is the case of Álex Char, who will be mayor of Barranquilla for the third time, despite the fact that he has an investigation against him for vote buying and attempted murder, charges that he shares with his imprisoned brother, the former president of Congress Arturo Char.
In Cesar, the land of vallenato and yellow butterflies, the candidate of the Gnecco will be chosen, that clan made up of several members of the same family accused by the justice of being part of a criminal organization that handles gasoline smuggling and who appears responsible for several murders. Although her boss, Cielo Gnecco, is a fugitive from justice, everything indicates that her candidate, Elvia San Juan, is going to be the governor of Cesar. I hope I’m wrong.
Women have reduced their participation in these elections and among the few that have presented themselves, only a minority has gender awareness and declares themselves feminist. The majority are women who ended up in politics because they inherited their electoral wealth from their husbands because many of them are either paying a sentence for being corrupt or have already paid it and cannot return to politics.
All the space that was won for the opinion vote four years ago will be taken over by the clans and their tentacles. They will be the big winners of this Sunday’s elections.
Petrismo, which is running for the first time in these elections after having won the presidency, was also left in debt. The coalition made up of several leftist movements and parties, which had a large vote in the Congressional elections, was unable to present candidates who represented change and, on the contrary, in many departments the left ended up supporting candidates from the quarries of clientelist politics.
These will be boring, corrupt, predictable and hopeless elections.
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