The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, made strong statements this Saturday analyzing the present of his government, which lacks a majority in Congress, forcing him to build a majority coalition where his political force needs others that are not as progressive and have been linked to the institutional past: “I believe that radicalism in itself can lead to errors. In the existing tension between reform and revolution, a reform keeps some things from the past and causes a break towards the future. This rupture has to do, in all the reforms that I have presented, with overcoming the neoliberal model. It is not a question of abolishing the market but of removing the preponderance of the market and putting the preponderance in the right of the citizen and the citizen”.
“Overcoming the neoliberal model”
In the interview with the radio program La Pizarra of Canal Red in Spain made by the Spanish academic Alfredo Serrano Mancilla, Petro added that the three major reforms he is promoting are linked to retirement, health and the labor regime, pointing to overcome the neoliberal model: “That is not overcoming capitalism, it is matching it. I have even said to develop it, because in Colombia we do not have developed capitalism, it is rickety. The great accumulators of capital that exist in the country do so at the expense of the State with their resources”. This would have generated that they put the State at their service making it undemocratic, taking power away from the population and excluding it. “The regime that comes out of there is one of profound social inequality and enormous capitalist rickety,” he said.
To this situation, Petro considers it “pre-modern production relations”, something that also occurs with land in Colombia: “It is practically in the hands of feudalism, and it is another of the ongoing reforms. We have 20 million fertile hectares, which are owned by two or three thousand people and do not have productive activities”. In this unproductive landowning sector, the figure of Petro generates tension: “they are the owners of the media; So I have a daily campaign against me and yet the people have maintained a majority with me, but they still need to mobilize more. These reforms are going to have great problems to be built in reality, if the people do not mobilize. Colombia has a stammering experience in popular organization, very strong in the indigenous, especially in the south of the country, and very weak in the big cities. We are at a time when fundamental reforms are being proposed, many have to do with changing production relations, but I cannot guarantee that we will pass them”.
Communication in the digital world
Gustavo Petro’s analysis drifted towards social networks and digital communication, reflecting that, at first, they were perceived as a possibility of “democratization of information”, in which the big media scheme was losing audience, before some social networks that opened up the possibility of “expressing oneself more freely”, where he was a precursor spreading his ideas on networks. The problem, from his point of view, would be that In Colombia, half of the population is not connected to the Internet, not only due to a lack of connectivity infrastructure, but also due to a matter of costs that they cannot afford in terms of telephone service and cell phone access. And he added that another world factor is the appropriation of the networks: “the owners of each platform are large accumulators of capital, they have an ideology and they act, so the algorithms are not democratic. When information appears to you, it is generally not progressive information. And many philosophers have already delved into this matter and into the possibility of manipulation, almost individual by individual; this opens up a slightly more catastrophic vision of the media, that is, it could be worse than the traditional media”.
For this reason Petro considers that, heAchieving the democratization of the web deserves a great global public debate: nothing would be gained by democracy if it went from a traditional media system in the hands of the great accumulators of capital, to a supranational media in the hands of the great accumulators of world capital.
Latin American unity
Petro gave his opinion on Latin American integration, which he sees as “more rhetorical than real; the Europeans have taught us how to integrate: they start from very specific projects such as coal and the fossil economy. Today we cannot integrate because of the fossil economy , which is oil and it is abundant in Latin America.It seems to me that Chávez’s mistake was there: he believed in integration around the energy question as in Europe, but in the fossil economy. Today we cannot think of a world based on the fossil economy, that anchors us to the past, to an old progressivism that no longer exists and that could perfectly leave us in a great failure in one or two decades, because human survival implies leaving the accumulation of fossil capital. This opens a scenario, but it has not yet been foreseen, which is the integration of Latin America through clean energy, in decarbonized economies, which implies linking electricity networks and clean mobility networks”.
Petro stressed that today, there are almost no projects around these issues in the South Continent, where there would be centripetal forces that disperse from two large economies in the region: Mexico with the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and Brazil, which has linked more to the BRICS. In this context, Latin American integration could be seen as something small, because from Mexican and Brazilian eyes, joining Ecuador or Colombia “may not be seen as a priority.”
The potential of clean energy
In the interview Petro said there are several imperialisms in the world and not only the one that was built in the United States: “Sometimes I feel afraid when leftist projects decide to separate from the US and surrender to the European or Chinese project. The Russian issue is important, Russia cannot be measured by its past, neither the imperial nor the revolutionary. Russia today is different, it has capitalist relations of production. China must be looked at more carefully because we are very unaware of it, it has a great command of world infrastructures that can turn it into an empire”.
The Colombian leader believes that anti-imperialism must be looked at in another way: “it is about identifying how Latin American power grows more, how we are more powerful so that empires do not dominate us. For example, from the perspective of the climate crisis, which It is how I have proposed that all problems be looked at”.
According to Petro, the Amazon Jungle gives power to South America, in relation to new clean energy technologies such as solar, hydraulic and wind: “To date, the region with the greatest potential for generating clean energy is Latin America.” And the strength of that demand would be in the US, which needs to decarbonize. Given the need for the economy to stop consuming oil and coal, the South Continent should avoid repeating the mistake of producing energy raw materials such as coal and oil, which prevents industrialization at the local level.
For the president of Colombia, “the discussion is how, from clean energy, decarbonized industrialization appears, which is what would give us our economic power. We should build this discussion in a new scenario such as UNSAUR or CELAC because if If we don’t, we wouldn’t be speaking in the language of the new world power.”