The president who preached revolution

… Since 1789, there has been one magical word in itself that includes all the imaginary futures, never as hopeless as a hopeless situation. Those words are revolutionary.

Simone Weil

Since he took office on August 7, 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Peter has been trying to set up a new, revolutionary epic tale in the country’s political culture. With the presence of King Philipe VI of Spain, he began his inaugural speech, ordering soldiers in the military home to draw out the sword of Simon Bolivar. This was the same sword that was said to have been stolen from the Liberator House Museum in Bogota by the April 19th Movement (M-19), a guerrilla movement that Peter belonged to adolescence. The group returned it in 1991 as a gesture of peace.

Displaying the sword of Bolivar was the first of several innovative gestures, symbols and rituals that accompanied Peter’s president. Subsequent examples include the M-19 flags displayed at the gathering along with hats, cassocks and other relics, particularly Jaime Bateman and Alvaro Feyado (a fellow underground member of Peter) and Camilo Torres, the charismatic leader of the National Liberation Army (ELN). All of these come from Petro’s personal collection.

Petro’s complicated and vague statement about X (formerly Twitter) also deserves mention. Sometimes they prove the M-19. The M-19 was the protagonist of social reforms introduced by the 1991 Constitution, abandoning violence in exchange for pardons in 1990. But otherwise, Peter looks nostalgic for the year when guns tried to ignite the Latin American revolution. In other countries, this is anecdotal, but not prolific to give birth to novelists, cyclists, singers and guerrillas.

How can you explain revolutionary nostalgia in someone who once fought with weapons and reached the pinnacle of power? Of course, Peter has maintained the demobilization agreement and has maintained an institutional responsibility position for over 30 years. Those who view him as the fifth columnist suffer from one of the political illnesses of our time, and the words “fascist” and “communist” are attributed to the enemy of fanatic and accidental ideology.

However, it is true that the two souls coexist with Peter and fight against the battle between politician-like Sparego and revolutionary ID. Between a politician who has to compromise and a laid back revolutionary. The first left leader in the country’s Republican history, accumulating grievances took preceded power, exploded on the streets between 2019 and 2021. But it became clear that without a majority of Congress, combined with deep, deep-rooted light emptying to administrative technocracy and immeasurable personalism, it soon became clear that improvisation was statistically improvised. Sometimes inconsistency and inefficiency create deep cracks in Peter’s “change” story. It is no coincidence that his half-reformist, half-revolutionary, always vague declarations appear when they are in decline. For Peter, the past is a lifeline.

The revolution after the revolution

Revolutionary myths have never had political and cultural weight in the history of Colombia, which was in Chile with Arendé or Mexico in the Nationalist Project, but Peter calls an updated version of the same. This is made up of the country as the “power of the world of life.” Its pillars are peace negotiations with armed groups, the promotion of green economy, biodiversity, and the visibility of historically excluded people. Readers with ample patience will recognize a mix of Eduardo Galeano, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, a trademark of old Latin American left-wing rhetoric.

There is a complimentary intuition that underlies Peter’s program. However, the Colombian government shares the paradox of modern left-wing parties around the world. They achieve relative success by placing progressive sensitivity to a global agenda (environment, identity, equality, fiscal justice, awareness, environment, identity, equality, fiscal justice, recognition), but face great challenges in agreeing and implementing effective and sustainable measures. Politics is not the realm of good ideas and one-off success, as politicians and state women know, but not the realm of possible collective projects.

Realism means knowing the battle of battle. However, in his own stage as a revolutionary leader in the region, Peter was armed with a paper sword. This is a debilitating anti-Americanism that has never been rooted in a country that received $389 million from the US in 2023. He is undoubtedly supported by strong ethical and legal justifications by requiring deported immigrants to adequate care. However, his neglect to the immeasurable economic costs of a tariff war with his major trading partners brought to the table again the most populist and demagogical version of his politics. As we all know, revolutionaries tend to misunderstand their sums.

The last Buendia

In Colombia, Peter’s most uncompromising critics call him the same coincidence “guerilero” as his current president in his time, in his time, called his enemy. Obviously, this is permitted in democratic debates, but also includes historical inaccuracies. Peter was not a guerrilla, as did Manuel Marlanda Veles (FARC) or Fabio Vasquez Castaño (ELN). He also did not hold a major position in the M-19, which emerged as an armed group following the fraud that took place against former dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinila in the April 1970 presidential election.

Colloquially known M-19 – or “mm” is the most romantic guerrilla organization in Colombian history. His memoir (Una Vida, Muchas Vidas2021), Peter attributes his pioneering role in tolerance towards homosexuals to the movement, under the guidance of the poet Louis Vidales. However, he says that it is not a word about the execution of union member Jose Raquel Mercado in 1976, and that it is not an act that shocked the public.

M-19 was defined as a nationalist and popular movement, two adjectives that are rare in Colombia’s singular political history. However, in the 70s and 80s, “MM” attracted widespread sympathy when the country lived under a siege, and when the opposition and suspected socialists were the subject of state oppression and persecution. This cultural and emotional atmosphere is beautifully reproduced by Juan Gabriel Vazquez in his novel Los Nombres de Feliza. However, it was not resistance to authoritarianism that gave M-19 a place in the history of Colombian democracy, but the demobilization of 1990 and subsequent election success was its success as a liberal and conservative party as a third political force involved in drafting the constitution.

M-19 was not a typical guerrilla group, just as Peter was not a typical guerrilla fighter. Rather, it was a revolutionary army, fighting for “real democracy” like Simon Bolivar’s campaign against royalists. M-19 has now become recognized as a popular militarist with unique thinking that is different from Stalinism, Maoism and Gue Valism. More remembered for its stunts, including the theft of the Bolivar sword in 1975, the capture of 5,000 weapons from the military camp in 1979, the occupation of the Dominican Republic embassy in 1980, and the attack on the Judicial Palace in 1985.

This ambiguity was accompanied by Gustavo Peter’s career from the age of 18. It describes his typical combination of nationalist rhetoric, internationalist messianism, and patriotic folklore. M-19 is Peter’s first love, something he will never forget, and it is idealized over the years. This constant past defines this melancholic revolutionary character, his tendency to envelop himself in unconditional supporters, his senseless neglect for management and governance, and his preferences to pray day and night for world apocalypse, distant conflicts, and utopian solutions.

The revolutionary president likes to compare him to Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the protagonist of Gabriel Garcia Marquez 100 years of lonelinessperhaps for the courage to fight as much as he can – unless his enemies have left. But in fact, Peter resembles Jose Arcadio Buendia, the colonel’s father. His innovative sermon is a 2.0 version of stubbornness, the founder of Macondo, the mirror city of Marquez’s book, speaks endlessly about his potions.

This article is a part of Global Conversations and is supported by Open Society Foundations. The original Spanish version is available online Letras Ribour January 24, 2025.