Colombia: An ethical revolution (with a grassroots focus)

Colombia is approaching the most important election on the continent—and possibly on the planet. Not because Bogotá will decide merely the administrative fate of a peripheral state, but because something far more profound is at stake in Colombia: the possibility that Latin America will continue and deepen the historic rupture that began with Gustavo Petro’s government in the face of the old order of the armed oligarchic estate as a form of government.

While Europe is consumed by its liberal exhaustion and the United States is once again flirting with mass fascism, the Latin American continent is once again becoming the decisive laboratory of global politics. Honduras was the warning. Argentina is the experiment. Peru, the dress rehearsal for the hollowing out of democracy. And Colombia—precisely Colombia—is the tipping point.

The Continental Oligarchic Restoration or the Return of the Monroe Doctrine

The revelations known as “Honduras-Gate” —a series of leaked conversations involving political, media, and security actors linked to governments and far-right sectors in the region, including the United States, Argentina, and Honduras, discussing strategies of pressure, destabilization, and cognitive warfare against popular democratic processes in countries such as Colombia and Mexico— finally brought to light something that for years many preferred to dismiss as Latin American paranoia: the existence of coordinated mechanisms linking far-right sectors, intelligence agencies, military structures, media conglomerates, and governments aligned with Washington to contain or destabilize popular democratic processes in the region. The disclosed discussions regarding Colombia, Mexico, and other Latin American countries revealed the extent to which the old hemispheric logic of the Monroe Doctrine continues to operate in contemporary forms, combining diplomatic pressure, media and cognitive warfare, lawfare, regional intelligence, and political destabilization operations, thereby reviving the old hemispheric technologies of regime change against governments and popular movements.

For an American reader, the parallels should be impossible to ignore. The same political, media, and corporate constellation aligned with Trumpism that intervened in recent Latin American processes—including the political pressure campaigns and cognitive warfare observed in Argentina and Honduras—is now openly involved in attempts to manipulate and influence the U.S. midterm elections. The classic distinction between domestic and foreign policy is beginning to blur under a new reactionary international order centered on authoritarian nationalism, disinformation, and the permanent destabilization of democracy.

In this context, the Colombian elections go far beyond the national framework. Colombia could become the first major hemispheric rejection of the international rise of contemporary fascism, or a new strategic victory for the authoritarian forces seeking to restore the old continental order through social fear, cognitive warfare, and oligarchic discipline. For U.S. voters, interference in Colombia reflects processes already unfolding within the United States, where Trump’s Republican Party is increasingly attempting to subvert democratic procedures through institutional pressure, disinformation, voter suppression, attacks on electoral legitimacy, and increasingly open efforts to undermine and potentially overturn democratic electoral processes.
That is why there are profound reasons to closely observe what happens in Colombia on May 31: to denounce U.S. intervention, to understand the international dimension of this dispute, and to recognize that the continent’s democratic future is no longer played out solely within national borders.

What is happening in Colombia is not simply a dispute between the left and the right. That interpretation is too narrow to grasp the historical moment. What is at stake is the continuation of a process of radical and ethical democratization of the Colombian state, or the triumphant return of oligarchic necropolitics: recycled paramilitarism, land dispossession, a narco-economy integrated into regional power, structural corruption, reactionary evangelism, and violence administered as social pedagogy.

The oligarchy and the fear of the people

The Colombian elite knows this. Perhaps better than anyone else. That is why they react with such disproportionate paranoia toward figures like Iván Cepeda or toward the Historic Pact itself. Because when Cepeda speaks of an “ethical revolution,” the Colombian oligarchy does not hear a democratic transformation: it hears an insurgent threat. Not because Cepeda is a guerrilla in disguise—that caricature belongs to the outdated paranoid delusions of the landowning castes—but because Colombia’s ruling classes have spent decades confusing social justice with terrorism.

After two centuries of running the country like a plantation surrounded by private armies, the local oligarchy has lost the ability to imagine a real democracy. Any redistribution of symbolic, economic, or racial power strikes them as illegitimate violence, if not terrorism. Any popular uprising strikes them as war. Any commoner with intellectual authority is unbearable to them due to their deep class contempt, to that oligarchic conviction that knowledge, elegance, and political authority are the exclusive and monopolistic heritage of the upper castes.

Part of the tragedy in Colombia is that this mindset ultimately sabotaged even the historic possibility of a relatively stable democratic transition. The systematic obstruction of the peace process during the administration of Juan Manuel Santos—with figures such as then-Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez playing a decisive role in the legal and political blocking of the agreements—helped create exactly the scenario the far right needed: State noncompliance, the persecution of sectors linked to implementation, and the deliberate failure to dismantle regional war economies allowed residual armed groups to survive, whose existence ultimately serves as the perfect fuel for the politics of fear.

Every episode of sporadic violence, every act of residual terrorism, reactivates the favorite emotional mechanism of Latin America’s authoritarian right-wing: militarization, permanent exceptionalism, and the restoration of the internal enemy. The Colombian paradox is brutal: sectors that for decades blocked a democratic resolution to the conflict ended up using the consequences of that very sabotage as an argument to prevent further democratic transformations.

The dispute over the horizon of meaning.

Herein lies precisely the historical nature of the moment. Because the Historic Pact does not emerge merely as an electoral coalition. It also emerges as a rupture against decades of neoliberal domestication of political language and stigmatization under the doctrine of the internal enemy. Neoliberalism not only privatized public enterprises and dismantled social gains: it also attempted to privatize the collective imagination. It sought to render words like “class,” “exploitation,” “oligarchy,” or “social justice” obscene—or to expel them from language altogether. All were meant to appear as uncomfortable archaisms from another era, ideological remnants of the Cold War and the long Latin American counterinsurgency. That logic was historically organized under the so-called “internal enemy doctrine,” a political and military concept—fueled as much by American McCarthyist anti-communism as by European traditions of fascist persecution against the “infiltrated enemy”—that transformed social conflict into a permanent war against the population itself. In Latin America, that doctrine made it possible to label any project of social justice as suspected subversion. The problem was never solely armed insurgencies: the true enemy was the possibility of a popular democratization of power. The same counterinsurgency doctrine that was refined in Colombia has been applied far beyond its borders. What happens in Colombia does not stay in Colombia: the tactics once used to undermine popular movements, manipulate public opinion, criminalize dissent, and contain democratic transformation are increasingly visible in the United States and elsewhere, including in attempts to shape electoral outcomes and repress pro-democracy and anti-fascist movements ahead of the November elections.”

Under this logic, any demand for social justice could be interpreted as a subversive threat. Trade unionists, students, peasants, journalists, indigenous movements, social leaders, human rights defenders, or even moderate reformists were turned into potential enemies of the state, with the aim of preventing the emergence of democratic majorities capable of challenging the oligarchic monopoly on power.

It is not surprising, then, that for years even a significant portion of Latin American progressivism ended up speaking the sanitized language of governance, entrepreneurship, and global technocracy, as if social conflict had been overcome by cultural decree.

That is why the Historic Pact is shaking up the Latin American political landscape so much. It brings back to the center of the discourse something that the local elites believed had been definitively neutralized: the material existence of the contradiction between social classes. Suddenly, urban youth, trade unionists, grassroots feminists, Afro and Indigenous movements, and university sectors are once again talking about redistribution, dignity, and popular power without making ideological apologies. There is something magnetic about this phenomenon. After decades of aspirational neoliberalism and empty technocracy, politics once again has substance, desire, historical memory, and collective ambition. The left, for the first time in a long while, has ceased to appear as a melancholic administration of defeats with no alternative and has begun to look like the future.

That is what truly terrifies the ruling classes.

It is not merely the figure of Iván Cepeda as an individual. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a specific economic program that produces such a level of panic among the ruling classes. What truly terrifies them is the emergence of an unashamed popular subjectivity with a drive for power. Young people from the neighborhoods speaking the language of power without seeking cultural permission. Women politicizing everyday life. Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities occupying the symbolic center of the country. Proletarian university students discussing hegemony, historical debt, and redistribution as if Colombia finally belonged to them as well.

The Colombian oligarchy knew how to respond militarily and paramilitarily to the armed insurgency. What it does not know how to manage is a cultural democratization of power, an ethical and democratic revolution capable of challenging the country’s common sense without resorting to violence. And it is precisely this political impotence that is beginning to show through in the campaign speeches of its own candidates, increasingly permeated by fear, oligarchic class resentment, and the veiled threat of authoritarian restoration.

Because an ethical, aesthetic, and democratic revolution threatens something much deeper: the aristocratic monopoly on the very idea of the nation. That is, over the production of social consensus and, ultimately, over hegemony.

Democracy Under Siege

For the reasons outlined here, the Colombian elections extend far beyond national borders. In Colombia, it is not merely the fate of a progressive government that is at stake, but the very possibility that a profound democratic transformation might survive the coordinated advance of the continent’s new authoritarian right-wing movements.

Colombia could become the first major hemispheric democratic bulwark against the international advance of contemporary fascism. Or it could prove that the old Latin American elites, in league with global Trumpism and the hemispheric machinery of U.S. intervention, are still capable of blocking any profound democratization of the American continent.

What is at stake in Colombia no longer belongs solely to Colombia. The outcome of these elections could determine whether Latin America succeeds in deepening the historic rupture opened by the continent’s new popular democratic processes, or whether the Monroe Doctrine, the war against the working classes under the logic of the “internal enemy,” and oligarchic restoration manage to reorganize themselves under the contemporary forms of global fascism.