In an interview with Prensa Latina, Professor Francisco Toloza, from the National University, explained that it is not a catchphrase to say that this Sunday’s election day is historic in several ways. The first is the Latin American context where the right has been losing space with the recent defeats in Honduras and Chile, two of its most important strongholds, he stressed.
“In Colombia there is a new reality that manifested itself in a sustained social outbreak in 2019, 2020 and 2021 and that many of us aspire to see expressed at the polls in a massive vote in favor of alternative sectors and social leaders and open the possibility of a victory of the alternative and leftist sectors in the next presidential elections on May 29,” he said.
In his opinion, the government of Iván Duque, of the Democratic Center, has contributed to the fact that more and more sectors see a left-wing government as an alternative.
“Why? Because Duque has not been able to cope with the great economic crisis that Covid-19 helped exacerbate, with an ultra-devalued peso, monetary poverty that affects 45 percent of the population (about 21 million people,” emphasized the also political scientist.
Added to this situation in Colombia, thanks to the neoliberal and far-right government of Duque, is the harsh repression against protesters, especially against youth, in the context of the 2021 National Strike, the academic noted.
“We believe that this is already unsustainable and the crisis of this model, of this Colombian establishment, has not only hit those below, those of always, but even sectors of the middle classes and the bourgeoisie,” he commented.
In this sense, he explained that they have been affected “by the economic, political, and human rights crisis, as well as by the stubbornness of the Duque administration in practically maintaining a situation of war with the sister Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.”
He stressed that Colombia is a country that depends economically on trade with Venezuela, there are binational families and also a wide border of more than 2,200 kilometers.
“That is why this climate of war and ignorance of the political and social reality of Venezuela has affected and generated great suffering for a people that is one: that of the Colombian-Venezuelan region,” he said.
He pointed out that the Democratic Center will surely lose a large number of senators because “it no longer has its main leader, Álvaro Uribe, who had to resign his seat in Congress to avoid jail and is deeply questioned after the few advances of the Agreement of Peace”.
In addition, “his genocidal role has been revealed with more than 6,400 murdered young people, unfortunately known as false positives,” he said.
“Part of the expression of this crisis is that, while from the alternative sectors a clear victory is pointed to in the internal consultation of the Historical Pact, of Senator Gustavo Petro, in the sectors of the establishment and the right they are still plucking daisies” , he pointed out.
He affirmed that there is a very strong fight in the right-wing coalition called Team for Colombia and it is not yet known who his candidate will be.
“But any of them are candidates with a deeply low profile and are the very expression of the crisis that the right wing is experiencing,” he assured.
Likewise, he said that he did not see clarity in the misnamed center, which actually wants to keep Colombia within the continental right and the neoliberal model.
Uribismo, he assured, is in decline, in decline, but the Colombian right is not exterminated, it is not finished, on the contrary, there will also be an expression of a “tied vote, a machine vote, a patronage vote, a vote that is bought and sold and that is in the power of the great traditional parties and the new mafias creating with parties derived from Uribismo in this century».
It is clear that there will be a divided parliament, a little more to the left than the current one, but with difficulties for anyone who will have to govern the Palace of Nariño from next August 7, he warned.
He assured that these elections take place without any guarantee of security, due to the continuity of the armed conflict and practically the death sentences of the paramilitary groups.
There is also no guarantee in terms of equality of conditions for the financing of campaigns or electoral transparency because, he said, “the registrar Alexánder Vega is a token of the right, of the national government that is accusing Russia, Venezuela and Cuba, no matter how delusional it may seem, of a supposed electoral fraud in favor of the left.”
“He talks about hackers who can alter the software of the Registrar’s Office and this is not a ‘Garcíamarquian’ story, the registrar called the United States FBI to supervise the vote counting mechanism,” he said.
These lack of guarantees are the clear expression of the non-compliance with the Peace Agreement that contemplates a fundamental electoral political reform that has not been done, he affirmed.
The news in Colombia could be that a right wing, which had won the elections for 140 years and had had control of the country, could lose the presidency through the ballot box, he stressed.
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