2022 Colombian Election Platforms: Gustavo Petro

I will go through the main platform promises and proposals of the major presidential candidates in Colombia.

Gustavo Petro is the frontrunner and his proposals are always the centre of attention, generating a lot of debate and controversy. They’re so controversial because they raise some fundamental political questions: the role of the state, the role of the private sector and the economic model.

You can read Petro’s full platform here.

The basics

Petro’s slogan is Colombia Potencia Mundial de la Vida (Colombia: World power of life). He proposes the most significant and far-reaching changes to Colombia’s socioeconomic and political system of all the major candidates. Some of his promises challenge the fundamentals of the post-1990s Colombian socioeconomic system, so in that context, they may be considered to be quite radical. He paints an enticing portrait of a multicoloured democracy in peace built around a new social contract which will make equality a reality and with a productive economy which generates wealth and protects the natural environment.

Petro fundamentally wants to significantly strengthen the role of the state (the public sector). Since the 1990s, a lot of the state’s traditional responsibilities, including the provision of social services, have been outsourced, contracted out or privatized. Petro wants to reverse that, so that the public sector intervenes more in the economy and has a predominant role in the provision of social services, like in healthcare and pensions. Unsurprisingly, a lot of his proposals strike fear in the hearts of business leaders.

Some of the major proposals, summarized:

• Replace the extractivist economic model with a diversified economy based on agriculture, industry, services and tourism, with tariffs to protect industry and agriculture.
• Begin a rapid energy transition away from fossil fuels, banning all future oil exploration and focusing on solar and wind power instead.
• Pass a major tax reform to raise 5.5% of GDP in revenues by eliminating tax benefits and overhauling the corporate and personal income tax system.
• Guaranteed employment with the state as an employer of last resort.
• Agrarian reform to reduce inequalities in land and water possession.
• Free post-secondary education and forgive student loan debt.
• Create a single, universal public ‘preventive’ healthcare system, abolishing the role of public and private health insurance providers (EPS) as intermediaries.
• Unify the pension systems into a predominantly public, universal system with only the wealthiest allowed to contribute a supplementary amount to private pension funds.
• Immediately declare an emergency to address hunger and malnutrition and intervene in the food market.
• Create a national care system to reward, reduce and redistribute feminized care work and create a basic minimum income for female head of households.
• Major police and military reforms: abolish conscription, abolish the riot police, transfer the police from the defence to the interior or justice ministries.
• Fully implement the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC and move towards peace talks with the ELN.
• Paradigm shift on drugs: promote illicit crop substitution, don’t criminalize coca cultivators and treat drug use as a public health issue.
• Non-interventionist foreign policy, reestablish ties with the Maduro regime in Venezuela.

Economic and environmental issues

The defining element of Gustavo Petro’s economic agenda, as in 2018, is replacing the mineral-dependent extractivist economic model with a ‘productive economy’ based on respect for nature. This vision differs substantially from that of Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa and even Evo Morales, whose governments (especially chavismo and Correa) ended up being very much in favour of the extractivist economic models.

Petro says that he first understood the relationship between economic development and nature and how ‘voracious capitalism and neoliberalism’ had ‘devoured the planet’ while he studying environment and population development at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium in the 1990s. His criticisms of capitalism do not come from Marxism, but rather from environmentalism and the climate emergency.

Since the 1980–1990s, an extractivist model replaced the old coffee-based agricultural economy, as the Colombian economy liberalized and opened to global markets. In 2019, oil and coal made up 54% of Colombian exports, while coffee accounted for just 6%. Successive governments, regardless of their political stripe, have largely followed this liberal extractivist model — Juan Manuel Santos, for example, declared mining and energy to be the ‘locomotive’ of the economy. Oil only accounts for 2% of GDP but is a major source of government revenues.

Economic policy

Gustavo Petro’s “productive transformation” to replace the extractivist and agro-export model implies major changes to Colombia’s economic structure, trade relations and its place in the global economic system. His “productive transformation” policy is built on the idea of sectoral pacts between the state, the private sector and civil society, and envisions a more diversified economy based on agriculture, industry, high-tech services and tourism. In 2018, his opponents mocked him for implying that avocados could replace oil — he did not quite say that, but he says that products such as avocados, corn, rice, potatoes, bananas, soybeans, tomatoes, coffee and cocoa can become leading products.

Petro wants to promote and protect national agriculture and industries with protectionist measures and more state intervention in the economy. He would impose ‘smart’ tariffs to protect national industries and agricultural production and create jobs, renegotiate free trade agreements and review the conditions for foreign investment and intellectual property rights. The government would intervene more actively in the economy, notably to create and promote new domestic industries — he mentions fertilizers, electric vehicles, pharmaceuticals and green technologies.

Colombia ranks very poorly on transportation infrastructure, particularly roads and railways, and poor infrastructure and connectivity have been an obstacle to growth and development in Colombia for centuries. The past two governments have made major investments in transportation infrastructure, particularly roads and highways. Petro, however, isn’t fond of highways and wants to reduce dependency on diesel. Instead, he has very ambitious (and somewhat unrealistic) dreams to regain the navigability of rivers like the Magdalena, build more tertiary roads and to build an elevated electric railway network, “complementary to the Panama Canal”, between Barranquilla and Buenaventura. In urban areas, he supports the development of clean mobility — regional trains, metros, electric buses, bike lanes, car sharing and walking. Railways and river navigation have been neglected for decades in Colombia.

Another of Petro’s major ambitious promises is guaranteed employment, which he describes as the base of a new social contract to replace the current focus on subsidies and labour flexibility. Concretely, the state as an employer of last resort would provide a job with a basic salary for anyone who wants to work but cannot find work. This idea is kind of a replacement for a universal basic income, which opposition politicians supported during the pandemic. These jobs would include small public works projects and civic coexistence programs to reduce violence. He says the counter-cyclical application of this promise will create a stable labour market that will withstand cyclical shocks, increasing during recessions, but the costs of such a program would be enormous: there are currently 3.2 million unemployed people, an unemployment rate of 12.9%.

Petro wants to organize the informal economy — what he calls the ‘popular economy’ — and provide these future associations of informal workers with directly-assigned public contracts, special lines of microcredit, vocational training and pensions.

Other economic policies:

• Create a separate Ministry of Industry, currently part of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, to design and implement industrial policies.
• Democratize access to credit through public banking, low-interest loans and wage subsidies for small businesses. Petro proposes to merge different public financial institutions into a single public financial holding company (something which the current government wanted to do).
• A labour reform to guarantee the right to decent work.
  Regulation of work from home and employment on digital platforms (Uber etc.)

Fiscal and tax policy

A major tax reform in 2022 or 2023 is unavoidable because of the COVID-19 recession (7.1% deficit in 2021), the small stopgap tax reform that Duque managed to have adopted in extremis following the huge protests sparked by his initial unpopular reform and simply to find the money to pay for expensive campaign promises.

Just about everyone can agree that Colombia’s tax system is broken: an excessive amount of tax expenditures (and deductions, incentives, exemptions, write-offs, tax credits etc.) skew the system, tax revenues are low (20% of GDP vs. 34% for the OECD) and the system does a very poor job at redistributing income. Mainstream experts usually agree on solutions but many of them, like making more people (the middle-class) pay income taxes or imposing VAT on basic consumer goods, are extremely unpopular and unlikely to get through Congress.

Petro has the most ambitious and transformational tax reform ideas — his economic advisors talk about a tax reform that would aim to raise about 50–55 trillion pesos (5.5% of GDP), more than double Duque’s failed 2021 tax reform proposal.

He proposes a structural reform that would make the system fairer and more progressive, and gradually increase tax revenues to a level similar to the average of other OECD countries. He would do so mainly by eliminating tax benefits — particularly those which incentivize the extractivist economic model and benefit wealthy individuals and corporations — and through a big overhaul of the income tax system.

He wants to replace the corporate income tax with a tax on profits, but also to lower corporate taxation — both for SMEs and larger businesses (differential tax rates for SMEs was proposed in Duque’s failed 2021 reform). Petro says that he would only raise taxes on the 4,000 wealthiest people in the country and he would do so by taxing their unproductive assets.

Concretely, Petro would get rid of the schedular tax system and tax dividends and occasional profits at the same rate as general income (labour income etc.) — which would entail a significant increase on taxes paid by individuals on dividends and occasional profits. He would also force companies to declare and redistribute at least 70% of their dividends to shareholders (the current dividend tax can easily be avoided by corporations not distributing dividends), which would be taxed at a higher rate.

Finally, Petro wants to significantly strengthen measures against tax evasion, with stricter measures and harsher punishments. He is skeptical of the tax amnesties favoured by past governments and says that prison sentences shouldn’t be eliminated for those who admit responsibility and pay back the state. He also proposes to ban those who receive public funds from having bank accounts in tax havens.

On the other hand, Petro says he wouldn’t raise taxes on the middle-class and the poor and promises not to impose VAT on basic consumer goods — but these are promises which can be very difficult to keep.

Other fiscal and taxation policies:

• Impose health taxes on ultra-processed foods.
• Allow local governments to create congestion charges.

Energy transition

Gustavo Petro wants a very rapid transition away from oil and fossil fuels towards renewable energies (solar, wind and water), basically ending oil production within 10 to 15 years. However, Colombia already has the sixth ‘cleanest’ energy mix in the world: 67% of electricity generated in the country comes from hydropower, and 31% comes from fossil fuels

One of his most controversial proposals is to immediately suspend all future oil exploration, as well as ban the exploration and exploitation of unconventional deposits and offshore oil and to stop fracking pilot projects. Existing fossil fuel reserves would be used for internal consumption.

His stance on oil really encapsulates both Petro’s appeal and repulsiveness to different people. For his opponents, it shows his economic irresponsibility. For his supporters, it’s a bold and daring idea that is the kind of radical change many are thirsty for, and is well in line with global concerns about the climate crisis.

His vision for renewable energies is very ambitious but very vague and idealistic. He talks about the potential for wind and solar power in La Guajira, as well as biomass and hydrogen. On the other hand, he is more skeptical about Colombia’s main energy source, hydroelectricity, after the Hidroituango crisis. He would not build any new conventional hydroelectric dams and review the risk conditions of existing plants to protect affected communities.

The energy transition would be funded by royalties and the elimination of tax benefits for oil, coal and hydroelectricity.

Petro proposes to reform the mining code and strengthen environmental, labour and fiscal control on mining projects, notably demanding that mining companies rehabilitate the land and decontaminate rivers.

His energy policy is hostile to big corporations and wants to ‘democratize’ the energy sector, without giving much details — besides vague ideas to involve society in planning, regulation and monitoring, and promising lower rates and production costs.

Environment

Petro links his opposition to the extractivist model to the fight against climate change — although Colombia on its own contributes little to climate change (only 0.26% of global CO2 emissions in 2020).

Water has been one of the major political priorities of Petro ever since he was mayor of Bogotá. As president, he would guarantee access to water as a fundamental right by providing a ‘vital minimum’ amount of water to everyone, as he did in Bogotá. He would organize the territory around water and promote productive economic activities in harmony with the protection of the environment, local communities and cultural practices. His platform talks of ‘democratizing’ the access to water, ‘reestablishing’ equitable access to water and environmental control of drainage basins used by mining project.

Iván Duque’s government will leave behind very ambitious environmental commitments, although the results so far have been disappointing. Petro, like the other candidates, largely support these existing goals, like the target of net-zero deforestation by 2030. However, he opposes the military focus of Duque’s deforestation policy (Operation Artemisa) and would instead focus on formalizing land ownership and halting the appropriation of land for drug trafficking and mining. Indeed, informality in land tenure is one of the main causes of deforestation in the Amazon, and has allowed cattle ranchers to seize public lands, forest reserves and indigenous territories without property titles.

Petro would define high-risk zones as environmental reserves to avoid population expansion and resettle families living in areas at high risk of natural disasters. This is an ambitious and very costly idea, but consistent with the climate change adaptation that a vulnerable country like Colombia needs.

Other environmental policies:

• The protection of all páramos, aquifers, drainage basins, coastlines, rivers as well as the Amazon, Orinoquía and Pacific coast.
• Improve the quality and reduce the costs of public utilities including water and trash collection, and improve the quality and coverage of sewage systems.
• Respect local communities’ autonomy and local customs and the outcomes of local referendums and consultations, something which worries investors and big corporations. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian authorities will act as the environmental authority in their territories.
• Strengthen the independence and autonomy of environmental authorities. The costs of environmental impact studies will be borne by project developers.
• No aerial aspersion with glyphosate.
• Guarantees for environmental activists. Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for environmental defenders. This would mean the ratification of the Escazú agreement.
• Ban bullfighting and other spectacles which involve animal abuse.
• Ban single-use plastics and move to a circular economy.

Land reform

Colombia has one of the most unequal concentrations of land ownership anywhere in the world: the largest properties (over 500 hectares) make up just 0.5% of all properties but occupy 68% of the land. Land distribution and tenure rights are one of the fundamental causes of violence in Colombia. The most transformational land reform measures of the peace agreement have not been implemented.

Petro promises an agrarian reform to reduce inequality in the possession and use of land and water. He would finish the update of the multipurpose cadastre (part of the peace agreement), implement rural reform measures of the peace agreement (territorial development plans and the land fund), formalize property rights and end unproductive latifundios so that underused or inadequately used land (like extensive cattle grazing) is used for agricultural purposes. Latifundios owner would either need to start producing crops, pay higher taxes or, as a last resort, sell their land to the state. He promises that the most fertile land will create jobs for millions of dispossessed and displaced families, peasants and cooperatives.

Social policy

Education

Petro wants to strengthen the public education system, from early childhood education to post-secondary. He sees education as emancipatory (freeing the youth from violence) with a comprehensive, critical and democratic curriculum based on the diversity of knowledge, inclusiveness, civic education, arts, culture, sports, healthy well-being and love.

He promises free and universal early childhood education, including daycare/nursery and kindergarten, full-day schooling, adequate school lunches and improvement of school infrastructures including internet connectivity. To avoid students from dropping out, Petro would make the final years of high school a real gateway to post-secondary education.

Petro wants free public post-secondary education open to everyone, strengthening the network of public universities and the National Training Service (SENA) and increasing funding for post-secondary education. His major ambitious (and controversial) promise here is to forgive student loan debt from the ICETEX — a proposal which has been criticized by President Iván Duque, who called it a populist promise which will ruin the educational financing system.

Healthcare

One of Gustavo Petro’s main promise — unsurprisingly a controversial one — is to create a single, universal public ‘preventive’ healthcare system, providing quality care to everyone regardless of income and without the intermediation of insurance providers.

Petro has long been a vocal opponent of the current healthcare system created by Law 100 of 1993. Colombia has a ‘mixed-market’ healthcare system (not too dissimilar to Obamacare) with mandatory universal health insurance, divided into a contributory regime for those able to pay (12.5% of monthly covered earnings, split between employers and employees) and a subsidized regime for the poor. Beneficiaries enroll with public or private health insurance providers known as EPS, are entitled by law to a basic benefits plan and receive care within their EPS’ network (providers are known as IPS).

Colombia’s healthcare system is not bad — it ranked highly in a WHO survey, it now has near-universal insurance coverage (split about 50/50 between the two regimes), low co-pays and a low proportion of out-of-pocket expenditures — but there are major deficiencies in the quality of care and the system has been beset by a never-ending series of corruption and fraud scandals in the EPS.

The EPS, widely considered the biggest problem with the system, have become the lightning rod for criticism because of their scandals, suspicious profits, spectacular rise and falls, financial crises, inefficiencies and for allegedly acting as a barrier between patients and care providers (denying treatment and care, leading to tutelas in court and congesting the judiciary.). Many argue that the EPS have turned healthcare into a business for a select few rather than a right, and blamed them for nearly bankrupting and collapsing the system (even pre-pandemic) in their corrupt quest for profit.

The main part of Petro’s healthcare reform proposal is essentially to abolish the EPS as intermediaries to create a single, publicly run universal healthcare system, although private healthcare providers would still be allowed. His platform is very vague as to how it would be financed, but suggests there would still be payroll contributions, and the EPS would be replaced by ‘territorial health councils’ led by the health departments of each departments with the participation of other actors. These councils would organize local networks of healthcare providers (public and private), manage payments and sign contracts, and patients would directly access healthcare services without passing through an intermediary.

This is an innovative proposal, and one that could be quite appealing given the unpopularity of EPS, but experts have warned that it is not very feasible, largely because the territorial health departments do not have the capacity to properly administer financial resources and run the healthcare network. There are already major corruption scandals in the local health departments, as evidence by the ‘hemophilia cartel’ in Córdoba.

The other part of Petro’s proposal is shifting towards a preventive healthcare model. He promises publicly financed interdisciplinary health teams in the communities, particularly rural areas and low-income urban areas, to prevent disease. Petro argues that a focus on preventive healthcare will reduce costs and improve the healthcare system, but preventive healthcare already exists through the EPS and it’s doubtful the public sector would do a better job than the EPS at it, especially since under Petro’s model there’d be no cost incentives for good prevention.

Other healthcare proposals:

• Improve working conditions for healthcare workers with fair pay, promotions and permanent training.
• Revitalize scientific R&D to promote the creation of a national pharmaceutical industry.
• Expand coverage of work injury benefits.

Pensions

Gustavo Petro’s proposals have all been at the centre of debate during the campaign, but recently no proposal has been as controversial and divisive as his pension reform ideas.

There’s widespread consensus, from left to right, that a structural pension reform is necessary and long overdue — but it’s never been done. The current pension system (created by Law 100 of 1993) is complicated. It is made up of two parallel, competing systems (plus special systems) — a public defined-benefit social insurance system (Colpensiones) and private, defined-contribution individual accounts run by private pension fund administrators (AFP), based on the 1980s Chilean model. People may choose between the systems and switch every five years up to 10 years before retirement. The payroll contributions are the same for both system (16% of covered earnings), but the qualifying conditions are different although both systems guarantee a minimum pension (the minimum wage) to those who don’t meet qualifying conditions. To help fix the biggest problem with the system — the very low coverage — a subsidized voluntary individual account program (BEPS) for non-contributors earning less than the minimum wage and an insufficient means-tested pension subsidy (Colombia Mayor) were created.

Both systems have many problems: pension coverage is very low (25% of seniors have a pension, another 25% or so receive the Colombia Mayor subsidy), only 30–35% of the economically active population contributes for a pension because of high labour informality and low wages (around half earn less than the minimum wage), few people end up meeting the qualifying conditions, the public system pays a much higher replacement rate (avg. 73%) than the private funds, the retirement age is low (57 women/62 men), most pensioners are in Colpensiones but most contributors are in the AFPs, the public system has regressive implicit subsidies which favour the rich, the private system is a duopoly with two dominant AFPs (owned by Luis Carlos Sarmiento’s Grupo Aval and the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño respectively), the public system is costly and has a big deficit (taking about 3.5% of GDP in public spending each year) and the public system is unsustainable over the long-term because of a slowly aging population.

Petro proposes to unify the two systems into a predominantly public, universal system with three complementary pillars.

A basic, non-contributory pillar would guarantee a basic pension (half the minimum wage) to everyone who doesn’t currently have a pension. In the main contributory pillar, everyone earning between one and four minimum wages would need to contribute to Colpensiones (public) while those who earn more than four minimum wages would be allowed to choose where to contribute the surplus, including to private AFPs. There would be a third, complementary and voluntary fund for those who want to complement their pension. The acquired rights and current pensions would be respected, the retirement age would not be increased, survivors’ pensions would not be modified and the pension gap between men and women would be closed (unclear how).

He says that his reform will significantly increase Colpensiones’ income, allowing it to cover the pensions of the 1.4 million pensioners it currently has, and generate major savings to the state, enough to fund the guaranteed basic pension for the poor.

Petro’s idea is not particularly radical: many experts and politicians across the political spectrum, as well as the OECD and World Bank, have proposed a pillars system quite similar to Petro’s proposal (and his platform notes that his model takes from the World Bank’s recommendations and inspired by the Dutch system). What is quite radical in his proposal is that by setting the floor for additional contributions to the AFPs at 4 minimum wages, he would essentially eviscerate the private system, because only 5% or so earn more than 4 minimum wages, so the AFPs would need to survive on the contributions on a small number of individuals (other proposals for a similar system set the floor much lower, like 1.5 minimum wages). Doing so would have huge impact on Colombian capital markets. That’s kind of his point: he has repeatedly criticized the ‘private appropriation of benefits’ and said the private system is controlled by a few wealthy bankers.

What has generated a lot of controversy and anxiety is a comment he made during a debate in which he said that the contributions made are ‘public money’ (he is correct), which led his opponents to say that Petro would ‘expropriate’ the pensions and retirement savings of those in the private system. Many of his critics have drawn comparisons to Cristina Kirchner’s pension reform in Argentina in 2008, which nationalized private pension funds.

Petro’s proposal would help expand the pension coverage and eliminate the competition between two systems, but would not fix the problems of so many people not meeting the qualifying conditions or the regressive subsidies in the public system. It is, overall, also a short-term fix: the system remains unsustainable in the long-term because of the aging population, an issue which Petro has largely brushed off as a future problem.

Housing and urban development

Petro showed his urban vision while he was mayor of Bogotá: hostile to urban sprawl, mega-projects and to big property developers and construction companies, he wants to revitalize run-down downtown cores, densify cities, reduce residential segregation and focus more on inequalities and vulnerable sectors of society. He largely brings that same vision to his platform in 2022.

His housing policy is short on specifics but is clearly focused on social housing, improving living conditions in low-income and informal neighbourhoods and settlements and working with local communities and associations (rather than construction companies and property developers) to achieve these goals. He promises, among other things, a national community/neighbourhood improvement program, formal property titles to guarantee access to housing, public-community alliances to build and renovate housing in informal settlements and reviewing regulations on social housing.

Hunger and malnutrition

Petro has said that hunger and malnutrition is a ‘social catastrophe’. In 2018, 5.5% of the population was undernourished and 10.8% of children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition. In February 2022, a FAO-WFP report placed Colombia on a list of “hunger hotspots” and said that 7.3 million people are food insecure and in need of food assistance. The government complained that the report was not shared with them ahead of time and it lacked factual support and methodological definition, demanding that Colombia be removed from the list.

Gustavo Petro said that the first thing he would do if elected is declare a state of economic emergency, which would allow him to issue decrees related specifically to the emergency for periods of 30 days up to 90 days. He wants the state to intervene in the market with large-scale public purchases of food from producers and industries to deliver food assistance vouchers or packages for around six months.

His idea to declare a state of emergency was another matter that raised controversy. It was criticized by economists as well as by President Duque, who called it “populist and demagogic” and said that states of emergency can’t end hunger.

Societal issues

Women’s rights

Women’s rights is one of the main priorities in Petro’s platform.

His movement has supported feminist causes and women’s rights, but Petro has had a problematic relationship with feminism. In 2021, Petro was criticized for saying that “feminism stayed with the old traditional left in the intellectual sphere of the big city”. He received a lot of blowback from left-wing feminists for standing by the mayoral candidacy of Hollman Morris in 2019, who faced accusations of domestic violence from his ex-partner and other complaints of sexual harassment and abuse, and whose candidacy was rejected by nearly all of Petro’s feminist allies, including his 2018 running-mate Ángela María Robledo. His position on the decriminalization of abortion has always been vague, claiming that he supports “zero abortion”. Many left-wing feminists have taken their distances from Petro: Robledo formally left Petro’s movement in 2021, and more recently three prominent feminist leaders, Sara Tufano, Juana Afanador and Cielo Rusinque withdrew their congressional candidacies with the Pacto in December 2021.

However, Petro saw the importance of feminists and women in Gabriel Boric’s victory in Chile last year and he has sought to polish his feminist credentials. His running-mate, Francia Márquez, helps out greatly. She was the phenomenon of the Pacto Histórico’s primary in March, winning over 780,000 votes.

The main proposal in Petro’s platform is the creation of a ‘national care system’ (Sistema Nacional de Cuidado) to reward, reduce and redistribute feminized care work. This would involve guaranteeing employment, a basic income, equal pay and pension rights to all women, the creation of a basic minimum income for female head of households, the redistribution and reduction of unpaid care work by providing quality social services and priority access to post-secondary education and land redistribution.

The other major proposals on this issue:

• Requiring that women hold at least 50% of all public positions in all branches and levels of government. The ‘quotas law’ of 2000 requires that there are at least 30% of women in top-level and appointed (non-career) mid-level positions in the public sector, and a 2011 law requires parties to include at least 30% of women on their electoral lists. Petro’s proposal would significantly strengthen and extend gender parity requirements in the public sector.
• A plan to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and a comprehensive action plan against femicides to reduce impunity and facilitate reporting and investigation.
• National campaigns to transform gender stereotypes and banning content affecting women and girls’ dignity.
• Improving access to sexual and reproductive rights, reducing teenage pregnancies and implementing the Court’s decision decriminalizing abortion.
• The creation of a Ministry of Equality, with Francia Márquez as minister.

Minority rights and immigration

With Francia Márquez as his running-mate, Petro has made minority rights a key part of his campaign. Like in 2018, he enjoys very strong support with indigenous and Afro-Colombian voters.

Petro not only promises to guarantee the right to self-governance and collective property rights for ethnic communities (indigenous, Afro-Colombian, Raizal, Palenquero and Roma), but also to expand and strengthen their traditional collective territories and to involve them in the orientation and definition of the “future of the nation and the planet”. Ethnic communities would play a key part in his economic, agricultural and land use policy. This would imply respecting their right to prior consultation (like in infrastructure and energy projects), recognizing and supporting ethnic communities’ own law enforcement bodies (indigenous guards) and guaranteeing ethnic groups’ participation in public decision-making (including a vaguer promise to represent them in government structures proportionally to their ‘population, territorial and cultural presence’).

With the Venezuelan migrant crisis, over a million Venezuelans have immigrated to Colombia since 2017. Colombia has received more Venezuelan migrants than any other country, and while a lot transited through Colombia on route to other countries, over a million have settled — more or less permanently — in Colombia. According to official data, there are between 1.8 million to 2.8 million Venezuelans in the country. The Duque administration has been praised abroad for its management of the massive influx of Venezuelan migrants — in 2021, the government announced it would grant temporary protection status (TPS) to all migrants for ten years. However, there has been an increase in anti-Venezuelan sentiment and xenophobic incidents, and public opinion is quite anti-immigrant, with unfavourable opinions of Venezuelan migrants in general and opposition to the legalization of undocumented migrants. Many local politicians, even otherwise progressive centrists like Claudia López, have stoked xenophobic sentiments by falsely blaming Venezuelan migrants for rising crime and unemployment.

Many Colombians are concerned about Venezuelan immigration because the government already struggles to meet the needs of its own population — a situation made worse by the pandemic. The next president will need to manage the settlement and integration of well over a million Venezuelans. Yet, few candidates have anything to say about that in their platforms. Gustavo Petro keeps it to a short and vague paragraph saying that his government would treat migrants with dignity and respect, without any xenophobia and discrimination, and guarantee their integration, return home or transit.

Other promises include:

• Recognize the peasantry as subjects of right, giving them special attention in policymaking, greater protection and public participation.
• Fight structural racism and the violent exclusion of black communities in Colombia, and repair the state’s historic debt with them.
• Comply with Colombia’s international obligations including ILO convention 169 and UNDRIP.
• Adopt a legal statute for the Raizal population of San Andrés and Providencia, including the legal regulation of the Raizal seat in the House of Representatives (constitutionally created in 2015 but never implemented).
• Recognize and protect the culture and identity of the Palenquero people, including with the creation of a special seat in the House of Representatives for them.
• Guarantee LGBTIQ+ rights.
• Reduce the stigmatization and exclusion of people with disabilities.

Security, democracy, peace and foreign policy

Security: Police and military reform

While security is always a top election issue for the Colombian right, Petro doesn’t talk about it as much. His vision of security very much differs from the prevailing law-and-order model and uribismo’s democratic security policy. Petro proposes a major reform of the police and armed forces.

The Colombian national police came under widespread criticism — including from abroad — following widespread police brutality against protesters during protests in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — which resulted in up to 60 deaths and thousands of injuries in 2021. Democrats in the US Congress even urged the State Department to unambiguously denounce police brutality in Colombia and freeze police aid. Following the protests, the government announced a police reform with both cosmetic changes (new uniforms, bodycams, new human rights body within the police, human rights training) and more significant long-term changes (a new disciplinary code with new serious offences, professionalization of the police force, a new law on the criteria for the use of force.) which will take time.

Petro proposes a far more transformational, structural police reform — coming closer to the demands of protesters and international NGOs like HRW. He would transfer jurisdiction of the police from the Ministry of Defence to the interior or justice ministries (as is the case in many countries), affirming the civilian character of the police. Perhaps more controversially, he also promises to abolish the ESMAD, the riot police squads that were responsible for most of the most brutal cases of police violence in the 2021 protests, and replace it with a new squad that would seek “peaceful and intelligent” solutions to conflicts. Petro also promises to respect the right to protest.

Under Iván Duque, the armed forces has shifted back towards an internal conflict mentality — and with that came the return of the old scandals. Petro says he would shift the security mentality away from the internal enemy and wartime focus towards an era of peace (although war continues in many parts of Colombia), with a new national defence policy with adjusted roles and missions for the armed forces. He wants to abolish conscription and promises to consolidate civilian control of the military, promote respect and guarantees for fundamental rights and improve human rights training.

Since the 2016 peace agreement, over 900 community leaders and human rights activists and over 270 ex-combatants of the former FARC have been killed. According to the NGO Indepaz, 171 social leaders and 43 ex-combatants were murdered in 2021 alone. Most of the killings are linked to illegal armed groups, but few cases ever get resolved. Petro promises a new policy to protect leaders and activists, but is otherwise vague about the details. He proposes to restructure the National Protection Unit (UNP), which provides security details to individuals who received threats, so that its focus is on the prevention of attacks against leaders and activists.

Peace process and internal conflict

Petro is a strong supporter of the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC.

He supports the full implementation of the peace agreement, particularly the sections on rural reform, territorial development plans (PDET) and illicit crop substitution. He vows to offer full support to the transitional justice system (JEP).

Petro promises to continue and expand reparations for victims of the conflict, including speeding up land restitution and encouraging the return and resettlement of victims of forced displacement. Moreover, Petro’s platform also talks about reparations for the socioenvironmental impacts of development projects (mining, infrastructure projects, hydroelectric dams etc.) and their victims.

Peace talks with the ELN guerrilla have been frozen since Duque took office in 2018 and were officially broken off in January 2019 after the car bombing at the police academy in Bogotá. Petro says he would create the necessary conditions to advance in an effective negotiation with the ELN, building on the lessons learned from the peace process with the FARC.

For other illegal armed groups (neo-paramilitary structures like the Clan del Golfo and other drug trafficking/criminal organizations), his platform suggests he would shift the focus towards targeting their big sources of capital, financiers, drug trafficking structures, exporters and their supporters within the state apparatus. He would open ‘spaces for judicial negotiations’ and collective surrender to justice on the basis of the dismantlement of their activities and surrender of the proceeds from their illegal activities.

Drugs

Petro says that the prohibitionist policies and war on drugs have failed and that a new paradigm is necessary. Some of the basic principles of the new drug policy he proposes include the economic transformation of drug producing regions without criminalizing coca cultivators, dismantling criminal organization and treating drug use as a public health issue.

Petro would ban aerial aspersion with glyphosate and promote illicit crop substitution. He says he would integrate coca cultivators into the new rural ‘productive economy’ he envisions, providing them with stable sources of income as well as access to credit, land and technical support.

Colombia decriminalized the possession of up to 20 grams of cannabis in 2012, in 2015 the Supreme Court ruled that cultivation of up to 20 plants was allowed and in 2016 Congress adopted a regulatory framework for the medical and scientific use of cannabis and its derivatives. In 2021, Duque signed a decree authorizing the legal sale and export of dried cannabis flowers and biomass for medical purposes. Slowly, Colombia is turning a major medical marijuana producer and there is increasing awareness of the potential economic benefits of this growing industry. Petro says he would continue to develop the cannabis industry.

One of Petro’s main achievements in Bogotá was the creation of CAMAD, medical care centres for drug addicts (similar to supervised injection sites), part of a strategy to treat drug use as a public health rather than criminal issue. He says he would expand the CAMAD strategy to the rest of Colombia.

Democracy and institutional reforms

The Colombian left has been very critical about Colombian democracy — or, in their eyes, the absence thereof. Gustavo Petro pledges to restore the separation of powers, respect the system of checks and balances and defeat the “mafias” which have coopted public institutions. In this vein, he proposes several significant institutional reforms.

Judicial reform: Everyone agrees that Colombia’s judiciary is in need of major reforms, but all recent attempts at major reforms have failed. Petro’s judicial reform is very short on details, and largely restates principles that everyone agrees with (judicial independence, meritocracy, easier access to justice, alternative conflict resolution mechanisms, budgetary autonomy etc.). He would reform the election procedure for the Attorney General (currently elected by the Supreme Court from a list of three candidates proposed by the President), saying that it should be based on “complete independence from the government of the day”, suggesting that he’d remove the president’s nominating powers.

Petro supports restorative justice and promises that prisons would became a space for resocialization.

Reform of the Procuraduría and Contraloría: Petro proposes to reform the Inspector General’s office (Procuraduría) and the Comptroller General (Contraloría) to eliminate overlapping powers and reduce the ‘inefficient and costly’ payrolls of both bodies, which were both greatly strengthened since 2018.

Electoral reform: Petro’s ideas for reform the electoral system are not specific, but likely include mandatory closed lists in congressional elections. His platform says that the electoral reform would allow citizens to hold their representatives accountable, strengthen and legitimize political parties, guarantee public campaign financing and provide new incentives for active political participation.

He would reform the two electoral bodies, the Registraduría and National Electoral Council (CNE) and create a new electoral tribunal. That tribunal would likely replace the CNE, which Petro describes as coopted by corrupt and clientelist interests.

Other reforms proposed include:

• Strengthen the public service, eliminate precarious contracts and eliminate private outsourcing and intermediation in certain essential tasks.
• Reform the public broadcasting system (RTVC) to ensure its independence from the government and increase cultural and educational content on public radio and television.
• Fight corruption by promoting participatory budgeting, transparent access to public information and strengthening oversight of public procurement.

Foreign policy

Petro doesn’t care a lot about foreign policy and international relations, as shown by his reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His platform’s section on foreign policy carefully avoids any mention of controversial issues like relations with the Maduro regime in Venezuela — although Petro has said he would restore diplomatic relations with the Venezuelan government, which have been broken since February 2019 (when Maduro broke off relations after Colombia recognized Juan Guaidó), and reopen the border, mostly closed since 2015.

Petro’s foreign policy would be based on the global fight against climate change, cooperation with other countries to consolidate and maintain peace and the principle of non-intervention in other countries’ internal issues (very similar to AMLO’s foreign policy in Mexico). He wants to strengthen ties with neighbouring countries, the Andean Community, the United States, the EU and Asian countries including China, Japan and South Korea.

Colombia’s foreign policy has long been hampered by the politicization of its diplomatic service, with most diplomatic appointments being rewards handed out to politicians and other loyal allies of the government, often with little regard for their qualifications. Petro promises to professionalize the diplomatic corps, with a 50–50 split in appointments between career diplomats and political appointees.

His foreign policy agenda would also place more emphasis on the protection of the millions of Colombians living abroad and on efforts to convince them to return home.