Colombia ‘Choosing Between AIDS and Terminal Cancer’?

Colombia’s voters shun the centre, set up runoff choice between two political extremes

Colombia’s voters on Sunday largely turned their backs on centrist candidates and instead elected to hem themselves into a selection between two unsavoury polar opposites on the political spectrum: hardline conservative and Uribe protégé Ivan Duque, and left-wing former guerrilla and Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro.

But to say that voters shunned the centre/centre-left in Sunday’s election is only partially accurate, because the centrist vote was fractured, and this alone handed Petro a ticket to “Colombia Decide, Parte II.”

That spot would have went to ex-Antioquia governor and Medellin mayor Sergio Fajardo, had it not been for the De la Calle crowd, whose poor showing was a disastrous indictment of the FARC peace deal and the Liberal Party. Had they formed a coalition – which they had flirted with doing but was shot down by Liberal heavyweights – the 399,000 votes Humberto De la Calle received would have went to Fajardo and tipped the balance in his favour.

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Related: Status Quo Upheld in Chaotic Colombia Election

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That’s all for naught, however. Colombians now face a choice on June 17 between two candidates that are despised and distrusted by large sections of the population. It is eerily reminiscent of the 2011 Peruvian presidential election, which in the runoff vote pitted the left-wing former coup leader Ollanta Humala against the right-wing Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of that country’s authoritarian ex-president Alberto Fujimori. At the time, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa compared the options for the new head of state to “choosing between AIDS and terminal cancer”.

“I do not think that my compatriots are going to be so foolish to put us in the dilemma of choosing between AIDS and terminal cancer, which is what Humala and Keiko Fujimori would be”, the Nobel Prize-winning author said in 2011, before the first round of Peru’s presidential election.

‘AIDS’ Ollanta Humala, left, and ‘Terminal Cancer’ Keiko Fujimori.

That’s what ended up happening in Peru in 2011, and here on Sunday, voters decided to put Colombia into its own “choice between AIDS and cancer” situation.

The comparison is crude but apt; both Petro and Duque spent much of their campaigns preying on the fears and prejudices of their respective support bases. Colombia’s right has accused and continues to accuse Petro of plans to “convert Colombia into another Venezuela”, while the Colombian left is convinced that Duque is going to tear up the FARC peace accord and send the country back to war without end.

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Related: Peace in Colombia? What Peace?

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It is hard to know what to take seriously, as both men ranked among the highest of all the presidential candidates in uttering inaccurate or flat-out untrue statements while on the campaign trail.

Each side’s camp spent much of their time engaged in veil populist misinformation campaigns, distracting from serious debate, and it bordered on the comical. After frequent attacks against Petro for being an adoring supporter of “castrochavismo”, a pejorative term invented by Alvaro Uribe to describe all things left wing – from the peace process to the former Bogota mayor. Petro snapped back, calling his opponent Duque a “castrochavista” of the right”, and that he, along with his mentor Uribe and his Centro Democratico party, “are part of the party of death.” Undaunted, Uribe took to Twitter to accuse Petro of plotting to “instigate hatred of social classes” and “through silent support of the FARC peace accord, drug trafficking”.

Petro’s retort? He challenged Uribe to a vallenato dance competition.

Both presidential aspirants also have their own wild, half-baked, and downright scary judicial and economic policies that help hold up the “AIDS or cancer” narrative. For his part, Petro wants to replace Colombia’s oil and gas industry – which represents more than 45 percent of the country’s exports – with avocados. Duque, on the other hand, dreams of doing away with Colombia’s highest courts, including Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, Council of State, and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) war crimes tribunal, and replace them with a unified “super court”. The reason? Cutting down on costs by axing the number of high-paid judges who sit on those courts.

I feel it’s important at this time to remind readers that these two people are grown men, and one of them is going to wield power over the entire country very soon. There are the two choices that Colombians have left themselves with, and 19 days from now, they will have to pick one or the other, cast a “voto en blanco” protest ballot, or not turn up to vote at all.

During the runoff election, pay special attention to the number of blank votes cast, as well as voter turnout numbers. We suspect that a large portion of Colombian voters will opt out of choosing between cancer and AIDS.

 

Tags: Alvaro Uribe, Colombia, elections, Gustavo Petro, Ivan Duque, peace process, Peru, Politics, president, South America