Petro warns that a coup is coming in Colombia

By Camilo Rengifo Marin on September 16, 2024

Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced in Armenia, Quindio, that a coup plan is in the making. The plan has strong financial resources and would see the president of the Senate, Efraín Cepeda, a businessman and politician of the Conservative Party, replace him in the Casa de Nariño.

In response to a publication by the Conservative Party on social media – which was surprisingly joined by the president of the Liberal Party, César Gaviria -, Petro clarified that he does not accuse Efraín Cepeda of wanting to remove him from office. He also indicated that it is not true that he accuses the congressman of having smuggled large sums of money to remove him from power.

“Nowhere did I accuse Cepeda of a coup. What I said is what the law says. If the removal of the president and vice president takes place, and that is a coup, who will assume the presidency, the president of the Senate,” Petro stressed in networks.

He confirmed that this alleged coup d’état “would be financed by the mafia”. He criticized the process that the National Electoral Council (CNE) was conducting against his presidential campaign for alleged irregular financing, suggesting that there were economic interests behind it, so that the case would end up before the Chamber’s Impeachment Commission, in order to suspend him from office.

Petro assured that this alleged coup would have happened immediately without popular support. He did so in statements that have sparked a heated debate in the country about political stability and tensions between the government and various sectors of Colombian society that felt more comfortable with the governments of the far-right Álvaro Uribe and Iván Duque.

He indicated that the main reason why the high command would not support his resignation is that his perceived enemies are “not so stupid” as to push for an overthrow of a president who, like him, was elected with more than 11,700,000 votes in the June 19, 2022 elections. An attempted coup would mean a reaction from his supporters in the streets and, consequently, a popular uprising.

Popular media

During a meeting with representatives of alternative media, the president revealed details of what he sees as an imminent threat to his government and pointed out that significant amounts of money are involved in these alleged impeachment attempts. To contextualize his argument, Petro referred to recent events in other Latin American countries, such as the attempted military uprising against Bolivian President Luis Arce and the impeachment of Pedro Castillo in Peru.

A measure, Petro said, would make possible a world in which “the worker tells a news story, the peasant tells what happened in his village, the woman tells her sorrows and her struggles, the young man sings poetry.” A world that, Petro said, “does not exist in RCN or Caracol.” He also noted for the popular communicators that they would plan his death, in a goal that would only have to be carried out, since “the order would already have been given.”

“I am an example of alternative communication. I am, like you, a communicator,” a man who has always fought against the narrative of the hegemonic media, he said before some 1,500 community journalists and directors of small alternative media, before whom he announced that “by presidential order, the law of thirds is being applied.” This is a promise from his presidential campaign that a third of the government’s advertising budget should go to alternative media. “We can apply it once and for all, while we are in government,” he added.

The president resumed a defiant stance against the dominant media, accusing the newspaper The Spectatorthe channels RCN And Caramelthe magazine week of manipulating the minds of Colombians to defend the interests of the big businessmen who own them – the Santo Domingo families, owners of The Spectator, Caracol TV And Blue radio; Ardila Lülle, owner of RCN; Luis Carlos Sarmiento, owner of The time; and the Gilinski family, owner of week.

“The king is the economic power, the owners of the world’s major media are the economic power,” he stressed in another of those speeches, on Monday, September 9.

Remembrance of Chile

Petro compared the truckers’ strike of the previous weeks to the coup against Salvador Allende, carried out in Chile on September 11, 1973. “They wanted to see if Salvador Allende could be repeated, blocking the roads to overthrow the president, which is what they want to do: either the president dies or they overthrow him, the order has been given,” he said, confirming that there was a three-month deadline to carry out this alleged plan. The Colombian government says it will go “to the limit” to end the strike.

“Either they kill the president or they overthrow him. We don’t want Petro anymore,” the president said of the alleged plot against him, which he had mentioned in previous speeches but for which he had provided no further evidence. “They are making a parody of the popular election of April 19, 1970,” Petro said, after confirming that they would try to keep the people passive.

At that moment he addressed the youth with alternative means to tell them that this is where they are needed: “A coup d’état is not the generals of the police and the army, who are looking for a way to take over the palace and remove the president, no gentlemen, the oligarchs of the country are not such brutes. It is a Colombian-style coup d’état,” said Petro.

Both the government and the opposition, grouped around the Centro Democrático and Cambio Radical, have almost simultaneously deployed a strategy of mutual international condemnation to seek foreign support, amid the harsh polarization that is plaguing the country and which is already part of the political menu they want to offer with a view to the 2026 presidential elections.

The previous Saturday, Petro had pointed out that the National Electoral Council (CNE) was taking steps towards “a coup d’état” by wanting to investigate him for possible irregularities in the financing of his election campaign. “Every step taken against the president in the Electoral Council is building a coup d’état,” Petro estimated in his X account, adding: “Are they complaining about Venezuela? In Colombia, a coup d’état against the president is underway.”

Petro pointed out that “the Constitution does not allow a purely administrative and political body such as the Electoral Council to pave the way for the suspension of the President from his functions for an investigation of the results, over which he has no more power than 30 days after the elections”.

“Those who have been defeated by the candidate and by the people want to decide in the Electoral Council and in the Commission of Impeachment that the president who defeated them and his voters must leave, without having committed any crime,” the president indicated.

The president declared his rebellion on Thursday, September 12, 2024, before the ruling of the Council of State that forced him to retract his statements against Enrique Vargas Lleras: the brother of former Vice President Germán Vargas Lleras, whom he accused of allegedly embezzling five billion when he was in charge of the New Health Promoting Company.

Source: Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English