Gustavo Petro photographed during a tour of Rosas (Colombia) on January 12th. COLOMBIAN PRESIDENCY (via Portal)
Last Thursday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro published 14 messages on Twitter. In one he warned the ELN guerrillas – with whom a peace process is underway – of the risk of following in the footsteps of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. In another, which ends with the funny phrase “My dad doesn’t have a girlfriend,” he denied it to a media outlet. In two he mentioned his children. In another, he reported on his visit to Nariño, a department in the south of the country cut off from the Pan-American Highway by a landslide. In another, he advocated open electoral lists. In another tweet, he retweeted the Arabic newspaper Al Mayadeen Español, which reported a spy network against him. Behind the messages is not the hand of any adviser, it is their desires and their spirits. There is the tweeter Petro.
Petro’s tenure began on the right foot last August. In those first five months, he has managed to maintain a good reputation among Colombians and earn the respect of those who saw him as nothing more than a former communist guerrilla fighter who would lead the country down the path of Chavista Venezuela. The number of reforms implemented and a cabinet made up of politicians from different spectrums and with recognized experience shaped his image as president. But on Elon Musk’s social network, where he announced each of his ministers or where he announced his key decisions, Petro has slipped more than once. The last, on New Year’s Eve, in his biggest political mistake to date.
We have agreed with the ELN, the Segunda Marquetalia, the Central Joint Chiefs of Staff, the AGC and the Sierra Nevada Self-Defense Forces on a bilateral hiatus from January 1 to June 30, 2023, which may be extended depending on the progress of negotiations.
Total peace becomes reality.
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) January 1, 2023
On December 31, the President was very active on Twitter, which had already become his channel of communication with traditional media. Journalists are among that audience, which already has nearly 6.5 million followers and has earned him the world’s fourth-biggest global leader according to the 2022 Twiplomacy ranking, behind only India’s Narenda Modi, Joe Biden and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Just after midnight, the President released the first big news of the year for the country and for all of Latin America: he announced the ceasefire with the ELN. Barely three days later, the guerrillas denied the agreement, and the good mood that had built around a fundamental peace process for the future of Colombia and the region strained.
What can explain why the opposition senator quotes the magazine she doesn’t want?
Well, if they find themselves in destructive gossip.
My father is 87 years old and his wife, with whom he lived until the last day, died two months ago. My father doesn’t have a girlfriend. https://t.co/wmaacxENcG
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) January 12, 2023
Eugenie Richard, professor and researcher at the University Externado de Colombia, affirms that one cannot govern well if one communicates poorly. “When communication is poorly managed, it gives the impression that it is poorly governed. You see a lack of control, improvisation, amateurism,” he says. Petro writes the messages himself and most of the time doesn’t discuss them with his team. He mixes institutional information with his own impressions or indiscriminately defends himself against personal attacks. Liliana Gómez, director of the Masters in Communication at Universidad Javeriana, claims that while she has used Twitter well in the past, which helped her a lot to rise to power, she is now doing it in a “terrible” way because it misinforms and generates noise.
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The President is also very quick in his tweets. It’s common for you to make typos or go too far in your comments, which sometimes makes it seem like you wrote on the spur of the moment, as if you wrote without thinking. On September 4th, the region looked to Chile. The Colombian President commented on the result of the referendum on the new constitution even before Gabriel Boric himself spoke. “Pinochet revived,” he wrote on Twitter, as a CNN news story promoted the victory of the no among the majority of Chileans, the same who months earlier had elected left-wing Boric as president, who, of course, did not say anything about voting with the dictator . During former Peruvian President Pedro Castillo’s failed self-coup, Petro so insisted on social media his support for the imprisoned president that he provoked an angry backlash from Peru for interference in its internal affairs.
All rulers strive to dominate the public agenda. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador does this with a daily press conference first thing in the morning, where he sets out his comments and answers to journalists. He usually places various topics in the media very early on. In contrast to using Twitter, this method is bidirectional and a priori more democratic. There are journalists present – accreditation is available for those who wish – and there are questions – usually the President’s team decides who does it, but sometimes it’s decided by drawing lots. Petro has given very few press conferences during his tenure and there are no such exchanges on Twitter. “He’s interested in being heard, but not so much in listening, it’s vertical power management,” says Richard.
The use of Twitter is not even new. Presidents like Donald Trump, the first great tweeter, or that of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, made the social network their main communication channel. Trump said he was president thanks to social media. Petro follows this path that Álvaro Uribe has already made popular in Colombia. But the ex-president used it primarily to oppose his successor Juan Manuel Santos and to avoid being ostracized from public life, and led the no-campaign on Twitter to the referendum on the peace process with the FARC, which he ended up winning polls. .
The power of networks is immense. Gómez explains that candidate Petro has had a history of using Twitter and believes his presidential campaign was the best Colombia has seen in years. “Since it has worked for him, he doesn’t want to stop using it. He’s used to being in the opposition, but today he’s in government and he didn’t see the difference. He feels he has to keep conquering,” he says. Petro opened his account in 2009 and served as his opponent, as the mayor of Bogotá, and now it is the first channel of communication for the President of the Republic.
With the news of the ELN, many members of the government and cabinet raised their hands to their heads. It would have been enough, say sources close to the negotiations with the guerrillas, if the president had written that the ceasefire was “close” rather than taking it for granted. Few dare tell the President, who wields natural power over his entire team, what to do. In five months, it adds more successes than failures, but most of them are from the social network. In Colombia, the phrase “Someone picks up the President’s phone” is already becoming popular.
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