Amid the work program that the President of the Republic, Gustavo Petro, is carrying out in Spain, he referred to the call he made from the balcony of the Casa de Nariño on a bank holiday Monday this week, which has sparked a heated debate in the country.
The Colombian President pointed this out The public defense of his controversial reforms must be peaceful, despite the cable embedded in his balcony speech warning that “limiting them can spark a revolution.”
“The call for the presence of the population on the streets, in the squares, is in defense of the health, labor and pension reform projects, it is not a call for violence,” Petro said.
And the Colombian President added that “the invitation to the Colombian society to mobilize peacefully in the streets for the labor, pension and health reforms presented by the government to the Congress of the Republic”.
He also said: “There is no doubt that we want change and that is why we were chosen. The changes imply changes in the standards (…). Now we want these changes to be supported by the population. No change can be presented in a society unless it has popular support, it cannot be imposed.”
And made it clear: “On the contrary, the more people can express themselves peacefully, the less violence there will be in the country. The violence has to do with suppressing the calls and statements of the population.”
“If we say that people take to the streets peacefully, we reduce violence. It doesn’t break the institutions, it uses the institutions because that’s what they’re there for: to process the changes,” stressed Petro from Spain.
With the balcony and the call for revolution, Gustavo Petro is banking on stealing liberalism from César Gaviria at any cost
In the excited speech that President Gustavo Petro addressed to the balcony on May 1, there was a clear opponent: César Gaviria. The first President attacked him mercilessly and dedicated some of his most scathing sentences to him. But what resonated most with the audience – some with stupor, others with euphoria – was his threat that “trying to hold back reforms could lead to revolution”. What few have noticed is that this phrase has a clear message: the president aspires to Gaviria’s liberal bases and has no intention of making his revolution without them.
One could say that liberalism was the axis of the President’s speech. With his lofty words, Gustavo Petro was not addressing his gallery, the left that devotedly supports him, but those supporters of the red rag, who are elusive and whom he needs today more than ever.
President Petro first spoke about one of the biggest leaders of this banner, former President Alfonso López Pumarejo, who is known for promoting the so-called “revolution on the rise”. And he assured that we are facing the same times in Colombia.
“Alfonso López Pumarejo went onto these balconies in early May, not right here, to address the people and to outline the alliance between a government and the working class as the basis for change and transformation… This is an example that will go down in history received,” he said. And he recalled the intricacies López had to endure in order to implement the reforms that established what is now known as the social rule of law.
“They buried him in the midst of violence. Even Alfonso López Pumarejo himself was attempted to stage a coup in his second government. They stopped their reforms. The massacres began, terror against the peasantry grew.Petro warned. And there, without saying it, the President repeated a caudillo and an assassination attempt, that of another liberal hero: Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.
The President euphorically recounted what came next: “This violence has appeared that has no end, that has killed more than a million Colombian men and women, that has not sown the land with furrows to grow food, but with graves, with graves.” .
And in his lengthy words, he repeated the same thing over and over again: that while history never repeats itself, we face the same challenges and risks. “We are in a similar moment as General Melo, President Bolívar, the great reformer Alfonso López Pumarejo. We will see similar circumstances and situations.”
The President realized between the lines that he was going through a huge political crisis. “They believed Petro being cornered would lower the idea of the great transformation, the idea of societal change that would simply adapt to live in peace would lower.”
And in the end he told the Liberals that the idea of the continued revolution that Pumarejo has achieved is more with him than with Gaviria. There were no detours with this message. For example, the President recalled that “it was López Pumarejo who said that the country had a social function, namely to produce food” and that “he wrote it in the Colombian constitution in 1936″. And he even coined his sentence to close his speech. “Today, in the same times of progressive revolutionary reforms, we need the Colombian people. Don’t leave us alone,” he said.
Meanwhile, he treated Gaviria with contempt, calling him the representative of those elites who wrangle ill for the downtrodden. And to have betrayed these postulates of the red rag out of greed.
“Only because the owners of the banks, the owners of capital, are putting pressure on one of their biggest spokespeople, former President Gaviria, to try and oppose the party Liberals, who had asserted themselves as a popular party there at the party congress in the Colón Theater, led by Eliécer Gaitán, who had come to fight, even risking their lives so that the ongoing revolution that accompanied Gaitán to the end, that accompanied López Pumarejo, would not be stopped by blood and fire, that liberal people have now been betrayed again when they decided that they would go against social reform to vote against the possibility of change,” he said.
The betrayal is nothing more than having deviated from health care reform. And there, almost at the level of liberal heroes, came the name of María Eugenia Lopera, the congresswoman who rebelled against Gaviria and voted to save the controversial initiative. The congresswoman was named in all of her letters and praised by the president and placed as a symbol to be supported but most importantly to be protected. “Now we must also accompany those from the Colombian Congress from various parties who have the courage and are not small in the vote for social reform,” the Colombian President finally assured.