There are several reasons and circumstances that make Colombia ungovernable. At first glance, one can see the cultural circumstances that, associated with a naturalised mafia ethos, prevent any effort to change corrupt political practices and the criminal exercise of power from producing results in the medium term.
Germán Ayala Osorio
As a society, we are dragging along a kind of ‘civilisational and democratic deficiency’ that has long been exhibited by armed groups, especially those that in the 1960s presented themselves as ‘revolutionary’, but ended up becoming criminal structures that play into the hands of the sectors of traditional power that led them to believe that it was possible to take power with gunfire. This ‘blemish’ is also the visible mark left by the members of a traditional, property-owning, immoral, but timorous elite; this same ‘civilising and democratic blemish’ is the source of their racism, aporophobia, classism and out-and-out homophobia, because within their clans they coexist with all kinds of homosexual experiences which, deep down, shame their most important leaders.
All of the above ends up manifesting itself in the ways in which state institutions operate, which, permeated by the mafia ethos and the ‘civilising and democratic taint’, consolidate conflicting ideas about what the state should be.
The structure of the three public powers in Colombia suggests that, in addition to cultural difficulties, there are institutional ones, rooted in different conceptions of the state which lead to a separation of powers that goes beyond the spirit of the checks and balances of democracy. And these are further subject to the always capricious interpretations of the 1991 Constitution by flamboyant magistrates who are not immune to the ‘civilizational and democratic empty loads’ that we drag along with us as a society.
The high courts do not always act as guarantors of changes in the ways in which the state operates and in the results of that operation in terms of guaranteeing human rights, environmental and tax justice, among others.
For the right, for example, the state should be at the exclusive service of private interests, particularly those of the richest. This would explain the sense of recent Constitutional Court rulings that jurist Rodrigo Uprimny characterises as ‘pro-rich’.
“Our Constitutional Court seems to be entering into a sort of Lochner era because of decisions that are undermining President Gustavo Petro’s tax reform, which sought greater tax justice. The first of these was ruling C-489/23, which declared unconstitutional the ban on the deduction of royalties, thus depriving the state of some six trillion pesos a year, which are now in the hands of the extractive industries.
And now, according to press reports, there is a risky tie in the Court that could lead to the fall of the wealth tax…We would thus move from the old Court, which protected the most vulnerable and defended the social rule of law, to the Lochner era of the new Court: a court that overprotects economic freedoms and property to the detriment of the guarantee of social rights, which ends up favouring the rich and powerful and undermining efforts for social justice”.
No one dares to deny that political violence in rural areas, compounded by insecurity in the capital cities, is contributing to the difficult task of governing by the first progressive president in more than 200 years of the Republic.
But perhaps the greatest difficulty in changing what is wrong in the country lies in a division of powers permeated by the petty interests of the members of a wealthy elite that has accustomed the country to the idea that the operation of the state should be exclusively oriented to the service of capital and the enrichment of a few.
Not all of the magistrates who reach the high courts, especially the Constitutional Court and the Council of State, are aligned with the idea of consolidating a modern, civilised state and a Republic in Colombia. On the contrary, many judges arrive at these positions of power with the strong intention of preserving the historical conditions of an establishment that aims to preserve environmental and tax injustices.
Thus, let us forget about any possibility of overcoming environmental, labour and tax injustices with a Constitutional Court that acts more as a political opponent of the current government than as a guarantor of the Political Charter. In the same way, let us discard any desire for Colombia to one day behave like a true Republic.
(Translated by Rebeca Nihidvu) – Photos: Pixabay
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