Colombian Politics Digest VII: Looking ahead to 2024
The election of the next attorney general, Petro’s frustrations going into a make-or-break year and Colombia’s role in the Venezuela-Guyana crisis.
In this year’s final edition of my Colombian Politics Digest, I take a look at the first major event of the new year—the election of the next attorney general—as well as the importance of 2024 for the Petro administration.
The next attorney general
On January 25, the Supreme Court will convene to elect the next Attorney General (Fiscal General). At the head of the Attorney General’s office (Fiscalía) and responsible for investigating offences and leading criminal prosecution, the attorney general is one of the most powerful and important figures in the Colombian state.
The attorney general is elected by the Supreme Court from a list of three candidates selected by the President, and serves a single, non-renewable four-year term. A two-thirds majority of the full court (23 magistrates) is required to elect the attorney general, so at least 16 votes. The attorney general must meet the same qualifications as Supreme Court magistrates—that is, a natural-born citizen, never convicted to a jail sentence, and be a lawyer with at least fifteen years’ experience in the judicial branch, legal practice or as a university professor.
Next year, the Supreme Court will choose between three women, with no prohibitive favourite.
The Fiscalía has administrative and budgetary autonomy, controls a substantial budget (over US$1.5 billion) and employs some 23,000 public servants. It is responsible for investigating offences and prosecuting most crimes, except for offences committed by some high-ranking public officials. It also leads and coordinates judicial police functions, carried out by the Police and the Fiscalía’s Cuerpo Técnico de Investigación (CTI), and participates in the planning of the country’s criminal justice policy (and may present bills on the matter). An overview of the Colombian legal system can be found here.
The attorney general has the power to appoint, transfer and dismiss all officials serving at his/her pleasure, including the deputy attorney general (vicefiscal), and assume control of investigations at any point. The attorney general also investigates and indicts some senior public officials with a legal or constitutional fuero, including the vice president, ministers, governors, heads of government agencies, the inspector general, the comptroller general, the ombudsman, ambassadors, generals, admirals and judges of tribunals, among others.
These vast powers make the attorney general a particularly influential and important political figure, and, unsurprisingly, past presidents have usually wanted to place allies and confidantes in this position, to protect their allies and political interests and to intimidate their opponents.
In August, Petro presented a rather unprecedented shortlist: three women, all independent with no close ties to Petro or the current administration and all experienced prosecutors who previously worked in the Fiscalía.
Petro sent a message that he didn’t need a fiscal amigo and contradicted media rumours that, like his predecessors, he would choose a list of allies. In 2019-20, Iván Duque’s three candidates all came from inside his administration and the eventual winner, Francisco Barbosa, was his university friend and then-presidential advisor for human rights. Unlike in the past few elections, there’s no clear implicit presidential favourite among the three—in 2020, Barbosa was Duque’s clear preference, and in 2016, Néstor Humberto Martínez (high-profile lawyer for the rich, Santos’ ‘superminister’ of the presidency in 2014-15 and close ally of then-vice president Germán Vargas Lleras) was the strongest candidate.
The three candidates are Ángela María Buitrago, Amelia Pérez and Luz Adriana Camargo.
Ángela María Buitrago, a criminal lawyer, was a prosecutor before the Supreme Court from 2005 to 2010, responsible for investigating important cases like the siege of the Palace of Justice in 1985 (indicting and convicting senior military commanders) and several public figures including former governors, congressmen and ex-prosecutors. In 2010, she was dismissed by caretaker attorney general Guillermo Mendoza Diago, ostensibly because she was ineffective, perhaps because she was too effective at stepping on powerful people’s toes. In an interview, Buitrago later said that there was “sabre rattling from political and military sectors” asking for her head. After leaving the Fiscalía, Buitrago has been a law professor at her alma mater, the Universidad Externado, a member of the interdisciplinary group of independent experts for the Ayotzinapa case in Mexico, and a member of the UNHRC group of human rights experts on Nicaragua.
In her public interview before the Supreme Court, Buitrago said that the Fiscalía must be independent, autonomous and ethical. Her ‘proposals’ are to focus on combating high-impact criminal groups and a ‘re-engineering’ of the Fiscalía to decentralize its power.
Amelia Pérez Parra is a criminal lawyer who worked in the judicial branch from 1987 to 2003, as a criminal judge, regional prosecutor and prosecutor in the Fiscalía’s specialized units for human rights and terrorism. As a prosecutor, she investigated brutal episodes of the armed conflict, most notably the Trujillo massacres of 1988-1994 which killed over 300 people, perpetrated by paramilitaries and drug cartels with the complicity of the police and military, and the El Aro massacre in October 1997, in which 17 people were murdered by paramilitaries. Álvaro Uribe, who was governor of Antioquia at the time of the El Aro massacre, has been accused by demobilized paramilitaries and survivors of having had foreknowledge of the massacre and participating in its planning along with a military brigade. Uribe has vehemently denied this allegations. She left the Fiscalía in 2003 following a conflict with her boss, controversial attorney general Luis Camilo Osorio (since accused of possible ties to paramilitaries), over her handling of the 2003 El Nogal Club bombing, claiming that he pressured her to focus her investigation around a single hypothesis. Following this dispute and facing death threats for her work, she went into exile in Canada, returning in 2012. She had several short contracts with the municipality of Bogotá from 2012 to 2014, while Petro was mayor.
Pérez has said that corruption and the slow response of justice to crimes are the main problems. She proposes to strengthen the Fiscalía’s immediate response units (URI)—24-hour centres where people can report serious crimes requiring immediate intervention, pay special attention to gender-based violence with special units to address those crimes, focus on the systematic murders of social leaders (over 200 in 2022, over 150 in 2023) and work in tandem with transitional justice system (JEP).
The last candidate on Petro’s list was the subject of significant controversy. His initial third candidate was Amparo Cerón, a prosecutor who had worked in the Fiscalía for over 30 years and had been one of the prosecutors responsible for investigating the Odebrecht scandal in Colombia, appointed by controversial AG Néstor Humberto Martínez (2016-2019). Cerón was pushed out by Barbosa in 2020, officially for ‘lack of results’, while she insinuated it was retaliation for her intention to summon Álvaro Uribe, Andrés Pastrana and Luis Carlos Sarmiento to testify. However, journalists like María Jimena Duzán and Daniel Coronell brought to light her close ties to Néstor Humberto Martínez and to the corrupt former anti-corruption prosecutor Gustavo Moreno, who claimed in 2021 to have personally selected her as prosecutor in the Odebrecht case (Moreno was convicted of taking bribes from politicians in the ‘Cartel de la Toga’ scandal). Cerón is also alleged to have ‘rigged’ the Odebrecht investigations, deliberately failing to investigate leads or listen to key witnesses.
Petro didn’t want to spoil a list which had earned him praise, and asked the Court to remove Cerón from his list on September 26. Although she insisted that she hadn’t resigned from the list, the Court authorized the president to change the list on October 12. Petro replaced her with Luz Adriana Camargo.
Luz Adriana Camargo, the third candidate, is a criminal lawyer who worked in the Fiscalía from 1992 to 2004 (rising to become prosecutor before the Supreme Court in 2003) before becoming assistant magistrate in the Supreme Court from 2005 to 2014. On the court, Camargo participated in the special unit investigating parapolítica. She later worked for the UN-backed anti-corruption commission in Guatemala, CICIG, until 2017, responsible for coordinating its main cases. Of the three candidates, she’s the one who has the most political connections: Camargo is a close associate of defence minister Iván Velásquez, who worked with her on parapolítica as an assistant magistrate and later became her boss as CICIG’s commissioner. According to La Silla Vacía, Velásquez has been actively lobbying for her, allegedly with the intentions of landing a senior job in the Fiscalía under her. This may not necessarily work in her favour. Velásquez, despite his achievements as one of the leading judicial investigators of parapolítica, had bad relations with his colleagues on the court and has since burned bridges by unsuccessfully challenging the election of seven of the current magistrates in 2020.
In her interview with the court in November, Camargo, like the others, said she didn’t represent anyone and hoped to be remembered for her independence and autonomy. Camargo proposed a very ambitious new information system that’d improve data analysis.
All three candidates, as mentioned above, are experienced prosecutors with a background in criminal law (unlike Barbosa, whose background is in IHL and transitional justice and had no prosecutorial experience, or Martínez, whose background was in commercial law). All three spent much of their legal careers investigating ties between illegal criminal groups and the state, human rights or the abuses of the state, issues which are close to Petro’s heart, who as an opposition senator in the 2000s denounced parapolítica. This focus also gives them a better understanding of the complexity of criminality in Colombia.
Petro’s shortlist of independent candidates for AG contrasted with his shortlist for a vacancy on the Constitutional Court in October, which was made up of three loyalists, who worked for his administration, with no great experience as jurists (as expected, the Senate elected Vladimir Fernández, who was the president’s legal advisor).
The new attorney general will replace Francisco Barbosa, who has become one of Petro’s most consistent and vocal critics, repeatedly clashing with the president over several issues. Barbosa, a vain and ambitious man, has tried to use his position as a launching pad for his political ambitions, which are unlikely to go very far. Dazzled by the power and prestige of the office, he narcissistically proclaimed himself as the “best AG in history” and “the most prepared of his generation” and spent public money to hire a political strategist and promote his name as if the Fiscalía was a political party. After being the president’s best friend, since 2022 he turned the Fiscalía into an opposition platform, suddenly discovering separation of powers and checks and balances. The validity of some of his legal criticisms of Petro’s policies were obscured and overshadowed by his very political fights with Petro, which were largely unproductive and pointless. Barbosa, despite his grandiose claims, leaves office with few achievements (the same was true of most of his predecessors) and will likely be remembered for desperately trying to bury Álvaro Uribe’s witness tampering case and a family vacation to San Andrés during a strict COVID lockdown in 2020.
The next attorney general will have a tough job. She will also need to navigate a political minefield, in good part because of several very political cases currently in the Fiscalía’s hands: Álvaro Uribe’s witness tampering case (in October a court denied the Fiscalía’s third attempt at closing the case and ordered he stand trial) as well as the cases against Laura Sarabia and Petro’s son Nicolás. In his letter presenting his shortlist, Petro asked that the court considers appointing an ‘ad hoc prosecutor’ to handle the cases involving his family, as it did with the Odebrecht scandal in 2018 given Néstor Humberto Martínez’s massive conflicts of interest.
The election was due to begin on December 7, but the Supreme Court delayed the vote until next year, on January 25, waiting until all the new magistrates are sworn in. Barbosa’s term ends on February 12.
2024, make or break
2023 was not a good year for Gustavo Petro. His brief honeymoon ended abruptly, and his approval ratings crashed and burned, falling from around 50% to 35-30%. His ambitious agenda of major socioeconomic reforms—healthcare, pensions, and labour—ran aground in Congress, facing strong opposition from other political parties and business elites. The healthcare reform finally managed to be approved in two out of four of its congressional debates, more than nine months after it was first presented, coming at a huge political cost to the government. The healthcare reform precipitated the explosion of Petro’s congressional majority coalition in April, leaving the government in a ‘minority government’ situation with uncertain majorities in Congress, particularly in the Senate. Petro’s record for very high turnover in his administration was proven true, with eleven out of nineteen ministers being shuffled after just one year in office. The ‘liberal technocratic’ faction in cabinet, represented by former ministers Alejandro Gaviria (education), José Antonio Ocampo (finance) and Cecilia López (agriculture), was nearly entirely removed from the administration.
His most trusted confidant and his eldest son were hit by explosive scandals revealing corruption, dirty money, unholy alliances and abuses of power that undermine the “government of change” rhetoric. These scandals and other events gave rise to unproven salacious rumours and theories about the government, 2022 campaign and the president himself (like that he has health problems or that he’s addicted to drugs and alcohol). Petro’s ‘total peace’ policy has largely devolved into ‘total chaos’, with rising criminality in all urban centres and extremely precarious security situations in different regions like Cauca. The opposition has accused Petro of letting violence spiral out of hand and demoralizing the armed forces while being indulgent with illegal groups who show little desire for peace while being engaged in peace negotiations. The Pacto Histórico’s candidates did very poorly in the regional and local elections in October, which signaled voters’ disappointment and disillusion with ‘change’ and a preference for familiar faces.
After something of an annus horribilis, Petro is well aware that 2024 will be his make-or-break year. It is his last chance to implement his government’s program and fulfill his campaign promises. 2025 will be a pre-election year, with focus slowly shifting towards the 2026 elections, and the third year has tended to be difficult for the past two administrations, quite worn out by then. On top of that, Petro has always had great difficulties translating his political ideas and aspirations into concrete, tangible policies.
Petro has spent the final week before the holidays in ‘conclaves’ with his cabinet, evaluating their work, grilling and scolding them, and imposing directions for the new year. Petro is unhappy because many ministries and agencies have had difficulties spending their budgets, and frustrated because he feels the administration has been too slow at implementing its main objectives. During a public event in Ibagué (Tolima) on December 21, Petro complained that he’s needed to push his own officials to “move the papers” to make education free and that bureaucrats and technocrats were unable or reticent to implement his big projects (like building 50 new public universities and higher education institutions). Media reports say that Petro in particular scolded education minister Aurora Vergara, transport minister William Camargo and national planning director Jorge Iván González. Petro’s frustration ahead of 2024 has, once again, revived the persistent rumours of a cabinet shuffle that has been said to be ‘imminent’ for the past five months. But the media’s sources on ‘cabinetology’ haven’t been very good…
Going into 2024, there are some key questions to look for in terms of the government’s strategy. How will Petro’s legislative agenda fare in 2024, particularly the healthcare reform which must be approved by June, but also the much-delayed pension reform and the labour reform on its second attempt? Will Petro be able to seriously launch any other major reforms (he has discussed a judicial reform for the spring)? Having proven that it has majorities in the lower house, will the government find majorities in the Senate, where their numbers are far more uncertain? How will Petro’s relations with the other parties and their leaders evolve in 2024? After making some first steps in the last two months, will Petro be serious about the ‘national agreement’? If so, what will that ‘national agreement’ even look like, and, more importantly, will it bring any tangible results?
2024 will be a decisive but also difficult year for Petro, one that could decide what his legacy will be. After all the problems and several defeats and setbacks suffered in 2023, Petro needs a new direction and strategy for his government in 2024.
Venezuela, Guyana and Petro
Over the past few weeks, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro escalated the long-standing territorial dispute with Guyana over the Essequibo region.
The ages-old territorial dispute predates chavismo, but the stakes have been much higher ever since Guyana discovered large offshore oil reserves and granted concessions to ExxonMobil. On December 3, Maduro organized a ‘referendum’ about Venezuela’s claim over the Essequibo, which officially resulted in over 98% of voters approving Maduro’s stances, including the incorporation of the disputed region to Venezuela as a state. In the aftermath of the vote, Maduro has ‘annexed’ the region and published a new official map showing Guayana Esequiba as an integral part of Venezuela, complete with arrest warrants against political opponents accused of conspiring against the referendum. Some believe that Maduro, worried by the success of the opposition’s primaries, wants to use the crisis to build a nationalist narrative and ensure absolute government control in the run up to the 2024 presidential election (perhaps even trying to postpone it), just as the US eased sanctions on Venezuela in October following a deal between the government and the opposition for the 2024 elections. Reports of Venezuelan military buildup around the border raised fears of armed conflict.
Brazil has taken the lead in trying to establish mediation between both countries to avoid a conflict, all while making clear to Maduro that it wouldn’t tolerate unilateral moves by Maduro. The United States has vowed its unconditional support to Guyana and held military exercises with Guyana on December 7. Facilitated by the Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Maduro and Guyanese President Irfaan Ali met for high-levels talks on December 14. They agreed not to use force in any circumstance and to refrain from escalating the dispute.
Given Colombia’s natural ties to Venezuela and Petro’s ambition, since reestablishing diplomatic relations with Maduro’s regime in 2022, to play a lead role in resolving the Venezuelan political impasse, one might think that Petro and Colombia would have a major role to play in this crisis. Quite to the contrary. While Petro has tweeted over 100 times about the Israel-Gaza conflict (in which Colombia has little to no influence), he’s only tweeted twice about the Venezuela-Guyana crisis. Colombia’s voice has been inaudible and entirely inconsequential in this crisis.
Petro finally said something on December 9, tweeting that war would be South America’s greatest misfortune and that Venezuela and Guyana must de-escalate the conflict. He called on regional leaders to build a mediation team. This first comment came after Irfaan Ali called on Petro to be on the “right side of history” and respect Guyanese sovereignty and territory.
A day later, Petro referred to the crisis in one of his long, bizarre tweets—this one as a retweet of a map of Gran Colombia in 1824 (including present-day Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, Essequibo and the Mosquito Coast). Petro lamented the disintegration of a nation dreamed of by Simón Bolívar, which he blames for many territorial conflicts and the need to maintain peace today after the “implosion of the Bolivarian project.” At the end of his long-winded spiel, Petro said that the two centuries-old dispute could be solved “in pursuit of what humanity needs, or in pursuit of what the oil industry needs,” and welcomed the talks between Venezuela and Guyana in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Foreign minister Álvaro Leyva attended the meeting, alongside representatives from CARICOM, CELAC, Brazil and the US.
His view on the issue, unlike on the Israel-Gaza conflict, appears unsettled. He is pulled between his more or less consistent desire for ‘peace’, which he’s repeated in reference to the war in Ukraine or in Gaza, and his ‘Bolivarian’ nostalgia/dreams of Latin American unity which makes him somewhat more sympathetic to Venezuela (besides, Guyana is really a little-known afterthought to most Latin Americans).
Colombia’s position in this crisis has been inconsequential, a mere spectator on the sidelines, even when it could theoretically aspire to some degree of regional leadership. While Brazil obviously weighs more than Colombia geopolitically, economically and militarily and it has a more direct stake in a Venezuela-Guyana conflict (as it borders both), Lula has become a more credible regional leader than Petro.
The Venezuela-Guyana crisis complicates Petro’s plans to restore diplomatic relations with Venezuela and play a leading role in the talks between the opposition and the government. This ambitious goal was already off to a rocky start. The international conference in Bogotá on the Venezuelan crisis, held in April, was a flop with few high-ranking delegates and no real results to show. The Venezuelan opposition doesn’t trust Petro, who they feel has become too chummy with Maduro. The US has also lost its confidence in Petro, realizing that Colombia was not able to meet the expectations they had for its role and has since looked at other ways to make contact with Maduro (like Qatar). As a result, Colombia only had a minor supporting role in the Barbados talks that resulted in partial deals on guarantees for the 2024 elections. Venezuela has fallen on the list of Colombian foreign policy priorities. Foreign minister Leyva, is distracted—he’s embroiled in a scandal about a passports contract that has him facing tough questions in Congress.
In other news
On December 12, the Senate voted down a proposal to legalize and regulate recreational cannabis, the second congressional defeat for the hot-button issue in six months. The vote came in the wake of controversy over Petro’s repeal of a decree that had imposed police fines and sanctions for possessing small amounts of drugs (which is decriminalized since 1994). Read more about Colombia’s drug debates in my new post here.
On December 13, the Consejo Gremial Nacional (CGN), the association of the 32 main professional/sectoral business associations in Colombia, elected Bruce Mac Master as their president for 2024. The election took on a political dimension with the last-minute candidacy of Bruce Mac Master, the president of the ANDI (the main employers’ organization) and regular critic of the government. His rival, former Liberal senator Camilo Sánchez, president of Andesco (the organization of public utilities companies), supported “measured and purposeful dialogue” with the government while Mac Master advocated for “greater commitment” in defence of business interests. Mac Master gathered majority support, and opposition politicians like former vice president Germán Vargas Lleras made calls in his favour, while government officials made calls for Sánchez. Ultimately, the CGN reached a consensus, electing Mac Master as president for 2024 and Sánchez in 2025. The new executive will have four members, including Mac Master and his running-mate (Jorge Bedoya of the SAC, the big landowners’ association) as well as Sánchez and his running-mate. Mac Master’s election to the helm of the CGN promises a more forceful, assertive tone with the government.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) granted party status to Vice President Francia Márquez’s movement Soy Porque Somos, bringing to 37 the total number of legally recognized parties in Colombia. In 2023 alone, the CNE granted legal recognition to eleven more parties. To learn more about the rapid proliferation of parties, please read my post on the topic from April.
The mayors and governors elected in October will take office on January 1. Several of them, like Fico Gutiérrez (returning as mayor of Medellín), Andrés Julián Rendón (new uribista governor of Antioquia) and Juvenal Díaz (governor of Santander) to name a few will likely become strong critics of Petro and the government from their regions. Others, most notably Carlos Fernando Galán as mayor of Bogotá, will quickly have their share of disagreements with the president.
Thanks for reading this year. Happy New Year!