Maximum tension: The election of the Attorney General and the February 8 protests
The election of the next attorney general is delayed once more, amidst an explosive political context and institutional conflicts, prompting a tense day of protests by Petro’s supporters on Feb. 8.
Lingering political tensions have reached a boiling point, catalyzed by the election of the next attorney general and the political context. The political context is explosive: old scandals from last year are back in the news to haunt Petro, and his own foreign minister has been suspended from office for three months. Petro feels attacked on all sides, reinforcing his siege mentality, his old narrative of political persecution and his theories of sinister plots by his enemies. His answer has been to call on his supporters to mobilize in response, and the result was a very tense protest on February 8. A deep dive into the complicated political-institutional crisis at hand.
The delayed election of the Attorney General
Attorney General Francisco Barbosa’s term ends on February 12. The Supreme Court failed to elect a successor on January 25 and February 8. Barbosa’s deputy attorney general, Martha Mancera, will act as interim AG until one is elected.
Given the political context and high stakes involved, tensions are running high. The cold war between Barbosa and Petro has escalated into open conflict, with both claiming that the other is plotting against them in some way. This is nothing new: since 2022, Barbosa, a vain and ambitious man, has behaved more as an opposition politician, using his position as a launching pad for his own political ambitions. In fact, besides mounting a final offensive against Petro, in his final days in office Barbosa, the self-proclaimed best attorney general in history, has been seeking to cement his legacy. Barbosa has spent over 180 million pesos in public money ($45,700) to print over 5,000 copies of an eleven volume series memorializing his own work. If that wasn’t enough, he’s had commemorative plaques in his honour installed in several offices—even though such plaques are illegal—to personally take credit, in some cases, for minor renovations like fixing the washrooms.
I discussed the election process and the three candidates nominated by Petro for the job here. Petro’s shortlist, from which the Supreme Court must choose, is made up of three women—Ángela María Buitrago, Amelia Pérez and Luz Adriana Camargo—all independent with no close ties to Petro and all experienced prosecutors who previously worked in the Fiscalía. Unlike in the past few elections, there’s no implicit presidential favourite, and there’s no sign that whoever wins would be a fiscal amigo, like Barbosa was for Iván Duque, his university classmate.
A two-thirds majority of the full court (23 magistrates) is required to elect the attorney general (16 votes). The court met on January 25, and although it elected its new president and vice president, it failed to elect the AG. On February 8, it was again unable to elect the AG after two ballots, and adjourned until February 22. The Supreme Court is in no rush and there’s no consensus amongst its members about how they should proceed. According to media reports, most magistrates cast blank votes on both Jan. 25 and Feb. 8, with no candidate coming close to the required majority.
There is a lot of pressure on the court to not delay any further. A lot of that pressure is coming from the government and the left, but also from commentators not particularly aligned with petrismo, like Rodrigo Uprimny. In op-eds, Uprimny has urged the court to elect an AG before Barbosa leaves office, in part to compensate for the enormous damage done by having elected Barbosa in 2020 and because there are no ethical or institutional reasons to delay the election.
According to La Silla Vacía, there are three ‘factions’ on the court. One group wants to elect the AG as soon as possible, holding extraordinary sessions until there’s white smoke (instead of waiting two weeks between regular sessions). The second group, believed to be the largest, wants to vote while taking their time, during regular sessions. A third group doesn’t like any of the candidates and wants to cast blank votes so that none of them are elected. This last group includes magistrate Gerardo Botero, who unsuccessfully tried to get Petro’s shortlist quashed because he considered it should include at least one man, and who recently wrote to the UN’s special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers to denounce threats, harassment and pressures against him and the court by the president.
Meanwhile: A controversial interim Attorney General
Given the Court’s inability to elect Barbosa’s successor before he leaves office, Martha Mancera will serve as interim attorney general until someone is elected. It’s not unusual for the election to take time or for there to be interim periods between the outgoing and new AG. In 2020, it took five rounds of voting for Barbosa to be elected, with only the bare majority (16 votes). Likewise, his predecessors never won with more than 16-17 votes. Since 2009, there has always been an interim period, where the deputy AG served as caretaker, in the changeover. The longest interim period lasted 16 months between 2009 and 2011, as the Supreme Court repeatedly rejected President Uribe’s nominees in the midst of a conflict between the highest court and the executive. In 2019-2020, there was an interim period of eight months between Néstor Humberto Martínez’s resignation in May 2019 and Barbosa’s election in January 2020 (because Duque took seven months to present his shortlist).
Martha Mancera is a career prosecutor with 30 years of service in the Fiscalía. Petro says that Barbosa wants to perpetuate himself in the Fiscalía through Mancera. Barbosa has claimed that Petro asked him to replace her, and speculated that it was because he was very worried about his scandals. Taking things further, Barbosa even travelled to the United States in late January to ‘present’ his deputy and to claim that she enjoyed the full support of the US government. Petro said that Barbosa was rather in Washington to ‘implore’ the US to protect his deputy.
One reason why many, not only petristas, are wary at the prospect of Mancera being elevated to interim AG is because she’s been implicated in several scandals. Revista Raya, Cuestión Pública and Daniel Coronell recently described how Martha Mancera allegedly covered up the drug trafficking activities of the head of the CTI (the Fiscalía’s investigations and judicial police division) in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura (Valle). Of the three undercover CTI agents who reported these findings to their superiors in 2021, one was killed by FARC dissidents days later and the other two ended up imprisoned and prosecuted by the Fiscalía (later released for lack of evidence). As the recent media revelations prove, Mancera gave the order to cover up the accusations. These are not the only scandals around her. Mancera was close friends with two narcofiscales in the Valle (prosecutors who protected drug traffickers), but, conveniently, in December 2023, the Fiscalía closed an investigation against Mancera for allegedly favouring and protecting her friends. Since 2016, Mancera also has an open case for allegedly taking bribes in exchange for not destroying a shipment seized by customs in Buenaventura. Petro has taken great pleasure in sharing articles about Mancera’s murky past and raised his own questions about her suitability for the job.
An explosive political context
The political context is extremely tense. The Fiscalía is handling two very political cases against Laura Sarabia and Petro’s son Nicolás, both of which could have very dire consequences for Petro. The latter case, connected to a broader investigation into campaign finance irregularities in Petro’s 2022 campaign, has been brought back into the headlines, at least in part deliberately by Barbosa. Following La Silla Vacía’s revelation (in August 2023) that the campaign didn’t report a 500 million peso donation from Fecode (the teachers’ union) to Petro’s Colombia Humana party, the Fiscalía and the Supreme Court searched Fecode’s offices on January 24.
Unions or corporations cannot contribute to presidential campaigns, but they may contribute to political parties. Several presidential campaigns, like Duque in 2018 and Santos in 2014, used this legal ambiguity to covertly receive corporate or union contributions via their political parties. Petro and his party have said that this money wasn’t used to pay campaign expenditures but rather to pay for a parallel vote count organized by the campaign, so the money didn’t need to be reported on the campaign’s financial report. The Petro campaign was very close on their official statements, to the maximum expenditure limit in both rounds (breaking them is a crime).
The longstanding cold war between Barbosa and Petro has recently escalated into open conflict. In early January, Barbosa compared Petro to Pablo Escobar. Following the searches at Fecode’s offices, Petro said they were “looking to find ways to remove the president from office.” A few days later, Petro inflamed things even further, accusing Barbosa of sedition for trying to investigate him (the AG cannot investigate the president) and claiming that Barbosa was increasingly desperate and would try to arrest people and initiate trials. Tit for tat, Barbosa responded in an interview with Semana, saying that Petro’s comment was a direct threat against the Fiscalía and the judicial branch, and said that Petro was the desperate one because of his scandals.
According to La Silla Vacía columnist Héctor Riveros, Barbosa reportedly privately asked magistrates to delay the election of the next AG until he can speed up the investigation against Nicolás Petro, in the hopes of extracting more information out of the president’s son to use against Petro, and to quickly collect whatever evidence he can get about campaign finance irregularities to be able to formally denounce Petro to the House’s Commission of Accusations. The case against Nicolás Petro has been moving slowly because Nicolás Petro’s collaboration deal with prosecutors fell apart and the star witness, Nicolás’ ex-wife Day Vásquez has been unwilling to implicate the president. The prosecutor responsible for Nicolás’ case announced on January 30 that he will file additional charges against him and seek a new arrest warrant—an unusual announcement because the next court date in the case is in late April.
Then, on February 3, the Fiscalía, through Semana, indicated that it would file charges against Ricardo Roa, Petro’s campaign manager, now president of Ecopetrol, and others in relation to the 500 million from Fecode.
This infuriated Petro, who posted a long ‘press release’ on his Twitter (and translated it to French, Italian and Arabic) in which he warned of an “institutional breakdown” (ruptura institucional) orchestrated by Barbosa and others to overthrow him. He said that his opponents were more desperate than ever because ‘the mafias’ don’t want to lose control of the Fiscalía now that he had presented a shortlist of ‘decent women’ to be AG. Rather shamelessly, Petro compared his current predicament to the genocide of the Unión Patriótica (UP), as if the two were even remotely comparable. Petro called on a large popular mobilization to defend ‘the people’s will’. Petro’s claims in his screed are largely exaggerated, inaccurate or a very tinted interpretation of reality.
Sidebar: The suspension of the foreign minister
Adding to Petro’s woes and feeding his sense that he’s being assailed by ‘the establishment’, on January 24, Inspector General Margarita Cabello suspended foreign minister Álvaro Leyva for three months because of potential irregularities in a bidding process for producing passports. It’s the first time a cabinet minister is suspended from office by the Procuraduría.
At the root of the scandal is a controversial bidding process for the production of passports. The procurement process to award the huge contract (over $152 million) to produce passports was launched in April 2023, and was designed to favour the current supplier, Thomas Greg & Sons (TGS). This Colombian subsidiary of a British multinational has managed this business since 2007 and is also a big government contractor for electoral matters. In the past 16 years, only on three occasions did they have to compete with another bidder for the passports contract. The last contract, in 2019, had already been criticized for irregularities and lack of transparency.
Other companies warned that the tender specifications were tailored to benefit TGS and put them at a disadvantage. This included requiring interested bidders to provide passport samples (with the same design line as the current ones) within 15 days, giving the winner just two months to set up two production plants and awarding extra points to whoever had a contingency plant in North America (only TGS met that condition). The foreign ministry ignored multiple complaints and warnings. Although the process was suspended amidst the controversy, the modified specifications continued to favour TGS. As anticipated, there was only one bidder in the end, TGS. However, another consortium filed an acción popular (popular action lawsuit), prompting the foreign ministry to suspend the bidding process on July 31. The Procuraduría demanded explanations from the ministry, and the comptroller’s office warned that the contract needed to be awarded to avoid financial costs to the state.
In the meantime, Petro reiterated that there shouldn’t be any single-bid contracts. Leyva, who has been steadfastly loyal to Petro, followed the president’s orders and, in September, cancelled the entire bidding process. Uncertainty over the supply of passports prompted panic and long lines outside passport offices. The ministry needed to directly award an emergency contract, to TGS, to ensure the continuity of the passport service after the old contract expired in October. Petro, meanwhile, voiced his support for Leyva, tweeting that he would not allow single-bid tenders.
The problem was that, despite Leyva’s 180 and the cancellation of the tender, the law gave TGS, the highest evaluated bidder, acquired rights. As expected, TGS sued the government for nearly $30 million. Despite being advised to settle by Martha Lucía Zamora, the head of the state’s legal defence agency, Leyva refused. The government’s legal advisers calculated that the probability of losing the case in court was over 90%. However, Petro sided with Leyva, tweeting that he had ordered a clean and transparent bidding process because “in this administration there are no acquired rights.”
The media reported that the meeting between Zamora and Leyva was very heated, with Daniel Coronell claiming that the foreign minister yelled at her, accusing Zamora of not protecting the president. Once again, Petro stepped in to defend his minister, denying that there had been any screams and implying that Zamora was favouring private interests.
Because of these disagreements, Zamora was forced to resign in early December. In an interview with Daniel Coronell, Zamora revealed that Leyva’s son Jorge Leyva and the foreign ministry’s legal affairs director, Juan Carlos Losada, had meetings with businessmen in Paris to fix the details of the passport contract before a new public tendering process was opened. Jorge Leyva denied any improper interference in the passport deal, and that he had only met with ministry officials in Paris in a personal capacity to serve as their tour guide.
Attempts to settle the case failed, and on December 19 Thomas Greg & Sons formally announced that they would sue the state. The Contraloría has already announced that, if the state loses the case, it would seize the assets and accounts of those public servants implicated. The high risk of the government being forced to pay out millions if the case is lost hasn’t worried Leyva very much. On Twitter, Leyva celebrated that settlement failed and accused Daniel Coronell of being tied to the ‘passport cartels’ (TGS).
In this context, on January 24, Inspector General Margarita Cabello suspended Leyva for three months and charged him with two serious disciplinary offences, with a disciplinary trial set to begin on February 15.
The attacks on all sides have rekindled Petro’s siege mentality and he’s fallen back on the familiar and comfortable narratives of political persecution and victimization. After Leyva’s suspension, Petro said “they’re going to suspend ministers here and there, […] they won’t let us govern” because they “don’t want there to be example of what a popular, democratic government is.” This is a continuation of the golpe blando (soft coup) idea that Petro and his supporters have talked about since last spring.
Petro has been a staunch opponent of the Procuraduría and its power to remove and suspend elected officials ever since he was sacked by Alejandro Ordóñez in 2013 when he was mayor of Bogotá (although Leyva, as a minister, doesn’t fall within the legal imbroglio over the Procuraduría’s powers to sanction elected officials). While the case against Leyva is strong and justified, and the mess was entirely of Leyva’s own making, Cabello’s biography and past record as inspector general allow petristas to question the credibility and legitimacy of the decision and claim that it was politically motivated. Cabello was justice minister under Iván Duque, who later nominated her for inspector general in 2020. Several times over, Cabello has been accused of political bias in her decisions and has earned the ire of petristas for suspending administration officials like Daniel Rojas. The unprecedented nature of her decision to suspend a sitting cabinet minister fuels the rhetoric of political persecution.
February 8
The large popular mobilization wished by Petro and officially organized by Fecode, was held on February 8, a clear attempt to pressure the court into electing an attorney general on that date. Government appointees, like Nórida Rodríguez, the head of the public broadcaster RTVC, openly promoted the marches and employees at public entities like the SENA received permission to participate. Last year, Petro’s repeated attempts to use the streets as a show of force to pressure other institutions largely failed, but he’s now trying again.
Petro met with the president and vice president of the Supreme Court on February 6. The meeting was supposed to be a routine courtesy call, but Petro moved it up to take place two days before the court met again. It ended up backfiring quite badly on Petro. The magistrates came to ask him to tone down the protests and call for calm. After 90 minutes, they felt that Petro got the message—the Supreme Court tweeted that they had discussed “the urgency of promoting respect between all institutions and sectors of the country.” However, a short while later, Petro came out with his own tweet, denying that the current situation should be read as a pressure on the courts but also calling for organization of the “coordinators of popular forces.” Instead of restraining the protests, as the court wanted, Petro instead just poured more gasoline on the fire and made clear his full support of the protests.
The protests drew relatively significant crowds in Bogotá (20,000 people) and cities across Colombia. Alongside Fecode, the largest trade union confederation, CUT, joined the protests, as did the Fiscalía employees’ unions. The protests started out peacefully. The organizers had changed the meeting point from the Supreme Court to the seat of the Fiscalía, the so-called búnker, so that the court would not feel it as a pressure against them. Protesters chanted slogans against Barbosa and Mancera, and Petro tweeted his support of the protests, calling them the “marches for decency.”
However, around midday, tensions in Bogotá increased once protesters heard that magistrates had not elected an attorney general. They moved downtown and surrounded the Supreme Court buildings, where some of them unsuccessfully tried to forcefully enter the premises, only to be held back by other protesters who called for non-violence. A few hours later in the afternoon, protesters blocked all three parking exits, preventing magistrates from leaving the building. Some employees left the building, escorted by law enforcement, harangued by the crowd.
The images of the Palace of Justice and the magistrates ‘besieged’ by protesters, some carrying flags of the M-19 guerrilla, evoked memories of the 1985 Palace of Justice siege, one of the most traumatic episodes in recent Colombian history. The full truth of what happened then is still ambiguous and debated, with wounds still open and very different competing interpretations of the events on the left and right. Semana’s Vicky Dávila, one of the leading voices of the opposition in the media, called on Petro to not allow ‘another holocaust’ like in 1985. Semana was whipping up a frenzy with its headline that the magistrates were besieged, with accesses blocked and prevented from leaving.
Adding to the highly charged atmosphere, a helicopter was seen flying over the court building. In the fog of war, some medias falsely claimed that magistrates had been evacuated by helicopter.
The defence minister reported that the court had the necessary security and that he was in permanent contact with the president of the court. The director of the police, General William Salamanca, walked over with no security detail to the Palace of Justice to talk with the magistrates. Late in the afternoon, Petro ordered the police to act against those who were blocking the movements of the magistrates. Meanwhile, protesters were debating whether they should stay or leave, with some vowing to stay until a new attorney general is elected.
The Supreme Court’s president, Gerson Chaverra, read out a short but vehement statement condemning the ‘siege’ and “illegal, violent blockade” of the Palace of Justice, considering it a situation which threatened the lives and physical integrity of employees, judges and journalists. Chaverra said that democracy is at risk when anyone seeks to pressure judicial decisions, and that all disagreements must be resolved through institutional procedures established by law. The Constitutional Court made a “concerned call for calm and common sense”, recognizing the legitimacy of civic protests but emphasizing that judicial institutions must not be blocked, intimidated or pressured. Other institutions, business associations (led by the Consejo Gremial) and politicians rallied in support of the Supreme Court.
Gustavo Petro now tried to wash his hands of the crisis. All while claiming that the unrest and blockade had been the product of ‘infiltrators’, he ordered the police to lift the blockades and disperse the protests, “respectfully but forcefully.” By the late afternoon, police, including riot police units (ESMAD), cleared the surroundings of the Palace of Justice and dispersed the protesters using tear gas. Besides some isolated disturbances, the situation was resolved relatively quickly, and the dispersal of protesters was quick and smooth. After several hours held inside, the magistrates were able to leave in their vehicles under police protection.
In the evening, Petro held a security council meeting with the commanders of the armed forces. In his balance of the day, Petro said the protests had been peaceful with the exception of two brief moments with tear gas in Medellín and Bogotá, and nobody had been wounded in the country. Taking an interesting distance from them, he added “the presidency reminds those who want to demonstrate […] to not affect the institutions in any way” and “the government guarantees the independence of public powers in the country and the freedom of their decisions.”
Petro incited the protests, inflaming his base with the idea of ruptura institucional, but once they got out of hand, he quickly sought to distance himself from them and was ultimately forced to send out riot police to disperse the protests that he had instigated.
The protests did prove that Petro still has the power to mobilize a significant part of his base—notably organized labour and more radical activists—to rally in his defence, adopting his arguments wholesale. The events of February 8 will reinforce his opponents and critics’ belief that Petro is a danger to democracy because he can, through his rhetoric, jeopardize the separation of powers. Former president César Gaviria, leader of the Liberal Party, in an all-caps reaction, said that Petro’s behaviour was violating the constitution and called into question Petro’s mental capacity (in reaction, Petro said he was confusing “madness with decency”). Álvaro Uribe tweeted that it was unacceptable for protesters to hold magistrates in “a sort of kidnapping.”
In a seemingly opposite direction, the OAS released a statement demanding that “attempts by different political actors to damage the democratic process in Colombia be abandoned”, that it was essential “to guarantee that President Gustavo Petro completes his presidential term” and condemning and repudiating “the threats to interrupt the constitutional mandate of President Petro.” The OAS also highlighted the “vital importance” of electing a new attorney general to provide constitutional and political certainty. Petro embraced this statement but other Colombian politicians have criticized the OAS’ comments. Centrist senator Humberto de la Calle wrote to Luis Almagro, the Secretary General of the OAS, to express his “surprise, astonishment and disgust” because no sane person in Colombia is working to overthrow the government and Colombia “has not been and will not be a country of golpistas.”
Since then, Petro and his supporters have tried to downplay what happen, claiming that the media exaggerated the reality. Petristas have continued claiming that blockades were the work of infiltrators or deliberately orchestrated and staged by the media to generate disinformation. Petro himself has criticized the media coverage of the protests, claiming that it was “planned mass manipulation that should be thoroughly investigated”, quickly circling back to his familiar story that it’s all part of the far-right’s desire to “destroy the progressive project” and impede that an impeccable person becomes attorney general “because they fear that impunity will be dismantled.” He reiterated his views at a governors’ summit on Feb. 9, accusing the media of building a false story to cover up peaceful protesters who were demanding transparent justice. Petristas have disagreed with the use of the term asedio (siege), widely used by the media and politicians, to describe what happened.
Angered by Daniel Coronell saying that Petro came off as inept and overwhelmed by the events, the president claimed that, around 1pm, the magistrates declined his offer to clear the area, saying that it was unnecessary and that they didn’t want violence. Petro says that his later order to clear the area was a ‘preventive decision’ taken to avoid any more difficult situations later.
On February 9, the typically discreet Supreme Court reiterated its statement from Feb. 8 to “ratify the magnitude of what happened” in the face of “accounts aimed at minimizing the seriousness of the events.”
Petro has kept persisting in his arguments. In a long-winded and somewhat incoherent tweet/rant on February 11, he accused the media of building “completely false communication bubbles with the aim of manipulating society.” He said that the “general popular mobilization” would impede a coup but also reestablish “decency, truth and popular power.”
Of course, there’s good reason to be critical of the media’s coverage of the events, particularly their usual urge to put a sensationalist, click-bait angle on everything. The references to 1985 by the likes of Vicky Dávila were intended to stir up emotions, when the situation was not in any way comparable.
What happened on February 8 will only further inflame tensions and deepen the political polarization. Petro and the left will be comforted in their beliefs that the reactionary establishment is threatening an institutional breakdown in their desperation to block the election of a new attorney general who would destroy their impunity and disrupt the narco-mafioso control of the Fiscalía. The right will see it as further proof that Petro is a danger to democracy and institutions and that, moreover, he’s weak and inept at handling a situation gone out of hand, notwithstanding the fact that their sudden defence of institutions and judicial independence rings hollow. Centrists, struggling to be heard, will be even more concerned about Petro’s populist and mercurial tendencies threatening the separation of powers and democratic institutions.
For the actual matter at hand—the election of the attorney general—it’s highly unlikely that the protests and Petro’s response to them will have the intended effect of forcing the Supreme Court to hasten its decision. The court dislikes external pressure, and its relations with the president will likely significantly worsen after recent events. While it’s hard to know much about the internal happenings on the courts, these events could strengthen the hand of those who want the court to take its time and those who dislike Petro’s candidates.