Photograph Source: Casa Rosada (Argentina Presidency of the Nation) – CC BY 2.5 ar

President Gustavo Petro’s Historic Pact government, in power since 2022, is a first in Colombia’s history. No other party ever aspired to serve all Colombians. Its existence depends on push-back against Colombia’s peculiar mix of corporations, big landowners, financial moguls, and narco-traffickers. Difficulties are cropping up now that call for sharpened resistance.

Prospects for re-election of the Historic Pact in the 2026 elections are not bright. A soft coup is playing out as lawfare. That’s the tool establishment forces have used in recent years to remove left-leaning presidents in Paraguay, Honduras, Brazil (two of them), Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru.

U.S. officials are comfortable, it seems, with restoration of the old order in Colombia. This article appears as a “heads-up” to anti-imperialist activists in the United States.

Criteria for defining a political party have changed, far in advance of the upcoming elections. In response, and also for tactical reasons, Petro has sought to covert the Historic Pact from a “convergence” of political parties to a single party with the same name.

At its Congress in November 2024, the Patriotic Union (UP) party, “broke the ice” to advance the proposal. The Colombian Communist Party (PCC) followed suit. These parties joined with Petro’s Human Colombia Party (Colombia Humana), the Democratic Pole, and the new “Progressive Movement” to establish the new party at a meeting December 17 in Bogota.

Election rules had called for political parties obtaining less than 15% of the vote in a national election to lose their “judicial personhood” and no longer be able to participate in elections. They applied to each party in the old coalition. An observer explains that formation of a single, larger party provides the smaller entities with protection against “the sustained victimization by the establishment against parties and movements of the Colombian left.”

(The UP and PCC had been granted judicial personhood as token of reparations for past oppression. For two decades after the PCC and demobilized FARC guerrillas established the UP in 1985, the two parties experienced wholesale massacre of their members.)

The new Historic Pact Party will “formulate a proposal to create a broad front with allied sectors and movements that are not part of the unified party.” It will choose........

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