Colombian President Gustavo Petro insisted on Thursday that there was an alleged plan to remove him from power or attempt on his life, without providing evidence, before hundreds of his supporters who responded to the call of the government and unions to defend his administration.
“They want to kill and overthrow the president… here begins the first day of a general mobilization of Colombian society,” Petro warned, while supporters chanted “They shall not pass!”, referring to the government’s detractors.
The president recalled that on July 20, the day he participated in a public event, would have been at risk of a possible attackas his Defense Minister, Iván Velásquez, had denounced. He also insisted on another alleged plan to kill him with a dump truck loaded with dynamite.
“What they want here is to erase the possibility that a progressive government can exist in Colombia and win elections and govern,” said Petro from a platform set up by his administration.
The protesters also echoed the president’s own denunciation of an alleged “Colombian-style coup d’état” in which his detractors would try to remove him from office using state institutions that are conducting investigations into the electoral campaign that brought him to power.
“We came to reject the coup they want to carry out against the president. Here in Colombia, the corrupt right has been doing whatever it wants,” Freddy Martinez, a 42-year-old construction worker, told The Associated Press.
This is happening as the National Electoral Council (CNE) is considering whether or not to open a formal administrative investigation into the electoral campaign with which Petro became president in 2022 for allegedly exceeding the financing amounts allowed by law. The CNE imposes economic sanctions.
Petro maintains that he did not violate the law and that the CNE does not have the authority to investigate him due to his presidential immunity, which means that he can only be investigated by the Congressional Investigation and Accusation Commission, where he could be punished with the loss of office following an impeachment trial.
In Plaza Bolívar, government supporters gathered in front of a platform set up by the government where several of its officials and union and social leaders spoke, asking the government to support their communities.
“We ask for peace, for the weapons to be silenced, for the countryside to flourish, for there to be support for the countryside,” cried Arnidia Runza Pinilla, a peasant leader from the Sumapaz region, which is in a strategic position that armed groups have sought to dominate as it is the gateway to Bogotá.
Peace policy is one of the main goals of the Petro government, which is conducting parallel negotiations with armed groups and urban gangs. However, the dialogue with the guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army, was suspended by the government the day before the demonstration, after the government attributed to this group the attack with explosives on a military unit, causing the death of three soldiers and wounding more than 26.
The negotiations with the ELN were the most advanced in the bid to seek dialogue to reduce the violence that did not stop after the historic peace agreement signed in 2016 with the defunct guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). After their demobilization, other armed groups occupied the territories left by the FARC and continue to fight for control of illicit economies.
Petro’s supporters also sought to defend the government’s social reforms from the streets, a common practice during the leftist’s mandate. They also demanded that Congress approve the labor and health reforms, the latter of which were rejected by legislators last semester.
“We need reforms in this country. We cannot continue to tolerate the poorest people dying of hunger and without medicine,” Liliana Gutierrez, a housewife who took part in the pro-government rally, told AP.
Labor Minister Gloria Ramírez defended the pension reform, the government’s main legislative victory, which was approved in June by Congress and signed into law by the president a month later.
“It will help three million of our senior citizens to get out of extreme poverty, that is social inclusion… but they want to take it away from us, that is what we are not willing to give up,” Ramírez claimed, before a large audience of senior citizens and officials from the state pension fund.
For the minister, the reform is in danger of being rendered ineffective now that the Constitutional Court is considering a lawsuit for alleged flaws in the process that took place in Congress. The lawsuit filed by opposition senator Paloma Valencia indicates that the House of Representatives approved the reform without having properly debated the text that had previously been approved by the Senate.
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