Colombians will go to the polls Sunday for the primary spherical of a presidential election that represents a turning level within the nation’s politics on a number of ranges. The front-runner within the race, Gustavo Petro, can be essentially the most progressive Colombian president because the Nineteen Thirties ought to he win. A former leftist guerrilla, Petro has promised to develop the nation’s social security web, together with improved entry to well being care and training, and reconfigure its financial system by shifting away from dependence on mining and hydrocarbons. His operating mate, Francia Marquez, is one in every of 5 Afro-Colombian vice presidential candidates; previous to this yr, no Afro-Colombian had ever appeared on a presidential ticket in Colombia’s fashionable democratic period.
However the election additionally represents a turning level within the nation’s divisions over the 2016 peace cope with the FARC guerrilla insurgency. Each Petro and his closest rival, the center-right candidate Federico Gutierrez, supported the deal and would search its full implementation, not like incumbent President Ivan Duque, who opposed it and sabotaged lots of its provisions. To make sure, Colombia’s “peace” has been largely chimerical. Violence has persevered, whether or not carried out by insurgents who both by no means demobilized or turned towards felony exercise, or else by paramilitaries. And the brunt of that violence has been borne by marginalized communities within the nation’s periphery, together with Indigenous leaders in addition to labor and environmental activists.
Nonetheless, the previous few years in Colombia’s politics have been outlined as a lot by large-scale social protests—which started in 2019 and, after a pause because of the pandemic, reemerged throughout the nation final yr—as by the violence related to the FARC and ELN insurgencies. Petro’s coalition in some ways represents the aspirations of those that demonstrated throughout the nation final yr. However it stays to be seen if he can mobilize to get Colombians to the polls as successfully because the social protest motion did to get them into the streets.
Listed below are some latest WPR articles for extra context on what’s at stake in Colombia’s presidential election.
This Week’s Highlights
Afghanistan’s Neighbors Are Studying to Reside With the Taliban. In a briefing on Monday, Andrew Watkins checked out how a sequence of violent incidents on Afghanistan’s borders have put the nation’s relations with its neighbors within the highlight.
- Infected tensions between the Taliban authorities and its neighbors, together with violence on the borders with Iran and Pakistan, have led some observers to surmise that regional states are reaching the restrict of their tolerance for the Taliban and would possibly quickly start to sponsor and assist anti-Taliban resistance teams in earnest. However whereas neighboring nations share critical issues concerning the Taliban’s capability to comprise terrorism, stem refugee flows and management their very own fighters, the area seems keen to tolerate lots, given the unsure options to Taliban rule and the potential disaster of renewed civil conflict or Taliban collapse.
- The Taliban’s relations with Iran are a working example. After clashes alongside the Afghan-Iranian border in April, Iran strengthened its border with armored troops. That incident came about amid a broader backdrop of suspicion and hostility: In early April, an Afghan refugee attacked clerics in a well-known shrine within the Iranian metropolis of Mashad, and the identical week Afghans protesting the poor remedy of migrants in Iran attacked the Iranian consulate in Herat. Nonetheless, Tehran solely gently rebuked the Taliban for the violence on the border, and technical delegations met within the following weeks to standardize coordination and deconfliction measures between the 2 sides’ border forces.
- The Taliban’s largest trigger for concern lies to the east, the place relations with the group’s former patron, Pakistan, are uniquely poor. The Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, has used its secure havens in Afghanistan to ratchet up its marketing campaign of rebel and terrorist violence in opposition to the Pakistani state. Islamabad has appeared to Kabul to train some moderating affect over the group, however Taliban-brokered peace talks with the militants largely stalled, and a March-April spike in TTP violence prompted unprecedented Pakistani airstrikes on Afghan soil. Nonetheless, each side have an curiosity in stopping any dramatic unraveling of the bilateral relationship. Unsurprisingly, within the month because the airstrikes, the state of affairs alongside the border has remained tense, however with out additional main incident.
- The Taliban have flexed their muscular tissues, in each rhetoric and deed, in opposition to all their neighbors since returning to energy. As tense because the Taliban’s relationships with its many neighbors could stay, nonetheless, the frequent prevailing strategic calculus—through which regional states want a problematic Taliban to the instability that might end result from opposing them—is unlikely to alter, at the very least till the ache brought on by the Taliban’s rule outweighs the ache that will end result from in search of to topple them.
Mali’s Junta Is Rewriting West Africa’s Playbook on Put up-Coup ‘Transitions’. And in Wednesday’s briefing, Alex Thurston defined what Mali’s most up-to-date coup might imply for the nation and for “democratic backsliding” in West Africa.
- When Col. Assimi Goita and his colleagues took energy within the first of Mali’s two latest coups, in August 2020, they adopted a recognizable script of shortly standing up a civilian-led transitional authorities with the duty of guiding the nation to democratic elections. Consequently, the situation appeared acquainted and the reactions of exterior powers virtually routine. With the transition again to a democratically elected authorities assured, there was no critical push from Paris, Washington or the regional head of states’ membership referred to as the Financial Neighborhood of West African States, or ECOWAS, to reinstate the ousted president. However the identical junta’s second coup in Could 2021 upended that “business-as-usual” strategy to post-coup transitions.
- The area has had its share of coups, each traditionally and in recent times, which usually fall into two fundamental classes. The primary is the professionally executed “senior officers’ coup,” the place the navy deposes an unpopular civilian chief and acts because the “referee of democracy” earlier than handing over energy. The second is the messy, impromptu “junior officers’ putsch.” The regional and worldwide group has playbooks for reacting to each of a lot of these coups. ECOWAS and others seemingly anticipated that Goita and firm would observe the mannequin of the senior officers’ coup adopted by an 18-month transition. However the Could 2021 coup dashed these hopes, with Goita putting in himself as transitional head of state and lengthening the transition timetable.
- Outraged by the junta’s proposal for an additional 5 years in energy, ECOWAS closed Mali’s borders and froze most monetary transactions with the nation in January 2022. In the meantime, relations between the junta and France steadily deteriorated and have now unraveled. The second coup revealed that the political-military technique France had been pursuing in Mali and the broader area for the previous decade had failed. France had claimed that its counterterrorism marketing campaign would allow “the return of the state” in Mali’s battle zones, an strategy that required a believable accomplice in Bamako to succeed. The second coup eliminated that variable from the equation.
- A yr after the Could 2021 coup, Mali is in a harmful place, with the junta now changing into more and more brutal. Within the capital, authorities have jailed politicians and intimidated journalists. Within the heart of the nation, Malian safety forces and Wagner Group fighters have massacred a whole bunch of civilians. However the junta’s capability to take care of fashionable assist up to now has undoubtedly influenced the extra lately minted juntas in Guinea and Burkina Faso, which took energy in September 2021 and January 2022, respectively. “Democratic backsliding” in West Africa is not only concerning the truth of coups occurring, however extra importantly the pattern of military-led transitions changing into open-ended. And beginning in Could 2021, Mali’s junta helped write the playbook on how to take action.
This Week’s Most-Learn Story
Russia’s Navy Was Doomed by Putin’s Tradition of Militarism. And on this week’s high story by pageviews, Alexander Clarkson defined why the Twentieth-century German scholar Alfred Vagts and his give attention to the social context through which a navy operates assist clarify the Russian navy’s failures in Ukraine:
Constructing on Soviet traditions, the Putin regime has celebrated navy energy by propagandistic rituals and authoritarian narratives that Vagts would have acknowledged as representing the tradition of militarism in its crudest type. This give attention to an unlimited array of militaristic customs, pursuits, status and actions elementary to Putin’s efforts to construct legitimacy for his dictatorial rule was epitomized by the fetishization of weapons methods corresponding to tanks or navy models corresponding to airborne forces, on the expense of their efficient deployment on the battlefield in opposition to a talented adversary.
What’s On Faucet
And developing subsequent week, we’ve obtained:
- A briefing by Max Bergmann on why elevated European protection spending remains to be falling quick.
- A briefing by Mary Fitzgerald on Libya’s unraveling political transition.
- And an in-depth article by Cora Fernandez Anderson on what U.S. abortion rights activists can be taught from Latin America’s “Inexperienced Tide.”
