We must resist the soft coup against the government of change

The traditional political forces announced from the first day the current Government began that they were not going to allow it to last four years. A certain senator from the party that is neither centrist nor democratic said earlier this year in a public forum that the opposition’s challenge was not to let Petro “stay for four years.” The senator, perhaps by mistake or perhaps intentionally, announced in public that the ultimate goal pursued by the opposition is to overthrow the president before his term ends.

That is why it should not be surprising that it was a magistrate from his party who wanted to initiate a process against the President of the Republic, the first action of the soft coup that we have denounced since last year. A magistrate who, in addition, was summoned this week by the Supreme Court of Justice in the trial underway in his purchase for alleged bribery of witnesses.

A magistrate who is accused of trying to change the testimony of a former paramilitary to try to benefit his political boss and who in this case decided to resign from his seat in the Congress of the Republic in 2022, trying to remain in the hands of the complacent Francisco Barbosa’s Prosecutor’s Office, like his boss, but his little trick did not work out and his process continues in the hands of the Court.

Lawfare is a mechanism of political persecution with which the use of the norm is perverted and judicial instances are used, legitimizing repression as a neutral judicial exercise. In Latin America, the progressive movements of the 21st century know very well about these strategies, as in Paraguay with President Fernando Lugo or in Brazil with the Lava Jato case with which Dilma Rousseff was impeached and Lula da Silva was captured in 2019. and then it was proven that it was a judicial setup.

The prevailing narrative has been, on the one hand, to declare President Petro guilty, forgetting about the presumption of innocence and the right to due process, and on the other, to call all of us who point out the judicial persecution as paranoid, ignorant of law and justice. That is why it bothers them so much when we remember that the National Electoral Council is not a competent body to judge, much less sanction, a president.

The Constitutional Court already said in Judgment SU-431/2015 that “foral protection was not limited only to criminal trials, but also covered any sanctioning process whose object was the reproach of behavior committed by constitutionally authorized persons.” Taking into account that the position of President of the Republic has constitutional capacity, its only competent investigator and judge is the Congress of the Republic, not the National Electoral Council.

We have the arguments to defeat them at their own game, the actions have been carried out in accordance with what is established in the Constitution and the Law. But we also need popular resistance, the organization of the social movement that makes it clear that they won fairly. access to power through democratic means, access that cannot be denied through institutional breakdown. In the face of persecution through the perversion of what is legal, the only thing left is the reaffirmation of legitimacy through social mobilization.