Socialists vying for power, whether through armed revolution, the ballot box, or variations on those themes, is nothing new in Latin America. In fact, Latin America has long been characterized by political swings between left and right. Colombia, however, had remained immune to this trend, hewing consistently to the right and toward close alliance with the United States. This year’s presidential elections broke the country’s pattern, with two outsider candidates leading in the first round. In June, with broad support from popular sectors, leftist politician and former Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro and feminist and anti-mining activist Francia Márquez defeated their maverick right-wing populist opponent. They took office on August 7.

The left ticket’s triumph is a remarkable watershed. Colombia had long served, as President Joe Biden recently commented, as “the linchpin  . . .  to the whole hemisphere, north and south,” for the US agenda.¹ It received the first World Bank mission in 1951, was the only Latin American country to send troops to support the United States in the Korean War, and is the only Latin American country that’s a NATO partner. It has also, since the 1990s, been the largest recipient of US military aid, hosted the largest number of US bases, and sent the largest contingent of officers to study at the US Army School of the Americas (since 2000, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC) — some sixteen thousand between 1966 and 2015.² Since Plan Colombia was implemented in 2000, the United States has poured over $13 billion into Colombia, 66 percent of that aimed at military and police.³

But the United States’ economic, political, and military designs for the country were not simply an external imposition. Colombia’s National Association of Manufacturers (Asociación Nacional de Industriales, ANDI), representing textile, agro-industry, and other industrial interests, along with its growing military and police forces, all of whom shared a tolerance or reliance on collaboration with privatized security forces to ensure their control over land, peasants, and workers, offered natural allies to the US project. This alliance is at the root of over half a century of violence, the main victims of which have been the organized left, worker and peasant movements, and anyone perceived as a threat to investment and profit.⁴ In many ways, Petro’s victory represents a fundamental breakthrough in subordinated sectors’ long struggle for a space and voice in Colombian politics.