Colombia’s presidential race: Structural inequality and elite continuity fuel fear of cyclical violence and neoliberal regression
Original framing: “Two sides of a political chasm share one fear in Colombia’s presidential race: A return to the past - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Colombia’s political violence is a continuum of colonial land grabs, 19th-century liberal-conservative civil wars, and 20th-century La Violencia, where elites used paramilitaries to suppress peasant and Indigenous uprisings. The 1991 Constitution, though progressive on paper, failed to dismantle structural inequality, leaving land concentration intact. U.S. interventions like Plan Colombia (2000) militarized the state and deepened paramilitary control over rural areas. The fear of regression reflects a pattern where peace processes (e.g., 2016 FARC accord) are systematically undermined by elite backlash.
Colombia’s electoral 'fear of regression' is not a cyclical glitch but a structural feature of a state captured by extractivist elites, where land concentration, paramilitary violence, and U.S.
intervention have perpetuated cycles of exclusion since colonial times. The mainstream narrative’s binary framing—left vs. right—obscures how both sides are constrained by the same oligarchic structures, from the 1991 Constitution’s neoliberal loopholes to the 2016 peace accord’s unfulfilled promises. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, who have resisted these cycles for centuries, offer a roadmap: territorial autonomy, agroecology, and truth commissions that confront historical impunity. Yet their solutions are sidelined by a media ecosystem that privileges electoral theater over structural change, while U.S. military and corporate interests continue to profit from Colombia’s instability. The trickster’s insight—seeing the electoral circus as a distraction from the real feast—reveals that the 'return to the past' is not a threat but a symptom of a system that never left it. Breaking the cycle requires dismantling the extractivist economy, demilitarizing the state, and centering the voices of those who have long borne the costs of 'progress'.