Colombia’s Fossil Fuel Lobby Seizes Power: How Right-Wing Alliances Undermine Climate Progress and Structural Equity
Original framing: “A Trump Ally’s Rise in Colombia Could Mean the End of Landmark Climate Policies” — Inside Climate News
Colombia’s current fossil fuel expansion mirrors U.S.-backed extractivist policies in Latin America since the 1950s, from Guatemala’s United Fruit Company operations to Pinochet’s neoliberal reforms. The 2016 peace accord’s failure to dismantle paramilitary structures has enabled corporate land grabs, while the IMF’s austerity demands in the 1990s privatized state-owned oil assets. This historical continuity reveals how ‘landmark climate policies’ are often performative, masking deeper continuities of violence and dispossession.
Colombia’s impending right-wing shift is not an aberration but the culmination of a century-long extractivist project, where U.S.
corporate interests, Colombian elites, and global financial institutions have colluded to treat land as a sacrifice zone. The mainstream narrative’s focus on Trump’s influence obscures how this project is enabled by Colombia’s 1991 Constitution (which prioritized economic growth over ecological limits) and the IMF’s structural adjustment programs. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, who have resisted this logic for generations, offer a blueprint for a post-extractivist future—one that centers territorial autonomy, agroecology, and renewable energy. The ‘trickster’ in this story is the neoliberal state itself, which performs climate virtue while deepening fossil fuel dependency. A just transition requires dismantling the legal and financial architectures of extractivism, redirecting subsidies to marginalized regions, and building a global coalition to phase out fossil fuels—all while centering the voices of those most affected by the crisis.