Gustavo Petro’s government ends its first year in office attempting to balance the demands of the social movements that propelled it to power with those of a political class that retains legislative sway.

In Cali, memory lines the walls. Colombia’s third-largest city is adorned with murals depicting the estallido social: the immense protests that shook Colombia from April to June 2021, sparked by crushing social conditions and met with fierce state repression. Five-metre paintings of young people killed by police overlook congested highways, signalling residents’ refusal to forget the crimes committed under the authoritarian regime of Iván Duque. This year, on the second anniversary of the uprising, the city’s puntos de resistencia (or ‘resistance points’) were reimagined. New works of street art went up, while communal meals and musical performances brought together those affected by the events: the parents of activists killed in the crackdown, protesters left with life-changing injuries. ‘The police didn’t like us meeting like this before’, said one graffiti artist, spray can in hand. ‘But since the election, they tend to leave us alone.’

In June 2022, the revolt against Duque culminated in the election of Colombia’s first progressive government, headed by President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez. The last time a leftist made a serious bid for the presidency was in 1948, when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s likely victory was thwarted by his assassination. Since then, the country’s peasant and indigenous populations have been excluded from its political institutions – dominated by the interests of agribusiness and extractivism, propped up by Washington with the aid of right-wing paramilitary groups.

Colombian GDP is around the Latin American average, yet inequality levels are among the highest in the region. For decades, peasant, Indigenous and African-Colombian populations have been forcibly displaced to facilitate increased land concentration. As the extractive economy spread from the 1980s onward – along with ranching, intensive agriculture and cocaine production – paramilitaries cleared swathes of the countryside of their inhabitants. Under the right-wing presidency of Álvaro Uribe (2002-10), the landowning oligarchy, accounting for only a tiny fraction of total landowners, increased its holdings from 47% of agricultural land to 68%, while 80% of peasant farmers lived in poverty. The urban working class suffered low wages and job instability, its capacity to organize for improved conditions fatally weakened by systematic violence against trade union leaders and community activists. During Duque’s tenure, 42% of the population were impoverished, thanks to a combination of hyper-neoliberal policies and mismanagement of the pandemic.

Such asymmetries are partly a result of Colombia’s rigged political system. In 1958, the two parties of the ruling elite, the Liberals and Conservatives, agreed that power would rotate between them as part of a National Front arrangement. This antidemocratic duopoly was contested by the guerrilla movements that emerged in the wake of the Cuban Revolution: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), which aimed to defend peasants against state violence and establish a new national settlement based on popular participation and anti-imperialism. The FARC, in particular, found