Sunday’s election of a hardcore conservative in Colombia has left the media elites and their pundits befuddled.
Some are calling Ivan Duque, the 41-year-old new conservative president-elect a “populist” as if to suggest that both President Trump and the late unlamented Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chávez, are all dreadful peas in the same pod. Others are speculating that Colombia elected another Emmanuel Macron, as if France’s youthful, namby-pamby president amounted to a comparable sea change to what this election represents. We heard of the new president summed up as “pro-business” by the Wall Street Journal, as if that was all he meant to voters, and more pointedly still, summed up as “right-wing” by Agence France-Presse and National Public Radio, both of which are clearly displeased. He’s also been accused of being a “puppet” of former president Alvaro Uribe, the country’s Reagan-like leader from 2002-2010, who put terrorists on the run and changed Colombia’s reputation from night-haunted hellhole to success story, even a vacation paradise. The press dutifully spread the puppet stuff far and wide.
The best story I saw comes from a local, on-the-ground source. Here’s Colombia Report’s headline: “Iconic Medellin slum votes Duque to avoid ‘another Venezuela.'”
Medellín at La Sierra. Image by Monica Showalter.
Now the clarity comes. Poor people voted for a genuine conservative out of terror of becoming another Venezuela, because they know what it is up close. And yes, those are the vaunted poor who for years we have been hearing are so poor that they can vote only for candidates who offer to shovel the most pork. They didn’t. And it wasn’t even close. Duque won against his opponent, socialist ex-guerrilla and former Hugo Chávez admirer Gustavo Petro, by a margin of about 54-42, according to the New York Times.
That didn’t merit any headlines from larger news sources?
It gets worse for the press, because the Colombia Reports story is chock-full of on-the-ground shoe-leather reporting illustrating just that from the poor: an absolutely clear-eyed rejection of socialism, based on the example coming, and coming, out of Venezuela:
“You know what everyone’s saying,” said Teresita Alvarez, 63, as she walked to the polling station with her daughter and granddaughter.
“He [Petro] could bring Colombia down – he could make it like Venezuela. No one here wants that.”
Strangely, both Teresita and her 36-year-old daughter, Liliana, who have always lived in La Sierra, voted for centrist Sergio Fajado the first time round. Their second vote was a massive swing to the right.
Builder Alex Gutierrez, 40, picked Duque for the same reasons.
“We’ve seen the problems with Venezuela. We don’t want to risk that happening here,” he said.
Medellín. Image by Monica Showalter.
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