marches and protests

This week in Colombia, there were two marches: one promoted by the government of Gustavo Petro to support his reforms, amid a drop in popularity from 54% favor to less than 40 in three months; and another, a day later, called by rambling opposition, so much so that we all knew where the march began but not where it would end.

The march of the government, with propaganda in the national media and all the support of the bureaucracy, is met with an erratic government which calls on the citizens to make reforms “in the streets”. A classic Peronist populism that intends to impose its agenda in a country that is increasingly realizing what it has chosen.

Regardless of the outcome of the marches, today they are part of a new political fight in which the left has the advantage and knows how to use this force to impose its criteria, block economies, destroy infrastructure and channel discontent to electoral effects. The mobilizations of 2019 and 2021, which generated the victories of Boric in Chile and Petro in Colombia, are the best example of the success of this strategy, which mixes brutal violence and intimidation with a successful narrative that puts the other first as guilty.

The other type of mobilization, the operation of which we can already see, takes place in Peru, and it is about the violent rupture of a democracy. It has a very effective organization, like the marches in Chile and Peru, funding from which we still do not know where it comes from (probably from abroad, since it is the modus operandi of Russia and Cuba) and 70 blocking points across the country, severely affecting the economy.

The communicating vessels of the violent protests of previous years with those of Peru are evident. They learned how to block, how to destroy an economy and how to defeat a country. They have learned to manage the international narrative of a violent state and peaceful protesters, when the reality is not like that; Moreover, the support of the Latin American radical left -AMLO, Petro, Maduro, Ortega and others- guarantees that this type of operation becomes normal, with the objective of making countries ungovernable when there is no left-wing government.

Another thing is when mobilization comes up from the government. The geniuses in this field were Hitler and Mussolini. Perón did this with great success, but his incomparable charisma facilitated the process; Chavez has been successful in this type of calling as well, and we’ve also seen how AMLO, and now Petro, are calling with little success, because in the 21st century, with social media, visibility and constant exposure, things get sell at another price.

Protests in Iran and Sri Lanka showed the power of citizens to overthrow a government that destroyed their country and how a religious dictatorship is challenged; but what happened on January 6 in Washington shows that no democracy is safe, however crazy it may seem. Today’s democratic governments must add to the challenges of poverty, inequality and economic growth, that political activism that has shut down swathes of first-world cities, like Portland, or seized an icon of freedom, like the capital. This political activism-vandalism was capable of destroying an entire metro line in Santiago or 26 police stations in Bogotá in one night, or blocking a country, as they do with Peru and almost succeeded with Colombia in 2021.

The question now is how does a democratic state or government react to this new way of creating disorder and chaos? It’s not terrorism, it’s not guerrilla warfare, but it’s a type of asymmetrical warfare where few armed youths infiltrate the protests and generate violence that aims to cause death and injury that discredit public forces and generate chaos.

The police forces in our region are not trained in this new model of low intensity warfare. It is not only a question of increasing and professionalizing more the anti-riot squads, which are often confronted with this type of protests and blockages; these shock groups are now more necessary than ever, even if the discourse on the left is that they must be ended for obvious reasons, but they are not enough.

How to stop this strategy of disruption should be a fundamental objective of our security agencies. Just as in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the enemy of democracy was the guerrilla warfare, sponsored by the Soviet Union across Cuba, in this decade and beyond the challenge is this type of violence, which benefits from great support from countries like Russia and Iran. and as regional operators Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

We already see irregular groups and criminal gangs taking advantage of this type of chaos for their own benefit. In the case of coca, the FARC succeeded in doing so as part of the peace process, restricting the fumigation and eradication of illicit crops in Colombia, or in Mexico, more brutally, using this armed intimidation to obtain releasing the son of a drug trafficker, in one case, or clarifying who is responsible, as has happened in many other cases.

At the end of the peaceful march in Bogotá, it was nothing more than seeing a group of indigenous people blocking the entrance to the Colombian Congress with clothes printed with the image of Che Guevara, only to realize that this battle is between those of us who believe in freedom and those who don’t Those who believe in authoritarian states already know that they have these kinds of instruments of force to gain space and obtain prebends and benefits by using force.

It is urgent that democratic states, but also citizens, understand that this enemy of freedom is growing and must be fought; take advantage of the weaknesses and advantages of democracy to attack and destroy it. For this reason, a great coordinated effort is needed, hopefully with the help of the United States, especially in the field of intelligence, to attack this cancer that lives today in all our countries.

Protest yes, of course, it must be guaranteed and protected. Protest vandalism must be fought with all the police and judicial forces, since it is today the privileged instrument of those who want to put an end to our freedoms.