Petro’s New York drug cases and Uribe Turbay’s assassins shake up Colombia’s election. And Argentina remembers its most brutal military dictatorship on its 50th anniversary.
ELECTIONS
Two court cases shake up presidential race in Colombia
Two big judicial stories from last week have heated up Colombia’s campaign season. First, the New York Times revealed that President Gustavo Petro is under investigation by two US federal prosecutors’ offices over potential links to drug trafficking.
Shortly after, magazine Semana disclosed a confession by one of the men convicted of murdering presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay last August, who said that the hit had been ordered by a left-wing guerrilla group, the FARC dissident organization known as Segunda Marquetalia.
👉 Why it matters. After Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was deposed and captured in January based on a US judicial investigation, any probe against the country’s neighbor and on-and-off ally is relevant news, even if the New York Times report said Trump was not behind it. With only two months to go before Colombia’s presidential election, both stories will also give conservatives ammunition to blame the left for crime and political violence, which have plagued the country for decades.
Petro was quick to dismiss the investigations, pointing to his history of denouncing links between right-wing paramilitary groups and drug cartels. The president argued that the probes against him were “preliminary,” and that their real origin lay with “the Colombian right and some of its extradited friends, as well as some friends they have at the State Department,” led by Cuban-American hawk Marco Rubio.
This is not the first time that Petro’s entourage has been investigated for ties with the criminal underworld. Petro’s son Nicolás (who has been indicted over corruption allegations) said that he received cash from drug traffickers during his father’s presidential campaign, but later backtracked, arguing that he was pressured into the confession for political effect.
Interior Minister Armando Benedetti, who led Petro’s presidential campaign, was also caught on tape comparing the probes against his government with Proceso 8000, a famous inquiry into the ties between the Cali Cartel and former President Ernesto Samper’s fundraising efforts, and which led to the ousting of multiple key cabinet ministers.
The other big political headline of the week confirmed what judicial analysts had already suspected. In his transcribed interrogation, Simeone Pérez Marroquín, who was sentenced to 22 years in jail for organizing Uribe Turbay’s assassination, said the hit was ordered by Segunda Marquetalia’s second-in-command, Zarco Aldinever, after a meeting on the Venezuelan border.
The revelation led to disputes between the government and its critics, who argued about whether Aldinever was still part of peace talks with Petro’s administration at the time he ordered the crime.
Former two-time right-wing president and opposition leader Álvaro Uribe (no family relation with Uribe Turbay, although they came from the same party) went as far as saying that Petro’s presidential candidate Iván Cepeda promoted the escape of Segunda Marquetalia’s leaders to Venezuela. Cepeda replied that he would take Uribe to court to challenge his unproven accusations.
In the end, while the specifics of each claim can be debated, the underlying conflict is about how the state should deal with the dissident left-wing armed groups that have refused to lay down their weapons: with dialogue, peace offerings and measures to address social inequality, or with the hardened law-and-order approach proposed by the right.
🇨🇴 Read also: The three main contenders in Colombia’s presidential race.
HISTORY
The economic legacy of Argentina’s military dictatorship
Aside from a recent swell of right-wing dissent, the military coup that toppled the government in Argentina 50 years ago today is repudiated at home and abroad. The country observes the date with a national holiday every March 24, featuring rallies and memorial events, and the dictatorship’s international reputation is equally infamous, due to its well-documented record of kidnappings, tortures and disappearances.
But the dictatorship’s equally disastrous economic legacy is also worth understanding, given how Argentina’s democratic right-wing governments have kept reaching for similar formulas, and getting similarly poor results.
Social unrest was rampant in the lead-up to the coup — driven not only by escalating political violence but also by the mass price deregulation of 1975 (known as the “Rodrigazo”), which sent inflation surging from 40% in 1974 to over 300% in the next two years.
For the putschist military waiting in the wings, the Rodrigazo was an asset. The collapse of the peso and skyrocketing of utility bills destroyed what remained of then-President Isabel Perón’s credibility, while handing the incoming armed forces a comparatively tidy macroeconomic inheritance.
The fiscal deficit, which stood at an historically bad 15.6% of GDP before the Rodrigazo, was cut to a more manageable 5% by the first full year of the dictatorship in 1977, while the external sector improved from -3.5% to a 3% surplus over the same period, giving military officials a golden chance to grow the economy and balance the books through an export-led recovery.
But the dictatorship did the exact opposite, using a regional credit boom caused by petrodollar recycling to raise large amounts of debt, reinflate the value of its currency, finance cheap imports and cover even larger deficits.
Macroeconomic numbers deteriorated massively even before the credit bubble burst in 1981, with an unprecedented current account deficit of -7.6% in 1980, which drove thousands of businesses into bankruptcy as they struggled to compete with foreign products.
When the military left power in December 1983, almost every macroeconomic indicator looked worse than at the start of the dictatorship, including a budget deficit exceeding 18% and unprecedented inflation.
The unravelling of the credit bubble led to a dramatic housing market collapse, which left thousands of middle-class Argentines on the streets after 1981, triggering a brutal recession and prompting a last-gasp attempt to regain popularity with the ill-advised war over the Malvinas (the Argentine name for the Falklands) one year later.
The massive government debt incurred during that era (rising from 18% of GDP to 60% in seven years) would continue to bite the country for years, culminating in hyperinflation and default in 1989.
👉 Why it matters. Right-wing Argentine presidents like Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) or Javier Milei have copied large parts of the dictatorship’s economic formula, from a strong dependence on debt to dismissing rising bankruptcies as the inevitable cost of liberalizing trade, all while large current account deficits sustain their popularity in the short term.
But the fact that Argentina’s last military dictatorship or Macri himself failed even on their own terms, leaving the country with higher inflation and worse macroeconomic numbers than they inherited, should be a warning sign for Milei while he rides a wave of market confidence.
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Last Friday, we asked readers to explain a Colombia-Ecuador border dispute predating the current tensions — and nobody got it right. The episode occurred in 2008, when a Colombian airstrike killed FARC leader Raúl Reyes on Ecuadorian soil, triggering a diplomatic crisis and prompting Venezuela and Ecuador to move troops to their borders with Colombia.
QUICK CATCH-UP
😢 At least 68 people died in Colombia after an Air Force plane with 128 passengers and crew crashed in the Amazonian region of Putumayo, near the border with Peru. Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez said he did not suspect foul play, although investigations are underway and will be worth following given the conflictive nature of Colombian jungles.
🇪🇺 The European Union’s free trade agreement with Mercosur will take effect provisionally on May 1, the European Commission announced Monday. Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay have already completed the ratification process; Paraguay recently ratified and is expected to submit its notification shortly, the Commission said.
🛢️ In one of his first decisions as president, Chile’s José Antonio Kast announced a large hike in gas and diesel prices, which will jump from CLP 1,170 (USD 1.29) and CLP 932 per liter, respectively, to CLP 1,500. The hike was prompted by international price jumps, but marked a departure from previous administrations that tried to cushion steep rises through subsidies.
🐟 The US lodged a complaint in Lima against Chinese fishing, saying that boats operating beyond the 200-mile limit off the coast of Peru pose a threat to biodiversity and long-term sustainability, echoing a nationalist grievance common in the region and aligning with Washington’s current stance against Beijing. Peru says it has recently intensified controls, and cases are much rarer than before.
🏳️⚧️ Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that teenagers will be able to alter their gender identity in their state-issued IDs even if they are below the age of consent. Their parents or legal guardians will need to be present during the process, and technical reports will also be required.