Colombia: Gustavo Petro Warns CNE Probe is Part of Coup Plot

Colombia’s National Electoral Council (CNE) on Tuesday, October 8, voted to investigate and present charges against the 2022 presidential campaign of Gustavo Petro over alleged irregularities in campaign funds. The CNE announced it would investigate Gustavo Petro, his campaign manager Ricardo Roa, three other members of the campaign, and the political movement Colombia Humana and the party Patriotic Union (UP). The announcement was made by CNE president César Lorduy.

In response to the decision by the CNE, Colombian President Gustavo Petro wrote on X, “The coup d’état has begun.” He added that, “The CNE can never, nor does it have the power to investigate the President of the Republic. This is the beginning of the Coup d’Etat. The integral presidential jurisdiction has been violated and the rule of law and the respect for the popular vote and democracy have been broken.”

When the announcement was made, Petro himself was in the department of Antioquia attending a public event to recognize the Colombian state’s complicity in the disappearance of people from the La Esperanza town by paramilitaries in collusion with the army. During his address to the public meeting he spoke about the attempt of the right-wing in the country to overthrow his government and violate the will of the people. “They are trying to take away the political right of the people who voted for Petro, 11 and a half million people, no more and no less, and the political right of Petro, because he is different, because he does not shut up, because he tells the truth, even if I am wrong many times; because I try to have justice in this country and so that poor people have a place and can stop being poor and young people have a university and women stop being harassed through macho societies and have equality, and they do not like it, as they did not like Gaitán, as they did not like the free people.”

On X, Petro also called on all popular organizations of Colombia to enter into permanent assembly and mobilization to defend his popular government against the right-wing coup: “The time for the generalized mobilization of the Colombian people has arrived. The constitutional president of Colombia elected by popular vote orders the security forces not to raise a single weapon against the people.”

He added, “I ask the diplomatic corps for a full meeting to explain to the world why what the CNE has done by majority vote is a coup against the full jurisdiction of the president and against the popular vote and the law. I request my lawyers in view of the IACHR sentence in my favor that has been completely violated.”

The CNE alleges that Petro’s campaign went above the established spending ceiling by 5,355 million Colombian pesos during the first and second round of the 2022 presidential elections. The body also repeated prior allegations that the campaign contributions of Federation of Colombian Educators (FECODE) and the Oil Industry Workers Union (USO) were somehow irregular. On January 25, 2024, former right-wing Attorney General Francisco Barbosa ordered a raid of the Bogotá office of FECODE over the same allegations. The raid was widely condemned by social movements and trade unions in the country as being politically motivated.

Tuesday’s vote was long anticipated and Petro himself has been warning for months that the CNE in collusion with the right-wing opposition would attempt to remove him from office through such a maneuver. CNE judges Benjamín Ortiz and Álvaro Prada first presented the accusation against Gustavo Petro and his campaign in May 2024. The CNE itself is an administrative entity made up of nine lawyers who are appointed by different parliamentary groups. Notably Prada is from the far-right party of Álvaro Uribe and authored a book “The Dictatorship of Peace”, which is described as “a manual to understand why it was important to reject the agreements that were voted on in the plebiscite.”

Due to the CNE’s clear partisan composition, the Council of State of Colombia has already clarified that the CNE does not have power to sanction the president but only has power to investigate the charges and present the findings to the Commission of Accusations of the Chamber of Representatives (which serves as the judge of the President of the Republic). In that case, this commission would revise the findings and decide if an impeachment trial should be initiated, which could lead to Petro’s removal from office.

Petro had denounced in early September that the coup was imminent and it would not be a military one, but would resemble Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, where the legislature serves as a “legal” agent to remove the democratically elected president from office under the excuse of supposedly having broken some law.

Following Petro’s announcement, legislators, social movements, and political leaders from across Colombia and Latin America expressed their rejection to the coup plot underway.

The National Unitary Command of trade union confederations CUT, CGT, and the two pensioners confederations CPC and CDP, released a statement “Yes to democracy, no to the coup”. In it they wrote, “The 11.3 million Colombians who voted for President Gustavo Petro represent the will of the people, so he must be allowed to fully comply with the constitutional term for which he was elected and in this sense we cannot hesitate to call on the people’s power to resolutely oppose this decision, which has no precedent in the life of the country. Such a situation is unprecedented and constitutes a blow to democracy.”

They added that their National Unitary Command has declared itself “in a state of alert in response to this perverse attempt to overturn the President of the Republic Gustavo Petro” and it will build broad unity with democratic and progressive forces to jointly oppose the attacks from CNE which aligns with the extreme right and uribista forces.

Spanish political leader Juan Carlos Monedero wrote on X, “Lawfare starts against the President Gustavo Petro. The right, out of government for the first time in 200 years, uses corrupt judges to try to achieve outside the ballot box what it was unable to win in elections. All democrats with Petro.”