Colombia's Government Has Declared War on Protesters

By Seth Wulsin, Jacobin

13 June 21

After six weeks of massive protests against neoliberalism and state violence in Colombia, right-wing president Iván Duque is relying on brute force to stay in power.

ix weeks into Colombia’s general strike, protesters have won significant victories while bearing the brunt of a brutal crackdown by state and paramilitary forces. Five members of President Iván Duque’s cabinet have stepped down or been replaced. Duque withdrew his regressive tax bill that sparked the protests as well as a controversial health bill and the proposal to pay billions for Lockheed Martin war jets in the midst of the worst health and economic crises Colombia has faced in decades. A movement has consolidated with a clear focus on the government’s sabotaging of the peace accords with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and continued overseeing of massive inequality, which has become intolerable for large segments of the population.

Duque and his political party have shown their inability or unwillingness to respond to the protesters’ demands, which reflect Colombia’s corruption and neo-feudal inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. A third wave of the coronavirus claimed over fifteen thousand lives in May and kept ICUs at near 100 percent capacity in Colombia’s major cities. Security forces have catalyzed enormous shows of solidarity with the general strike through their vicious attacks on peaceful protesters.

More than forty demonstrators have been summarily executed by state and parastate armed forces, with Human Rights Watch receiving sixty-three credible reports of deaths during the protests, two of which were police. Human rights groups Temblores and Indepaz have reported more than 2,000 documented cases of police brutality, more than 1,600 arbitrary detentions, 25 confirmed sexual assaults, 65 eye injuries, and 346 forced disappearances of protesters since the general strike began, with Indigenous, Afro, and poor communities the primary targets of repression.

Miguel Ceballos was the high commissioner for peace and government representative in pre-negotiations with the National Strike Committee until he resigned on May 22. Ceballos was widely criticized in the human rights community for undermining the peace process on behalf of the government. President Duque named Juan Camilo Restrepo to replace Ceballos as peace commissioner. Restrepo was the president of Augura, a banana producer trade association, when it donated $33 million Colombian pesos to the campaign against the 2016 peace accords. Augura is known for direct support of paramilitary groups, and numerous board members are considered supporters or direct participants in paramilitary organizations operating in Antioquia.

The Duque administration has repeatedly sabotaged their own government’s pre-negotiations with the Strike Committee representing protesters, refusing to provide guarantees of basic rights to protesters while ramping up the militarized crackdown — the continuation of a long tradition in Colombia of responding to social mobilization with state and parastate repression.

Lucía González, a leading member of Colombia’s Truth Commission that was formed as part of the peace accords between the government and the FARC, put it bluntly in late May when she spoke of

a state that is anti-reform, that has criminalized every attempt to deepen democracy, whatever the form, eliminating union activists, human rights leaders, stigmatizing mobilizations, criminalizing the leaders of the mobilizations, with the goal of guaranteeing a status quo and avoiding any kind of reform that results from their demands. It is a state that protects the elites and the privileges of certain sectors against the rights of others. It is a state by the elites, for the elites.

Cali has been the epicenter of state and parastate violence since the beginning of the general strike. A May 23 report released by the organization Justicia y Paz on the situation in Cali describes a particularly horrifying iteration of González’s analysis: on May 2, Cali’s Center of Municipal Administration was used as a center of clandestine operations, and protesters were taken there and detained in basements before being transported elsewhere in trucks. The report described mass graves in two municipalities outside Cali, the Mulaló area of Yumbo and the Guacarí area of Buga, where bodies of disappeared protesters have allegedly been dumped from trucks used by police.

The reports from Buga describe executions of young protesters who were reported as disappeared. Some who survived the executions were later found in health centers with gunshot wounds, and are now in hiding and facing death threats.

The report also describes the formation of armed paramilitary groups under protection of police operating out of the upscale Ciudad Jardín district in Cali. Ciudad Jardín was the site of armed attacks by wealthy neighborhood residents, accompanied by police, on unarmed Indigenous marchers. During the May 9 attacks, at least eight participants in the march sustained gunshot wounds at the hands of the armed civilians.

There are now reports of casas de pique in Ciudad Jardín, a term used to describe the clandestine centers used by paramilitary groups in the region to detain, torture, kill, and often dismember the bodies of their victims. Currently 120 people are reported as disappeared from the Cali protests since April 28.

Alfredo Molano Jimeno reported in El Espectador on May 24 that medical brigades serving protesters in Cali are being targeted by professional assassins and security forces. Medical workers have reported that they are now removing the identifying marks that they traditionally wear in conflict zones to avoid being targeted. Numerous medical workers have reported that they were informed that a bounty had been offered for the murder of health volunteers caring for protesters in Cali, and have described being targeted by police and civilians.

On May 25, Argentine human rights lawyer Juan Grabois, who arrived in Colombia with the International Commission of Solidarity and Human Rights to monitor human rights abuses, was denied entry, detained, and then deported later that day. Human rights observers already in the country have been targeted by police and armed civilians throughout the general strike. The Duque government denied or delayed the requests of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to come to Colombia to monitor the human rights situation, before finally capitulating this past week to pressure from international groups, including the US government.

The IACHR has met with government and civil groups all week, and Duque announced a superficial police reform bill the day the commission arrived in Bogotá. Temblores, Indepaz, and Paiis presented a devastating report to the IACHR commission detailing a long list of confirmed state-backed atrocities.

The Duque regime has embarked on a multipronged communications strategy designed to stigmatize the largely peaceful protests as acts of terrorism internally, and to present a picture of rigorous institutional protocol to the international community. The campaign has produced mixed results, thanks to the wide circulation of images and videos showing the scope of state brutality. The failure of both approaches does not seem to have deterred the Duque administration and their Centro Democrático Party from doubling down on the dirty war they have unleashed on the protests.

Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s former right-wing president and Duque’s political patron, has used his Twitter platform to support violence against protesters and promote a neo-Nazi theory of “dissipated molecular revolution” that claims protest is inherently an act of civil war requiring a militarized state response. While Twitter removed a tweet of Uribe’s early in the general strike for “glorifying violence,” the social media network has since allowed him to use it as his command center, from which he sends messages invoking the language of terrorism and counterinsurgency to police and paramilitary groups that continue to maim, torture, rape, and kill protesters.

A recent Invamer poll showed Uribe and Duque with disapproval ratings of 73 percent and 76 percent, respectively, underscoring the weakness of their political position in advance of next year’s general elections, with center-left opposition leader Gustavo Petro leading presidential candidates by a comfortable margin in all recent polls. The moral and political bankruptcy of the Centro Democrático Party, with its deep and well-documented ties to narco-paramilitarism, stands in stark contrast to the youth-driven movement that has metastasized into the most significant and widespread social uprising Colombia has seen in the past seventy years.

On May 27, Duque appeared at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, with former ambassador and former USAID director Mark Green, claiming to respect peaceful protests and the rule of law, and having zero tolerance for police abuses. At the same time, he couldn’t resist echoing an English-language campaign-style faux-interview video released days earlier, where he blamed the entire uprising and ensuing violence on Petro and shadowy subversive forces seeking to undermine his presidency.

The next day, Marta Lucía Ramírez, vice president and acting foreign minister, met with US secretary of state Antony Blinken to continue the attempted charm offensive. (She was conspicuously unable to secure a meeting with Vice President Harris.) Meanwhile, in the Siloé neighborhood of Cali, an off-duty investigator for the investigative division of the attorney general’s office killed two young protesters at a roadblock from his motorcycle in a drive-by shooting. The shooter was then captured and killed by other protesters.

The human rights group Justapaz sent out an alert that evening denouncing plainclothes paramilitary shooters in Siloé targeting medical workers who were attending to the fourteen protesters already injured by gunfire that evening. That night, Duque appeared across town in Ciudad Jardín — the same exclusive Cali neighborhood that has served as base of operations for paramilitary groups attacking protesters — where he greeted wealthy residents with hugs and announced for the third time in two weeks his intention to deploy maximum military force to retake Cali from the protesters. He has already militarized eight departments of the country — effectively a third of Colombia — in response to protests.

Duque fell out of US favor soon after members of his government meddled in the 2020 US presidential elections on behalf of the wrong guy. But Washington has long been forgiving of the transgressions of far-right narco-regimes considered strategic to US interests, and the United States needs to shore up its foothold in Colombia more than ever in advance of a likely impending leftward political shift in current right-wing strongholds like Brazil and Chile. Given this week’s victory of socialist candidate Pedro Castillo in Peru’s presidential election, it is conceivable that within a year or two, the vast majority of South American countries will be led by left-leaning governments — a dramatic turnaround from the recent wave of extreme-right neoliberalism and protofascism that has ravaged the region.

The question is whether the United States will continue to support repressive Colombian governments like Duque’s regardless of their human rights abuses. Such support is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of mounting media focus on their recent atrocities. But the United States has never been afraid to support attacks on democracy in the region, including in recent years in Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay.

If anything, it would be a surprise to see the United States just sit by and let their number one South American ally slip into the sinister hands of social democracy. Conditions on the ground in Colombia, however, might leave them with no choice.

Nobody Should Be Celebrating the Affordable Care Act

By David Sirota and Andrew Perez, Jacobin

13 June 21

Presidents Obama and Biden yukked it up this weekend in a video celebrating the Affordable Care Act. But the real thrust of Obamacare was always finding ways to pretend to address the health care crisis while protecting the health insurers fueling it.

n fortifying for-profit health care companies, the Affordable Care Act became a cautionary tale about the political supremacy of an insurance industry that many Americans hate. But it has now become something even more profound: the ACA’s modest popularity, forged in desperation, proves that an initiative can now be considered a political “win” even as it preserves a problem, steamrolls alternatives, and makes a crisis more difficult to fix.

In essence, a policy sold on the “audacity of hope” has helped deflate hope for anything better.

This past weekend, winning and hope were the big messages from the White House, where President Joe Biden and former president Barack Obama released a video celebrating the news that a record thirty-one million Americans are now getting their health insurance coverage through Affordable Care Act exchanges and an expanded Medicaid.

There’s a lot of laughing and yukking it up in the video — it has the corny vibe of a nineties buddy-reunion comedy flick, and in this case, the intent is to gaslight. You’re supposed to walk away from the Instagram-optimized clip feeling like everything is going in the right direction — and most importantly, feeling like “the ACA works,” as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) triumphantly declared.

Now sure, the ACA has been working to boost insurance industry profits and executive pay — indeed, as millions of Americans lost their health insurance last year, six health insurance CEOs were paid a combined $120 million. Those winnings are also working for politicians — some of those riches have been recycled into more than $150 million of insurance industry campaign donations funneled to Democrats since Obamacare was first enacted.

But the Democrats’ signature health care law is not working nearly as well to address the health care crisis that is quietly exploding across the country.

The ACA “Works” Best for Insurance Companies

Amid all the triumphalist rhetoric about the ACA, consider a few data points:

• The uninsured rate in America has steadily increased over the last several years. Nearly thirty million Americans were uninsured in 2019, according to Census data.


• Eighty percent of Americans told Gallup that they have not seen their health insurance premiums decline since the passage of the ACA — and 50 percent say they fear being medically bankrupted.


• Medical claim denial rates have been skyrocketing. Insurers reject more than one out of every six health insurance claims made by patients on ACA exchange plans.


• Reuters recently reported that while the uninsured rate is lower than it was two decades ago, “the proportion of adults unable to afford doctor visits climbed from 11.4 percent to 15.7 percent.”


• “Annual family premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 4 percent to average $21,342” in 2020, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.


• Among those with employer-based health care coverage, “About one in five say that someone in their household has been contacted by a collection agency in the past 12 months because of medical bills, and 9 percent say they have at some point declared personal bankruptcy because of medical bills,” according to a 2019 Los Angeles Times/KFF study.

To be sure, the simple, straightforward expansion of Medicaid was the best part of the original law. But by its own authors’ admission, Obamacare went out of its way to try to halt the larger push for a single-payer system, because in the words of Obama Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, they believed “dismantling private health coverage for the 180 million Americans that have it, discouraging more employers from coming into the marketplace, is a bad direction to go.”

The real thrust of the ACA has always been to find ways to pretend to address the health care crisis while enriching the health insurers that are fueling it.

The law spends hundreds of billions of dollars on such subsidies, and the American Rescue Plan expanded who’s eligible for subsidies. Those expenditures are touted for somewhat decreasing people’s premium costs — and indeed, more than one million Americans recently signed up for ACA exchange policies. But subsidizing coverage only limits the premium costs people pay themselves, with the government picking up the rest, on what are expensive plans. Overall health care costs remain sky-high.

While the new ACA sign-ups were celebrated as an enormous victory, many more Americans lost their employer health insurance coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic. And left unsaid by all the fist-pumping, high-fiving, self-congratulation from pro-ACA politicians is the fact that the ACA exchange plans that more and more Americans are being forced into also tend to feature excessive out-of-pocket costs — meaning many people are being shuffled onto plans they can’t actually afford to use.

Health insurers saw their profits boom during the pandemic last year, too, while millions lost their job-based health insurance coverage and people avoided going to doctors and put off elective procedures.

Overall, a decade into the ACA’s attempt to prop up and promote corporate health insurers, “individuals with private insurance were more likely to report poor access to care, higher costs of care, and less satisfaction with care compared with individuals covered by publicly sponsored insurance programs,” according to a study by California researchers just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Put it all together, this data shows the ACA works in the same way a train robbery works — it works really well for the thieves but not so well for the passengers.

Demoralization, Tribalization, and Health Care Surrender

People generally understand their insurance company is out to screw them. About a third of unvaccinated Americans believe they “might have to pay an out-of-pocket cost to get the COVID-19 vaccine,” even though it’s free, according to recent survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And yet here’s the thing: many of the passengers seem fairly content with the heist — or at minimum, grateful that it’s just larceny and not an execution.

Gallup recently found that even as health care costs continue to increase, more Americans are now saying they are satisfied with what they’re paying. When it comes to the ACA in specific, KFF’s most recent polling found 53 percent of Americans view the program favorably.

Some of that can be attributed to the varied and nebulous understanding of what the ACA hodgepodge actually is. Some understand it primarily to be just a long-overdue prohibition on denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. Some view it as just subsidies for slightly lower premiums. Some perceive it as the devil they know that’s safer than the devil they don’t. And some see it as at least modestly better than the Republican agenda of just sending people to the glue factory when they get sick.

Fair or unfair, justified or unjustified, the bottom line is this: after a decade of Democratic Party propagandizing and GOP offering no alternative at all, the ACA remains somewhat popular. The support is thin — lots of polls show Americans want to see the program improved — but there’s no denying that it has support, even as it has politically fortified an abusive, for-profit insurance industry.

Of course, the ACA has helped make sure more people are able to get ripped off on medical care rather than get completely cut off from the entire medical system. In that sense, the ACA is better than nothing at all, just like a train robbery is better than being thrown off the back of the caboose.

But the ACA’s modest popularity reflects demoralization and tribalization at least as much if not more than it reflects genuine satisfaction with the existing system.

After decades of watching other industrialized countries establish functioning universal health care systems and our government continue to prop up a system based around corporate health insurance, many Americans have concluded that nothing will change, that even tiny improvements are a huge win — and that policies like the ACA that are billed as transformational don’t transform much at all. Meanwhile, in a nation where public policy is now just fodder for the red-versus-blue bloodsport, any mention of ACA shortcomings is often seen first and foremost as betraying the blue team, so the program’s popularity is further bolstered by home-team spirit.

The popularity that has accrued to the ACA doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As the law itself enriches insurance companies and thereby strengthens their political power to block structural reform, Obamacare’s modest popularity further bolsters insurers by reducing the public demand for change.

For example, Americans’ contentment with the crumbs offered by the ACA goes a long way in explaining why even something as minimal as a public health insurance option has become a political laughingstock akin to the football in the famous Charlie Brown–Lucy scene.

For a decade, the Democratic Party and its allied liberal groups in Washington have been able to beat back discussion of universal health care by pretending they support a public option to compete with private insurers — and then they have inevitably cast aside the proposal when they regain power. This is what happened in 2010, and what is now happening again after Biden abandoned his public option promise in favor of a health care policy quite literally written by insurance industry lobbyists.

“The health insurance public option might be fizzling. The left is OK with that,” NBC News reported over the weekend. “Joe Biden campaigned on making the public option a reality, but so far, he’s done little to get Congress to enact one. Instead of outrage, influential progressives seem to be OK watching the promise go unfilled, preferring to pursue universal health care through other means, like expanding Medicare eligibility.”

The public option betrayal is indirectly linked to ACA popularity: sure, public option promises helped Democrats win elections, but they pay no price for abandoning those promises because hey, everything’s totally fine and here’s a tweetable Biden-Obama ACA commercial to prove it.

The same dynamic is at play with proposed Medicare expansion and full-fledged Medicare for All. Like a public option, those policies may be conceptually supported by a majority of Americans, but it’s been a half-century since the creation of Medicare.

That’s a half-century of insurance industry hegemony in American politics — a half-century of the country being conditioned to expect that when it comes to health care, nothing can fundamentally change. All those years have taught successive generations that even if we may like the idea of big changes, we should just be content that the ACA protects people with preexisting conditions, lets more people buy bad insurance, and preserves a predatory health care system that “only” bankrupts half of all cancer patients.

Perhaps that perception is correct. Perhaps America’s government is so uniquely corrupt and singularly captured by the health care industry that our most enduring form of exceptionalism will be permanently remaining the only industrialized country to not guarantee medical care to all people.

But as resigned as many may be to an eternity of ever-increasing medical bills, that doesn’t have to be our destiny.

We don’t have to reward inadequate policies with favorable opinion polls.

Regardless of slick White House videos or football-spiking tweets from senators, we don’t have to believe it is some enormous victory that millions of people were thrown off their employer-based health care but at least some of them were able to get crappy coverage on for-profit insurance exchanges that involve high out-of-pocket costs and high claim denial rates.

In short, we don’t have to just accept that the best we can hope for is a policy that funnels more cash to private insurance companies in exchange for smaller and smaller discount coupons for more and more expensive medical care.

Perceiving that downward spiral as normal and laudable is a choice by elected officials, by party powerbrokers, and by voters — and it is a choice we can reject.