Full Testimony: House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Hearing on Colombia’s Descent to Socialism: Assessing Gustavo Petro’s Presidency

production was at a record high, in spite of more than 20 years of record U.S. investment in counter-narcotics, and de facto, counter-insurgency.

The Petro government is deeply committed not only to fully implementing the 2016 accords, but to advancing peace processes with other illegal armed groups in order to consolidate peace throughout the country. The government's plans are ambitious - they may be overly ambitious. But after a year in office, the government has held three rounds of negotiations with the last remaining major guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and a fourth round is scheduled to begin August 14. The UN Security Council, the European Union, the OAS, Canada, and the United Kingdom are all on board.

Surely a Colombia fully at peace is in the interests of the United States. Yet some Members of Congress are seeking to put obstacles in the path of these negotiations because Cuba is a guarantor country - as it was for the negotiations with the FARC. I am thankful that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has just come out strongly in support of Colombia's peace process with the ELN.

On counter-narcotics, the Petro government has been clear that it will pursue a different strategy that will target large drug traffickers, money launderers, corrupt officials, and organized crime, instead of small cultivators. The government's interest in trying something different can hardly come as a surprise. In 2020 the final report of the congressionally-mandated Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission found that "[w]hile Plan Colombia was a counterinsurgency success, it was a counternarcotics failure." The war on drugs in Colombia has been costly in money and lives, and it has not produced the desired results. We should, at a minimum, remain open to the opportunity to develop a new approach with our long-standing ally.

In 2022, as the government of Ivan Duque was drawing to an end but before the election of Gustavo Petro, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), of which Colombia is a member state, reported that Colombia had "one of the highest levels of poverty, income equality and labor market informality in Latin America." The OECD recommendations to Colombian authorities included raising more revenue from personal income taxes; fostering the formalization of employment; merging the two existing public health systems into a single system; and creating a basic non-contributory pension benefit. These recommendations targeted structural problems in the Colombian economy that have existed for decades that successive governments failed to adequately address and that contributed to the explosion of street protests in 2021 that the Duque government brutally repressed.

The labor, health and pension reforms presented by the Petro government and currently being considered in the Colombian congress, and the new National Development Plan, approved by a vote of 120-12 and focused on environmental protection and green energy transition, may or may not be sufficient to fix these long-standing structural distortions. But the Petro government's decision to attempt reform is an appropriate response to deep-seated problems that have long fostered social unrest. Members of Congress should encourage these initiatives, monitor their development closely, and refrain from dismissing them out of hand.