Ideological Conflict between Levels of Government in Colombia

• In Event: Policy, Participation, and Conflict in Decentralized Latin America

Abstract

In the Andes, familiar ideological conflicts over the appropriate role of the state in the economy are increasingly unfolding along territorial lines. In the aftermath of decentralization, elected subnational officials like mayors and governors now often enjoy sufficient resources and authority to challenge the economic models endorsed by national governments. What happens when local and national officials espouse and pursue radically different policy preferences?

This paper offers a partial answer by examining in depth the case of Bogotá, Colombia under Mayor Gustavo Petro, who led one of the most substantively radical and intellectually coherent attempts to challenge neoliberalism at the urban level in all of Latin America. As a former leader of the M-19 guerrilla group who demobilized in the late 1980s, Petro’s administration (2012-15) tried to re-assert public authority vis-à-vis the market in four critical policy fields: environment, housing, transport, and trash. Petro’s reform agenda represented a major challenge to neoliberalism and its defenders, including Juan Manuel Santos (2010-18), the right-of-center occupant of the presidential palace just down the street from city hall. Briefly suspended from office when he attempted to undo the privatization of trash collection, Petro was allowed to finish his term in 2015, but ultimately failed in his attempt to redirect the city away from neoliberalism.

My research seeks to uncover the causes of Petro’s failure through an in-depth analysis of the four policy fields through which the mayor sought to counter neo-liberalization, either in the form of new regulatory approaches (environment and housing) or new municipally-owned enterprises (transport and trash collection). To construct these four policy narratives as systematically as possible, I conduct a similar set of analytical tasks for each, including 1) a brief description of the policy status quo before Petro, 2) a discussion of the content of the policy changes Petro sought to make along with the opposition these proposed changes generated, 3) an analysis of the mechanisms each side used in the ensuing policy conflicts, and 4) an assessment of the outcome of each conflict. In addition to (largely favorable) government documents issued by the municipality under Petro and (largely critical) newspaper reporting by mainstream media outlets, these narratives are based on twenty-four interviews conducted in September 2017 in Bogotá with administrators in the relevant municipal secretariats—both those who worked for Petro and those who worked for previous mayors. While these officials differ in their ideological support for or opposition to the content of Petro’s proposals, supporters and detractors largely agree on the nature of the obstacles that checked the mayor, including the hostility of the national government, the opposition of business interests, and the absence of coalitions to support the new policies.

Author

• Kent Eaton, University of California, Santa Cruz