From the cabildos open to the strike: Petro opens a new way of social mobilization to defend his popular consultation

President Gustavo Petro has been trying to wake up who is usually considered a sleeping giant: the Colombian people. He asked him to mobilize in mass when he presented his health reform at the beginning of his government; when part of his cabinet resigned before completing the first year; when the Supreme Court took prosecutor; when his pension reform was approved in 2024; when he asked the Constitutional Court not to lie down; when he denounced an alleged coup d’etat of the National Electoral Council; when he demanded to lower the high energy rates in the Caribbean. His last call, on May 1, sought to accompany him to file a popular consultation initiative, with 12 questions on labor issues, which the Senate sank last Wednesday. Then Petro returned to the call of the streets.

“It is up to the people to meet in Cabildo in all the municipalities of Colombia,” said the head of state shortly after the legislative sank the proposal. “I will personally meet with the popular council of the city of Barranquilla,” he added. The appointment, this Tuesday, is at the Paseo Bolívar.

The headquarters was not chosen at random. Interior Minister Armando Benedetti traveled this week to the city to advance preparations waiting for the arrival of Petro, which plans around 3.00 in the afternoon. Since Thursday, the day after the convulsive day in which the Senate sank the original consultation, and revived the government reform of the Government, the Barranquilla politician began the “socialization” of the event and met with union leaders.

At the headquarters of the Colombian Energy Workers’ Union once again lashed out against the president of the Senate, Efraín Cepeda, to which the Executive has graduated as an enemy. “You have to do that, where Cepeda goes, they tell her pod everywhere. You have to say in the block that when they see it, they have it,” the Minister of Politics harangued them. He also assured that “the people” will be in charge of deciding whether the questions of the popular consultation are presented again, or if they will go to a general strike. “I wish they decided the strike,” he said, asking for the solidarity of the workers and echoing another call from the president, that of a national strike.

The pulse between the Executive and the Legislative acquires a special, very Caribbean flavor, because Cepeda is also a native of Barranquilla, a very significant place for Petrism, which for a long time tries to dispute the hegemony of the family of Mayor Alex Char in local politics. It was there, in the capital of the Atlantic, where Petro had the first of the great public square events that characterized the campaign that led him to power, with a huge P catwalk in the form of P, and it was also where he closed the campaign in another massive event, before some 40,000 people. In the second round of those elections, he obtained more than 350,000 votes in the great city of the Caribbean, with which he practically doubled Rodolfo Hernández. It was also there that the saga that has his son Nicolás, elected deputy of the Atlantic, unfolded accounts before justice. The president’s strategy passes through Barranquilla, as confirmed in the neighboring municipality of Soledad, part of the metropolitan area, where Petro launched three weeks ago the promoting committees of the popular consultation, another important leg of the social mobilization proposed. Now, with the sunk consultation, call the council.

The open councils that the president asks are a figure of democratic participation that comes from colonial times, but more thought for local debates than nationals: the call for citizens to discuss a decision of the municipal council or the Departmental Assembly. There is, so far, a regulation for a national council, and are forums without any legal consequence.

That does not mean that councils cannot have political power. The popular consultation was always seen, by analysts and politicians, as an opportunity for Petro to campaign several months, only one year after the presidential elections, and with a flag as popular as that of labor rights. When sinking the initiative, opposition congressmen celebrated last week take that campaign possibility to the president, but Petro took note. Not only will it present a popular consultation again, but it calls these councils to maintain the living debate about the labor reform that the Senate sank in March, the popular consultation that sank in May, and the second labor reform that can sink again in June.

In addition, Petro drives the councils with the parallel proposal of a possible unemployment. “The general strike does not decide it, the right to the strike enshrined in the National Constitution, the people decide,” he clarified in X last week, when an exchange between him and Benedetti was known, by text messages, in which the head of state seems to suggest calling a national strike. The president said publicly that he would not dislike the idea, in any case. “I ask the peasant youths, neighborhoods, university youths, if the people decide the general strike, the maximum use of culture and art,” he wrote in X.

The president came to political power, in part, promoted by the social movements that marched massively in 2021 against the reforms and police violence during the government of former president Iván Duque, one of the most unpopular in the history of Colombia. Petro has not had, in all his calls, an equally powerful and spontaneous indignation engine that was that year to summon citizens to the streets. He has in his favor that the electoral era started, and that he carries in his hand the flag of labor rights; against him, that social mobilization usually works more when it comes from the bottom and not from the government. The town is the same, but the street begins to look different.