{"id":147,"date":"2026-05-28T19:47:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T19:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=147"},"modified":"2026-05-28T19:47:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T19:47:13","slug":"a-promising-democracy-that-cant-stop-fighting-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=147","title":{"rendered":"A \u2018Promising Democracy\u2019 That Can\u2019t Stop Fighting Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

Read more Words of War<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In April 1948, after the assassination of the populist leader Jorge Eli\u00e9cer Gait\u00e1n, crowds poured into the streets of Bogot\u00e1. Buildings burned. Churches were looted. Armed mobs seized parts of the capital. Gait\u00e1n\u2014a labor lawyer turned political phenomenon who seemed poised to become Colombia\u2019s next Liberal president\u2014had built a mass following among working-class Colombians frustrated by inequality and elite rule. An enraged crowd beat the alleged gunman to death before his motives could be revealed. Gait\u00e1n\u2019s killing triggered El Bogotazo, the explosion of unrest that marked the beginning of La Violencia, the brutal conflict between Liberals and Conservatives that would kill more than 200,000 Colombians over the following decade.<\/p>\n

In 1950, an article in The Atlantic<\/i> warned that Colombia\u2019s \u201cpromising democracy\u201d was beginning to come apart. An unnamed writer noted that the country had functioned \u201cmore consistently and over a longer period than any other Latin American republic,\u201d but that its government was faltering. Across rural Colombia, Liberal and Conservative elites backed armed supporters who fought to defend each party\u2019s political power and economic interests. The country\u2019s leaders seemed to govern by intimidation: opposition meetings broken up in small towns, armed groups terrorizing voters, emergency decrees restricting democratic life.<\/p>\n

More than 70 years later, familiar patterns are emerging as Colombia heads into one of its most consequential elections in years. On Sunday, Colombians will vote for a successor to President Gustavo Petro, the country\u2019s first leftist president and a former member of the Marxist M-19 guerrilla movement. Petro came into office promising to negotiate cease-fires with every major armed group still operating in Colombia, but many of these talks eventually stalled or collapsed. He suspended negotiations last year with the National Liberation Army, or ELN\u2014now Colombia\u2019s largest active guerrilla group\u2014after it launched an offensive in northeastern Colombia that killed more than 30 people. Still, even as Petro\u2019s peace agenda has faltered, several armed groups, including the ELN, have signaled that they may be open to restarting negotiations with the next government.<\/p>\n

The election has become a referendum on Petro\u2019s \u201ctotal peace\u201d strategy. His supporters say that Colombia cannot end decades of conflict through military force alone; the Petro ally and presidential candidate Iv\u00e1n Cepeda has promised to continue the negotiations. His Conservative rival Paloma Valencia and the right-wing outsider Abelardo de la Espriella are each campaigning on restoring security through a strong military response, arguing that Petro\u2019s approach allowed armed factions to regroup and expand their territorial control, particularly in rural and border regions.<\/p>\n

The debate has become inextricable from the country\u2019s deteriorating security situation. Although the cities, where much of the country\u2019s wealth and political power are concentrated, have become safer and stabler over the past decades, armed groups have staged dozens of bombings and drone strikes across Colombia in recent months. Dissident factions of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC\u2014the far-left guerrilla group that fought the Colombian state for more than 50 years before signing a landmark peace agreement in 2016\u2014were behind several of the attacks, targeting civilians and military bases just weeks before the election. Some factions never fully demobilized after the accord, while others later splintered from the peace process entirely. Especially during election cycles, these insurgents use violence to protect their illegal economies and to demonstrate their continued power in regions where they often have a stronger presence than the state itself.<\/p>\n

The race has felt, at times, like a dispatch from 1948. Last summer, a Colombian senator and presidential hopeful, Miguel Uribe Turbay, was shot during a campaign rally in Bogot\u00e1 and died two months later. A 15-year-old hit man and eight others were arrested for the shooting, and the country\u2019s attorney general has issued warrants against leaders of the Segunda Marquetalia, an offshoot of FARC, in relation to the assasination. Earlier this month, a former mayor and a staffer allied with the presidential candidate de la Espriella were shot dead (the shooters have not been apprehended). Colombia\u2019s public-defender\u2019s office warned that the killings could threaten \u201cdemocratic participation\u201d ahead of the vote.<\/p>\n

Read more The TACO Equilibrium<\/a><\/p>\n

When an unbylined Atlantic <\/i>writer covered Colombia in 1963, the country looked very different. Exhausted by years of bloodshed, the Liberal and Conservative parties had agreed to share power through a coalition known as the National Front, alternating the presidency and dividing government positions between them. The article describes a country trying to steady itself after chaos, building roads and housing projects, attracting foreign investment, and projecting an air of stability after years of partisan violence.<\/p>\n

Still, beneath that stability, the writer detected problems, such as economic woes and oligarchic tendencies, that had not so much disappeared as hardened. The coalition government\u2019s success, the writer observed, would ultimately depend on whether it could address \u201curban squalor and rural poverty, whose victims are being aroused to a sense of their own strength.\u201d Those lingering tensions would soon reshape Colombia again. A year after the article was published, the FARC and the ELN emerged as separate militias. A few decades later, presidential candidates, journalists, and judges were routinely assassinated by cartels, guerillas, and paramilitary groups warring with one another and with the state.<\/p>\n

The 1950 article in The Atlantic<\/i> ends without resolution: \u201cWhat will remain of Colombia\u2019s promising democracy after so long a period of restraint and turbulence remains to be seen.\u201d Reading it now, amid another tense moment in Colombian politics shadowed by assassinations, bombings, and fear, that line feels like a question that Colombia has spent generations trying to answer.<\/p>\n

More From the Archives<\/b><\/p>\n

The Slow Food movement was born in 1986 when Carlo Petrini, an Italian environmental activist and former radio journalist, rallied a group of friends to protest the replacement of a beloved coffee shop in Rome with a McDonald\u2019s. When a bystander asked what, if not fast food, he was in favor of, he said: \u201cSlow food.\u201d What did \u201cslow food\u201d actually mean? That was something Petrini, who died last week at the age of 76, would spend the next few years figuring out, eventually hatching an international movement that combined an embrace of sustainable farming and traditional cooking with an epicurean\u2019s appreciation of good food. (Petrini would also found the University of Gastronomic Sciences, in Pollenzo, Italy, the first such institution in the world.)<\/p>\n

In 1999, Corby Kummer, an Atlantic<\/i> senior editor and a longtime food writer, helped introduce the Slow Food movement to America with his article \u201cDoing Well by Eating Well.\u201d \u201cAppetite can join forces with radicalism,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand both sides can be the stronger\u201d for it. That article would soon grow into the book The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors and Recipes<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As Kummer noted last week, Petrini showed people that they couldn\u2019t enjoy a region\u2019s best produce and cuisine \u201cwithout recognizing the dignity and well-being of the people who make food, the importance of tradition and human contact, and social and environmental justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The King of Queens<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Scott Stossel, national editor<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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