How to protect the 2026 elections? / Interview with María Isabel Rueda

The M-19 ceased to exist many years ago as an organization. Its end is marked by one of two dates: either the death of Carlos Pizarro in the plane, or the day the Constituent Assembly is installed. Then comes the Democratic Alliance M-19. As is more than natural, leaders of that organization took different paths. Some went to other parties or created their own organizations. Petro's lies about the history of the M-19 are a different matter. He managed to create the mythology, very much supported by the ignorance of some media and some politicians, that he comes from the M-19, where he was supposedly a very important man, a kind of Rambo, which is absolutely false.

He has even claimed responsibility for the Constituent Assembly…

But I would tell you that the biggest lie he began spreading about fifteen years ago: that it was he who convinced Carlos Pizarro to sign the peace. He made up the story that Pizarro was going to betray the meeting with the Government because of a supposed agreement he had with the FARC not to make peace with the Barco government. But then he, Petro, at noon, after the first round of meetings in the morning, sat down with Pizarro on the banks of a river, and he maintains that there an epiphany occurred and he convinced Pizarro that peace had to be made. If I tell you that Petro never sat down to talk with Carlos Pizarro for ten minutes…

And he certainly didn't meet Bateman...

He never met Bateman. He never even spoke to Fayad, who never even knew who Petro was.

But President Petro said about Benedetti in that catastrophic cabinet meeting: “... He has the magic of Bateman”, with the propriety of someone who knew him intimately...

While Bateman was alive, one could say that Petro was not really in the M-19. That is the truth.

So why this insistence on reviving the symbols of the M-19, Carlos Pizarro's hat in an urn in the Bolívar Palace, the stubbornness in displaying the M-19 flag, starting with having Bolívar's sword brought into his possession?

He is making a strategic bet: a sector of society remembers with affection the signing of the peace agreement by charismatic leaders. But the reality is that the memory of the M-19 has never been so crushed as during the Petro government. It has done a lot of damage to that memory, which first speaks of reconciliation. But then there are Gustavo Petro's complexes and resentments.

But self-conscious about what?

I don't understand, but in his autobiography he tells many lies, he shows himself to be the megalomaniac that he is and exhibits all his resentments towards specific people who have never done anything to him.

For example, his hostility towards the business community. Here he reflects a primary social resentment, he considers anyone who owns a Renault 4 to be a class enemy. A symptom of a tremendous complex is systematically feeling important by making everyone wait for hours. By always arriving late, because 'you have to wait for me', he is embracing a huge inferiority complex, or superiority complex (I don't know what it is).

How is that personality affecting the Government?

A very profound question and a matter of political culture in society. When one looks at history, the great damage has not been done by leftists or rightists, but by the crazy ones. When one approaches, for example, the history of the Second World War, no one at this point questions whether Hitler was right-wing or left-wing, but rather classifies him as an unbalanced person who infected a society and drove it to madness. And these cases have been repeated throughout history. To go no further, today there is already evidence of psychopathy in the last Venezuelan leaders and look at what the country is going through.

And do you think there are psychopaths in Gustavo Petro?

Yes, objective psychopathy. There is a book by a very interesting character called David Owen, an English psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who back in the sixties decided to get into politics and, after many years in Parliament, retired to write about his experience and the illnesses of power. He tells, for example, how the alcoholism of Bush and Tony Blair were decisive in the great errors of the invasion of Iraq and makes a checklist of personality aspects of what he calls Hubris syndrome, characterized by an excessive ego and a lack of humility. And one sees there the psychological profiles of Petro painted in terms of megalomania. In his second chapter he brings a checklist of about fourteen characteristics and Petro has them.

So Petro's problem isn't that he's left-wing?

No. Absolute psychopathy. If a character like Jorge Enrique Robledo or Antonio Navarro had come to power here, we would have a democracy like those that function in Europe . In Colombia, we are being led to a crisis, among other things, because both Petro's project and personality are profoundly anti-democratic. Don't tell me that this is an ideological discussion, looking at what he has done with the health system. Destroying a society's health system is not an ideological or political problem, it is psychopathy. And what Petro is doing with relations with Venezuela borders on treason. We are not talking about an ideological discussion there either.

Are you referring to the influence of Venezuela that some claim is undeniable in the situation in Catatumbo?

Look: we have been experiencing a systematic invasion of Colombian territory by the Venezuelan dictatorship. Those who believe Petro's narrative that what has been happening since January 16 in Catatumbo is a fight between the ELN and the FARC are wrong. If that were the case, it would end up being just another fight between Colombian gangs of violence. When what is happening is an invasion of Colombian territory by the Venezuelan dictatorship.

But tolerated by President Petro?

Not just tolerated, shared and condoned.

And how does that play out in Catatumbo?

The demilitarization of Catatumbo, the abandonment by the Public Force of the exercise of sovereignty in the area, began on April 28, 2023. That day, the ELN assaulted a military unit, seven soldiers died and 17 were wounded. And Petro's response was not to recover the territory and pursue the ELN. They simply removed the dead and wounded and withdrew the troops, to the point that a few days later the ELN militias entered the battalion facilities in the area, with yellow machinery, and not a single soldier ever returned. That is why, when the supposed ELN offensive of January 16 arrives, they do not speak of a dead soldier, because there were no soldiers, nor of a dead policeman, because there were no policemen. They speak of the ELN's clashes with people from the FARC and with their social bases, but never with the State, because the latter had already surrendered and displaced its Public Force from the area two years earlier.

I insist: what does Venezuela have to do with all this?

Let us not fall into the trap of continuing to believe that what is happening in Catatumbo is a fight between the ELN and the FARC, when in reality it is a matter of sovereignty. Today Catatumbo is under the territorial control of the Venezuelan dictatorship. It is enough to ask the question: what is the ELN today? Well, they describe themselves as a binational force. And while they are against the Colombian State, against its democracy and its society, in Venezuela they are a force with the State. Today the ELN is part of the Venezuelan armed forces, of the Venezuelan dictatorship.

So where are we going with this dialogue with the Castilians?

I have been saying this for a long time: watch out for the elections on the 26th. I think that one has to consider the objective hypothesis that the Venezuelans and Petro are going to invent a binational conflict that, in the middle of the electoral process, will allow the calendar of the elections to be modified.

Give me proof of that hypothesis...

Every army in the world, all armed forces and all defense ministries have something called a war hypothesis. That has to be part of the protocol. They have studied if there were a war today in our country, with whom it would be, under what circumstances, who would be the protagonists and what would be more or less the military plan, etc. Obviously, Venezuelans have had their war hypothesis for many years, which is a possible incursion by the United States and NATO, let's say the West, into their territory.

On the map they say that one side would be the Atlantic, where they could arrive by ship and air, but there is also, of course, the Colombian border, in two parts: the border on the Orinoquia, where there would be a confrontation with tanks, infantry and such, due to the characteristics of the terrain; and there is the Catatumbo, which is a jungle, with a manageable topography.

It is possible to fight there very well, it is the most important center of coca production in the world, because it produces almost twice as many crops per year as other places where there are more crops. Catatumbo is producing seven crops per year. In addition, its location allows the production of those tons of coca leaves to process them in the laboratories in its rearguard, which are in Venezuela, where the State protects the distribution routes.

So, what Venezuela has just done is say: let's stop messing around, we're taking this under our belts, we're not going to share it with anyone. And, what's more, if something happens to them, like an incursion, they have a rearguard in Catatumbo, where they could fight for a hundred years.

I don't see why Venezuela and Petro would invent this binational conflict...

Well, for Maduro, like any dictator, it helps him to seek internal national unity. And for Petro, it helps him to modify the electoral calendar. Here, if the President manages to modify that calendar, he has the power to do so whenever he wants and he will remain in power, like Maduro. He would start by postponing them for a year, for example, and then he would say that there are no conditions and then he would come back and postpone them.

And how can we defend the elections of the 26th?

We are trying to find some consensus on a law to defend the elections of 26, which has five articles. The first: the military and the Public Force in general will not be able to invoke the principle of due obedience when it comes to orders that affect their responsibility to protect the constitutional electoral process. The second: to make it a crime for the Ministry of Finance to not timely allocate resources to the Registry and the National Electoral Council.

And what if he doesn't do it even then?

In the third article, because we must be on the safe side, the Registrar must write an emergency letter to the general manager of the Bank of the Republic so that he can transfer the funds directly to the Registrar's Office. In the fourth, prohibit the modification of the electoral calendar based on the state of internal unrest. And in the fifth article, which has been technically difficult, we would look for tools to protect the electoral process from the influence of criminal organizations in the controlled territories.

And part of the following reflection: Mr. Juan Fernando Petro said on Caracol Television: ' In the La Picota pact we managed to guarantee 1,000,000 votes'. And it turns out that Petro beat Hernandez by 700,000 votes, so the votes obtained via Picota were decisive. Imagine now with the territorial expansion of criminal groups. We have been looking at this issue with technicians from the Registry and with lawyers to establish that when there are serious indications of the presence and incidence of criminal organizations in the territories, the electoral authorities will move the polling stations to the most urban areas so that the population from the countryside comes to vote in the municipal capitals, as when they come to do the shopping.

There is less chance that the gun will be put to people's heads to make them vote in a certain way. Because, damn it, how can it be normal that any candidate, like Petro did in Cauca, has obtained 97 percent of the votes? That is statistically impossible. The bill to protect the elections of the 26th is practically already drafted. The most difficult thing is missing, which is to achieve the consensus of the parties.