The day the M-19 guerrillas descended on the University of South Colombia felt like a carnival. Students ran from classrooms to greet the khaki-clad visitors and teachers lined the corridors in the steamy tropical heat cheering them on.
The mood darkened when the army arrived later. Troops were hunting “subversives” who had shown the audacity to parade around the campus in Neiva, a city six hours south of Bogotá, in broad daylight indoctrinating students.
Sent to Colombia to teach English as part of my degree, I was among the faculty staff put up against the wall by the soldiers that day, searched and questioned. This was the 1980s, when Colombia was riven by conflicts between the state, drug traffickers and Marxist rebels. Stained by bloodletting, the nation’s future looked hopelessly bleak.
More than three decades later, I returned to a peaceful and prosperous Neiva to watch a former M-19 guerrilla make his pitch to voters to be elected as Colombia’s president.
Gustavo Petro’s election rally in a neighbourhood basketball court also had a carnival feel. Performers on stilts, dressed in the red, yellow and blue of the national flag, twirled to folk music. Dancers in traditional costumes traced the courtly steps of the bambuco. The only men in uniform were police guarding the candidate.
Petro’s tortuous path from clandestine rebel to leftwing politician leading the presidential polls forms part of Latin America’s unlikeliest success of recent times. For Colombia is a nation that found a path to relative peace and prosperity against the odds.
There were false dawns: a botched government attempt in the early 1990s to negotiate the surrender of cocaine king Pablo Escobar, a presidential election in 1994 tainted by drug money, and advances by the Farc, Colombia’s biggest rebel group.
But in 2002-10 Alvaro Uribe, a conservative president, waged a merciless war on the guerrillas, forcing them to the negotiating table. There was a terrible cost in human rights abuses but Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s successor, signed a deal with the Farc in 2016. The accord has held and the improved security of the past two decades has given the economy fresh life. As Colombia became more prosperous, it developed politically and socially. Previously marginalised groups found a voice and started to win representation. A new generation benefited from access to higher education.
The students in Neiva had changed, too. The giant Che Guevara mural which used to dominate a university entrance building was long gone when I returned last month. Most recent graffiti targeted femicides or sexism, rather than inciting Marxist revolution.
One elderly man at Petro’s rally spoke eloquently of peace and social justice. “Yes, I was M-19,” he said, when I sought him out afterwards. His name was William Calderón Vargas and he remembered the guerrillas’ visit to the university because he was one of them.
Calderón demobilised along with the rest of the M-19 in 1990 in the first of Colombia’s peace agreements. Naturally, he was a Petro supporter. “Petro is an old comrade from the fight but I support him because of what he represents. Petro became an emblem of the battle against corruption and the vexations of war.”
Not all the past’s wounds have healed. The Petro rally in Neiva was only communicated to the press a few hours in advance for security reasons, and the venue subsequently changed without notice. Bodyguards surrounded the candidate.
Colombian society remains one of the most unequal in the world and the newly empowered indigenous, Afro-Colombian and sexual minority communities want to be heard.
Many Colombians are hungry for change and this election feels like a turning point. A Petro win would mean Colombia’s first leftwing government. His supporters believe it would seal Colombia’s transformation from a narrow, elite-run fiefdom to a modern social democratic state. His opponents fear Petro’s radical policies would destroy the peace and progress of recent years, trigger fresh conflict and risk an economic and political calamity akin to neighbouring Venezuela. They cannot both be right.