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gustavo petro
Cutting Ties With Israel, 'One Colombia Shows Far More Courage Than the Other Columbia'
"The times of genocide and extermination of an entire people cannot return," said leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro. "If Palestine dies, humanity dies."
May 01, 2024
In sharp contrast with Columbia University in New York City, Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Wednesday announced the imminent suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel over that country's assault on Gaza.
"The government of change informs that as of tomorrow diplomatic relations with Israel will be broken... for having a government, for having a president who is genocidal," Petro told a crowd in the capital Bogotá during an International Workers' Day event, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"The world could be summed up in a single word that vindicates the necessity of life, rebellion, the raised flag, and resistance," the leftist leader added. "That word is called Gaza. It is called Palestine. It is called the children and babies who have died dismembered by the bombs."
"The times of genocide and extermination of an entire people cannot return. If Palestine dies, humanity dies," he added as the crowd started chanting, "Petro! Petro! Petro!"
Colombia joins at least nine other nations—including Bahrain, Belize, Bolivia, Chad, Chile, Honduras, Jordan, South Africa, and Turkey—that have either recalled their ambassadors from Israel or broken off relations in response to Israel's assault on Gaza, which has killed, maimed, or left missing more than 123,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced around 90% of the besieged strip's 2.3 million people.
In late October, Colombia became one of the first countries to recall its ambassador from Israel, a move that came amid a diplomatic fracas between Bogotá and Tel Aviv sparked by Petro's comparison of Israeli leaders' dehumanizing and genocidal statements about Palestinians with "what the Nazis said about the Jews."
Petro also called Gaza—often described as the "world's largest open-air prison"—a "concentration camp."
After Israel accused Petro of "hostile and antisemitic statements" and "support for the horrific acts of Hamas terrorists," the Colombian president hit back, saying Israel's war on Gaza is "genocide."
Last month, Colombia asked the International Court of Justice to join the South African-led genocide case against Israel, which is supported by over 30 nations. In January, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling that found Israel is "plausibly" committing genocide in Gaza and ordered its government to prevent genocidal acts.
Critics accuse Israel of ignoring the ICJ order. Last month the court cited "the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation" as it issued another provisional order directing Israel to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into the strip.
In a homophonic reference to protests on U.S. campuses including Columbia University—which has refused to divest from Israel and has twice sicced police on peaceful protesters—attorney Steven Donziger quipped, "One Colombia shows far more courage than the other Columbia."
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2023 Was '2 Steps Forward, 2 Steps Back' for Tropical Forest Loss
"Steep declines in the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia show that progress is possible, but increasing forest loss in other areas has largely counteracted that progress," one expert said.
Apr 04, 2024
An annual accounting of global deforestation, released Thursday, shows that political will can make a significant difference when it comes to protecting vital ecosystems and the Indigenous and local communities that depend on them—but that policymakers in many regions are not taking enough action to save tropical forests.
The data, gathered by the University of Maryland's Global Land Analysis and Discover Lab and published on the World Resources Institute's (WRI) Global Forest Watch program, found that primary tropical forest loss in 2023 decreased by more than one-third in Brazil and nearly 50% in Colombia after both countries elected leaders who championed conservation policies. However, on the global level, these declines were offset by increased deforestation in other countries.
"The world took two steps forward, two steps back when it comes to this past year's forest loss," Global Forest Watch director Mikaela Weisse said in a statement. "Steep declines in the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia show that progress is possible, but increasing forest loss in other areas has largely counteracted that progress. We must learn from the countries that are successfully slowing deforestation."
"This year's forest loss numbers tell an inspiring story of what we can achieve when leaders prioritize action, but the data also highlights many urgent areas of missed opportunity to protect our forests and our future."
All told, 3.7 million hectares of primary tropical forests were felled last year at a rate equivalent to 10 soccer fields per minute. While tropical deforestation decreased by 9% in 2023 compared with 2022, the overall deforestation rate has held steady when compared to 2019 and 2021. Tree clearing released 2.4 metric gigatons of climate pollution into the atmosphere, which is nearly half of the U.S.'s yearly emissions from burning fossil fuels.
"Forests are critical ecosystems for fighting climate change, supporting livelihoods, and protecting biodiversity," WRI President and CEO Ani Dasgupta said in a statement.
Global Forest Watch focuses on the tropics because more than 96% of human-caused deforestation occurs there. However, the climate crisis contributed to making 2023 a devastating year for global tree loss, which rose 24% due to record-breaking wildfires in Canada's boreal forests.
"That is one of the biggest anomalies on record," University of Maryland researcher Matt Hansen toldReuters, adding, "It's a big deal, and it's a cautionary tale for climate impacts to fire."
In the tropics, Brazil managed to cut primary deforestation by 36%, the lowest level in the country since 2015. The country moved from being responsible for 43% of tropical deforestation in 2022 to 30% in 2023.
The decline coincided with the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who replaced former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro oversaw record deforestation as he prioritized exploitative industries over forest protections and Indigenous rights. Since taking office in early 2023, Lula has reversed course by promising to end deforestation by 2030, ramping up enforcement efforts against illegal forest clearing, rolling back anti-environmental measures, and recognizing new Indigenous territories.
"We're incredibly proud to see such stark progress being made across the country, especially in the Brazilian Amazon," Mariana Oliveira, who manages the Forests, Land Use, and Agriculture Program for WRI Brazil, said in a statement.
In Brazil, Amazon forest loss decreased by 39%, though deforestation increased in the vulnerable and vital Cerrado and Pantanal ecosystems.
"We still have a very long ways to improve and sustain the efforts, and I hope today's release energizes the national and subnational governments in Brazil—and governments around the world—to build on this momentum rather than using it as an excuse to slow down," Oliveira said.
The other 2023 success story was Colombia, which curbed primary forest loss by 49%. This reversal followed the election of left-wing President Gustavo Petro Urrego, who took office in August 2022 with Vice President Francia Márquez, a Goldman Environmental Prize winner. After a 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, other armed groups and other opportunists moved into territories they had vacated, increasing forest loss. Petro has prioritized conservation in negotiating peace agreements with these other armed groups.
"The story of deforestation in Colombia is complex and deeply intertwined with the country's politics, which makes 2023's historic decrease particularly powerful," WRI Colombia natural resources manager Alejandra Laina said in a statement. "There is no doubt that recent government action and the commitment of the communities has had a profound impact on Colombia's forests, and we encourage those involved in current peace talks to use this data as a springboard to accelerate further progress."
Despite the good news out of Brazil and Colombia, upticks in deforestation in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Laos counteracted that progress on the global level. In Bolivia, forest loss rose by 27% to reach the greatest loss on record for a third consecutive year. A little over half of this was due to fires that spread more readily because of climate-fueled drought, while the rest was due to the expansion of agriculture, particularly soy. Agriculture was the main force behind deforestation in Nicaragua—which cleared 4.2% of its remaining primary forest—and Laos, which saw record loss of 47%.
Deforestation rates also continued to creep upward in Congo at 3% in 2023. This is concerning because the Congo rainforest is the last tropical forest that reliably acts as a carbon sink, and because of its importance to local communities.
"Forests are the backbone of livelihoods for Indigenous people and local communities across Africa, and this is especially true in the Congo Basin," Teodyl Nkuintchua, the Congo Basin strategy and engagement lead at WRI, said in a statement. "Dramatic policy action must be taken in the Congo Basin to enact new development pathways that support a transition away from unsustainable food and energy production practices, while improving well-being for Indigenous people and local communities as much as revenues for countries."
The new data comes as world leaders have six years to meet their promise, made at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021, of ending deforestation by 2030. However, WRI found that nearly 2 million more hectares were cleared in 2023 than would be consistent with meeting that goal, Mongabayreported.
WRI global forest director Rod Taylor told reporters that the world was "far off track and trending in the wrong direction when it comes to reducing global deforestation."
WRI's Dasgupta said: "The world has just six years left to keep its promise to halt deforestation. This year's forest loss numbers tell an inspiring story of what we can achieve when leaders prioritize action, but the data also highlights many urgent areas of missed opportunity to protect our forests and our future."
Taylor added that the rest of the world could not rely on individual leaders like Lula or Petro, but should take steps to encourage deforestation such as making it more profitable to preserve forests than to clear them, making sure global supply chains are deforestation free, and protecting the land rights of Indigenous peoples.
"Bold global mechanisms and unique local initiatives together are both needed to achieve enduring reductions in deforestation across all tropical front countries," Taylor said.
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How Can Workers Ensure the ‘Just Transition’ Is Truly Just?
The global economy is already undergoing its most fundamental transformation since the Industrial Revolution; if workers and trade unions are at the table negotiating the transition, the process has a greater chance of being equitable.
Jan 13, 2024
Making a transition away from fossil fuels is going to require a lot of work. But there’s a real concern that it will also require a lot fewer workers.
All of the workers in fossil fuel industries, for instance, are acutely aware that their jobs are at risk, if not immediately then at some point in the future. Along with automation, the energy transition also threatens to reduce the ranks of those in sectors dependent on fossil fuel, like plastics, steel, and petrochemicals. And unions are particularly concerned that unionized jobs in these sectors will be replaced with lower-paid non-union positions if they aren’t outsourced to lower-wage countries altogether.
In 2023, employment in the fossil fuel sector has rebounded from pandemic lows but hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels—even though oil and gas companies posted record revenues in 2022.
“The class warfare between workers and owners is not going to change with the energy transition because capital is always going to be there.”
New jobs, of course, beckon in the “clean energy” production of solar panels, wind turbines, and the batteries and other infrastructure necessary to remake the electricity sector. According to the International Energy Agency, this sector actually overtook the fossil fuel sector in 2021. More than half of the job growth in the energy sector in 2022 was in just five categories: photovoltaic, wind, electric vehicles and batteries, heat pumps, and critical minerals mining.
But according to one U.S. study looking at employment figures from 2005 to 2021, less than 1% of workers in dirty industries ended up with “green” jobs. The prospect of new, “clean energy” jobs shimmers in the distance, but for many workers it looks like a mirage.
That’s especially the case in the Global South. Jobs in the new sustainable energy sector are not distributed evenly across the world. China, the European Union, the United States, Brazil, and India have already emerged as employment hubs. But Germany alone has considerably more jobs in this sector than all of Africa.
“One of the issues that still worries a number of workers, especially the ones that are going to migrate from either coal or fossil fuel to clean energy is: Where are the alternative jobs?” says Everline Aketch, the Uganda-based sub-regional secretary for English-Speaking Africa for Public Services International. “They keep saying that the just transition will be able to provide a number of alternative jobs. But the jobs are still not there.”
One of the chief problems has been that the energy transition has largely been corporate-led rather than public-led, and companies prefer to keep labor costs low. “The class warfare between workers and owners is not going to change with the energy transition because capital is always going to be there,” points out Igor Díaz of Sintracarbón trade union in Colombia.
The energy transition also threatens to widen the gap between North and South, with the latter serving as a vast “sacrifice zone” that provides the inputs—extracted in environmentally damaging ways—that the former needs for its “clean energy” products. “Our countries cannot be forced simply to provide the resources of the North,” argues Ibis Fernández of the Confederación Intersectorial de Trabajadores Estatales del Perú. “This is all a new colonialism, right?”
Felipe Diaz, of the Colombian research institute Centro de Innovación e Investigación para el Desarrollo Justo del Sector Minero Energético, agrees. “Especially in Latin America, every government that emphasizes its own sovereignty is sabotaged either internally or externally,” he points out. “The cases have been very, very clear in Uruguay and Brazil. They tried to not depend on other countries, specifically the expansionist model of the United States, but they were literally squashed.”
The stakes could not be higher. The global economy is already undergoing its most fundamental transformation since the Industrial Revolution. If workers and trade unions are at the table negotiating the transition, the process has a greater chance of being equitable. But as the four abovementioned participants explained in the recent seminar Labor and Green Colonialism, sponsored by the Pacto Ecosocial y Intercultural del Sur and the Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies, the current corporate-led transition will continue to disadvantage workers and widen the gap between North and South.
Fortunately, other alternatives are emerging.
Worker Participation
Some countries have a tradition of involving workers and trade unions in economic planning. The co-determination process in Germany, for instance, provides workers with a say in company policies and, though trade unions, in government policy as well.
The new government of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez in Colombia, meanwhile, has established a new tradition of expanding the policymaking circle. “This is a progressive government,” Felipe Diaz points out. “For the first time they want a dialogue with the actors that have historically been displaced and ignored by previous administrations.”
More commonly, however, governments and corporations leave workers out of the decision-making process. “We have been talking about energy transitions that are fair and just and that’s not something that we’ve seen in Peru,” says Ibis Fernández. “The extractive sector is a very precarious sector. There’s a lot of exploitation, and the large multinational country companies are always trying to avoid respecting the rights of workers.”
“Part of justice in this transition process has to do with the involvement of unions, of workers and also the communities in the region.”
It’s ironic, Everline Aketch points out, that workers coined the phrase “just transition” only to have “this terminology hijacked by the multinational corporations. And active participation from workers in terms of defining how to move forward with the blueprint is absent. Currently there’s no clear blueprint in terms of how, for instance, Africa and particularly sub-Saharan Africa is going to be able to achieve this just transition.”
It’s not just corporations—governments, too, often pay little more than lip service to workers. “When it comes to the workers in South Africa, for instance, many of them don’t understand what the just transition is all about,” she continues. “The government comes in and says, ‘In the next five or six years, we’re going to actually close some of the mining sector.’ But they’re not explaining to the workers why they are closing the mining sector. And they’re not explaining the provisions they’ve put in place to absorb the workers who will lose their jobs.”
It comes down to a matter of equity and justice, explains Igor Diaz: “Part of justice in this transition process has to do with the involvement of unions, of workers and also the communities in the region.”
Prioritizing the Public Sector
According to the neoliberal model, an unfettered market spurs economic development and the public sector should step out of the way. International financial institutions and powerful governments have for decades urged countries in the Global South to cut government expenditures, reduce government regulations, and privatize government enterprises. Many countries are applying this model to the current energy transition.
“Currently just transitions are being led by multinational corporations whose major interest is actually profit maximization,” Everline Aketch points out. “This transition, which should be led by the government, is currently being overtaken by the multinational corporations, which developed countries and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development are also pushing. In terms of the tenets of justice, energy itself should not only be affordable but also accessible.”
Indeed, the corporate-led development strategy brought countries like Peru to its current economic crisis. “The mining boom is finished, and the precarity of the country is growing,” reports Ibis Fernández. “The state didn’t manage its resources, never redistributed wealth, and took most of the pie. The multinational countries did not address essential rights, did not invest in health and education, did not invest in people and workers so that they would actually have dignified work.”
One mechanism that enforces the divide between north and south are free trade treaties, including clauses that allow multinational companies to sue governments for regulatory practices that interfere with the corporate bottom line.
Everline Aketch agrees. “The same neoliberal policies are still driving the agenda of just transition, which is quite unfair to many developing countries,” she notes. “And the Green financing program is taking the model of structural adjustment programs from the 1980s and 1990s. Those same programs forced many of our countries, including Uganda, to privatize the energy sector and many workers lost their jobs. And there was an almost threefold increase in energy prices after privatization.”
She points out that 70% of Kenya’s energy now comes from clean energy. “But the IMF and World Bank are forcing Kenya to privatize this sector,” she reports. And to qualify for Green financing funds from the IMF, she says that “the Kenyan government is being told first of all to plant trees. This is not fair. To achieve a global just transition, there should be a level playing field. Africa should be provided the policy space to determine how it wants the trajectory of the just transition to take place. We have different levels and stages of development.”
She continues, “To achieve a just transition, Public Services International insists that governments be at the forefront of providing the policy framework and deciding how to generate the money to ensure a just transition and make clean energy accessible for all members of the community including workers.”
Moreover, she adds, “if this just transition is not publicly led, gender inequality will increase, especially in Africa where a majority of women—close to 900 million women—still have to use firewood biomass for cooking.”
Pushing Back Against Green Colonialism
In 2022, as a result of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the number of people without access to electricity increased for the first time in decades—by 6 million people to 760 million across the globe. Most of that increase was in sub-Saharan Africa, where four of five people lack access.
Nearly all of Uganda’s energy mix comes from clean energy like hydropower. “However, despite having the highest energy mix when it comes to clean energy,” Everline Aketch reports, “only 20% of our households are connected to the power grid. More than 600 million people across the continent do not have access to clean energy.”
Access to electricity is only one aspect of the huge disparity between the Global North and Global South when it comes to the energy transition. The latter is increasingly the locus of a scramble for resources similar to the colonial-era rush for riches. “We can add value to our natural resources,” Ibis Fernández says, “and stop what the Global North has condemned us to be, which is raw material exporters with no added value to our products.”
“We have seen the effects from free trade agreements that really favor international capital more than the nation itself.”
Everline Aketch agrees that the Global South, which is rich in minerals, needs these resources, or the revenues from their sale, for its own transition. “And then there’s the issue of intellectual property rights where most sub-Saharan Africans are not allowed to replicate some of these technologies to add value to their own material,” she adds.
Another issue is the disproportionate burden of dealing with the consequences of climate change that the Global South shoulders. “Africa contributes less than 4% towards the current global carbon emission,” Aketch continues. “We’re the least polluters on the planet. However, we pay the highest price.”
One mechanism that enforces the divide between north and south are free trade treaties, including clauses that allow multinational companies to sue governments for regulatory practices that interfere with the corporate bottom line.
“The worst thing is when these companies leave behind an environmental liability or social liability,” says Felipe Diaz, “and we have to pay them because the companies say that we’re going against their business.”
“We have seen the effects from free trade agreements that really favor international capital more than the nation itself,” Igor Diaz agrees. “And so it becomes necessary to really review those free trade agreements with the United States and with other countries that have caused so many social problems in Colombia.”
The Case of Colombia
The presidential ticket of progressive politician Gustavo Petro and environmental justice activist Francia Márquez won the Colombian elections in June 2022. Later that summer, the new administration stopped granting new licenses for hydrocarbon exploration and canceled fracking pilot projects, promising to wean the country from its dependency on carbon. In 2022, more than half of the country’s exports were oil and coal.
Although contracts to exploit existing reserves will last for another decade, the new government’s pledge potentially jeopardizes the livelihoods of workers in the oil, gas, and coal sectors. “In the middle of the pandemic, the government of Colombia tried to close mining for 18 months,” Igor Diaz reports. “Our union tried to stop this because more than 2,000 workers were given short notice, and they lost their jobs. This generated social chaos.”
He describes his experience representing coal miners. “In the mining company where I worked, there are 10,000 workers and more than the half of them are 35 years old,” he relates. “They’ve been working with us for 15 years. Any adjustment will be traumatic for them because in 10 years they probably won’t have any kind of retirement payment.”
“Large multinational countries don’t want an underdeveloped country like Colombia to make sovereign decisions around industry and technology transfer.”
At the same time, he argues that “this is a historic opportunity not only for Colombia but for the whole world. We definitely have to have an energy transition. In some regions there are other labor possibilities. People could work in agriculture rather than mining. We have to stop extractivism and petroleum drilling, but for that we have to look at other productive sectors in society, at the same time improving ecosystems and stopping contamination.”
But as Felipe Diaz explains, multinationals also dominate the renewable energy sector in Colombia. “Before the Petro government took office, the task of replacing fossil fuels was basically given to large multinational companies,” he says. “Today there are 19 different large-scale projects, and 80% belong to our multinational companies. Large multinational countries don’t want an underdeveloped country like Colombia to make sovereign decisions around industry and technology transfer.”
But the current Colombian government has embarked on a different path. In mid-December, the Petro administration announced the formation of Ecominerales, a new state-owned enterprise to produce and sell ore in a way to support the renewable energy industry in Colombia. “This same logic has also been proposed for the oil and gas sector,” Felipe Diaz continues. “The government wants the largest oil companies—Eco-Petrol, which is also state-owned—to have a new business unit when it comes to renewable energy.”
He continues: “That means that the public sector is going to start exercising governance and making demands of those profiting from the energy transition. The ministries that are leading the transition are calling us to help them with information and research to find out the needs of the workers. We’ve never seen this kind of communication before. The idea here is that a Green extractivism is not going to be in the hands of mining companies.”
A major challenge that Colombia still faces is the ongoing insurgency of the National Liberation Army (ELN), a communist guerrilla group, as well as some smaller paramilitaries and narcotraffickers. The stance of the ELN on the energy transition is still largely unknown.
“Do they agree to transition to a clean energy matrix or do they want to keep producing oil and gas as long as it’s a sovereign nation?” Felipe Diaz asks. “There’s been a new escalation of violence with the ELN, and it’s become really difficult to negotiate with them. When they end up taking over resources, it can complicate questions of equity in an energy transition.”
Forging a Path Forward
Colombia offers an intriguing example of a state determined to engage workers and prioritize the public sector in an energy transition. But this progressive administration also represents the culmination of many years of organizing by different sectors.
“When people come together–civil society, trade unions–that is where our power actually lies,” Everline Aketch points out. “Engagement with civil society and feminist organizations is very critical in terms of amplifying the voices not only of women but also showing the implication of neoliberal policies for issues of access.”
In Peru, too, such a mobilization is ongoing. “The unity has to be very wide, for example, with workers in the mining companies and Indigenous people,” she explains. “We are a very diverse country where conservative forces are trying to polarize opinion in many regions. We long ago realized that we had to make an alliance against these uncivilized actors.”
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