Abad: Cambios graduales, no mágicos; Petro confirma desconfianza inicial

Héctor Abad, the Colombian writer and journalist, has watched Gustavo Petro's presidency unfold with a deepening sense of vindication—not the satisfying kind, but the grim sort that comes when your worst suspicions about someone prove correct. Nine months into Petro's term, Abad's initial hesitations, which he describes as more intuitive than factual when he cast a blank ballot in the election, have hardened into something more concrete: a conviction that the president's government is drifting steadily away from the centrist coalition it began with and toward something far more ideologically rigid.

Abd's distrust has roots that run deeper than Petro's recent decisions. Years ago, when a former constitutional court magistrate named Carlos Gavidia Díaz led the left-wing party's democratic forum, he told Abad something that stuck: Petro would agree to party decisions at night, then present altered versions the next morning, keeping control of party finances and influence concentrated in his own hands. That pattern of behavior—the willingness to reshape agreements to maintain personal power—became the foundation of Abad's skepticism. When Petro won the presidency, he appointed a cabinet that seemed to signal moderation: the education minister had been a centrist precandidacy; the vice-presidential candidate from Sergio Fajardo's center-right movement became ambassador to the United States; the finance and agriculture ministers came from similar moderate backgrounds. But a few weeks before this conversation, Petro fired his education minister without warning, along with two other ministers close to him, one for criticizing the health reform. The pattern Abad had observed years earlier appeared to be repeating itself at the presidential level.

What troubles Abad most is not any single policy but what he sees as a fundamental mismatch between Petro's ambitions and his understanding of how change actually happens. Petro issues grand directives—that no child in Colombia should die of hunger—that sound unimpeachable until you confront the machinery required to implement them. The president, Abad suggests, seems genuinely confused when children continue to starve despite his orders, as if governance were a matter of will rather than logistics, ideology rather than the grinding work of reaching remote communities and building systems that actually function. This is where Abad's critique becomes something larger than a personal assessment of one politician.

Across Latin America, Abad observes, there is a hunger for transformation so acute that it has begun to override judgment. The region's traditional political classes have lost legitimacy so thoroughly that voters, especially young people, have begun to believe that any change must be better than the status quo. This desperation led Peru to elect Pedro Castillo, a man Abad describes as appearing wholly unqualified for high office. Petro's support for Castillo, Abad argues, was never really about solidarity with a fellow leftist. It was about vanity and strategic calculation. Petro saw himself as the potential leader of a new Latin American left bloc—with Boric in Chile, Castillo in Peru, López Obrador in Mexico, and Lula in Brazil. Castillo, lacking strong personality or statesman-like formation, seemed like someone Petro and his allies could influence, even control. When Castillo's government collapsed, both Petro and López Obrador invented a conspiracy narrative about Peruvian elites orchestrating his downfall, conveniently ignoring their own role in encouraging a man unfit for the job.

The deeper problem, as Abad sees it, is that Latin America has become infected with a fantasy of instantaneous transformation. Improvement in living conditions—Peru's economy had actually improved over recent decades—paradoxically breeds impatience. When people see that things can get better, they become unwilling to accept gradual progress. They demand radical change, shortcuts, magical solutions. And when politicians like Petro promise those solutions, when they issue orders as if reality bends to presidential decree, the inevitable disappointment feeds further instability. Abad is clear-eyed about this: revolutionary processes tend to impoverish populations for extended periods with uncertain outcomes. Gradual reform satisfies no one completely but remains the only mechanism that has actually produced sustained improvement. The problem is that no one wants to hear it.

Abd himself has become more entangled in political commentary than he would prefer. He has just published a novel called "Salvo mi corazón todo está bien," written during the pandemic, about a priest awaiting a heart transplant who finds unexpected grace in an ordinary family. He translates American literature to rest from the immediate political moment. But the Colombian political theater keeps pulling him back. Petro's son, who presented himself as humble during the campaign, now travels in armored vehicles and lives in apartments worth half a million dollars, receiving money for a house from a former narco who spent eighteen years in prison—all now acceptable, apparently, under Petro's "total peace" policy that extends amnesty to traffickers. Abad describes this as living "installed in a kind of soap opera," where the absurdity is so complete that it becomes almost literary. The difference is that this soap opera shapes the lives of millions of people searching for a way out of poverty and inequality, and finding instead a government that mistakes ideology for policy and orders for outcomes.