It had been just three months since Pedro Sánchez, against all odds, had become President of the Government thanks to a motion of censure. In August 2018, when many still thought that this experiment would last a few months, Sánchez embarked on a tour of Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica and Bolivia.
That tour provided him with an institutional patina that was then very necessary to endow his presidency with credibility. Sánchez was received with all honors and shared photos and press conferences with different leaders.
The political curiosity on that occasion was concentrated in the meeting with Evo Morales, although the rest of the meetings were with conservative leaders. Among them, Iván Duque, a young president of Colombia who had just taken office for the first time. None of them is in power anymore, except for Sánchez himself, who today returns to Latin America at a time when left-wing governments are spreading like an oil slick throughout the region, starting with Colombia, where the victory of the ex-guerrilla of the M-19 Gustavo Petro has made history. Sánchez will see him. He wanted to be one of the first international leaders to hold a meeting with Petro. If four years ago the Spanish president covered himself with institutionalism on his tour, now he will be impregnated with a leftist veneer.
For a couple of years, progressive leaders have taken over the presidency of other countries in the area such as Chile, with a rather conservative tradition, but in which social discontent has led to electoral results that have broken with forecasts. Gabriel Bóric, a young student leader of the 2011 mobilizations, was the first to meet with Petro. Sánchez will not go to Chile on this occasion, but he will go to Honduras, where another left-wing leader, Xiomara Castro, has also won the presidency. But, without a doubt, Colombia is the central point of this tour in which Sánchez also seeks to become the EU benchmark for Latin America at a time of concern in Brussels about the growing influence of Russia and China in that region. Spain will hold the presidency of the EU in the second half of 2023, just before the general elections, and Sánchez will thus receive an extra international role. In this context, the socialist leader will be in charge of organizing a summit between the EU and Latin America. If the NATO meeting in Madrid occupied the political agenda for a week, it is clear that Sánchez will take advantage of the European semester to concentrate all the attention.
The image of radicalism accompanies Petro due to his militancy in the M-19 during the seventies and eighties, although he has insisted that even then he promoted the abandonment of arms. His speeches are vindictive in social matters and rights. He has reforms ahead to favor access to abortion and the recognition of homosexual marriage. Another of his challenges will be, for example, delving into the democratization of the police, now militarized and integrated into Defense. Something that is not easy in a context in which the Gulf cartel, for example, offers rewards for killing police officers. Petro does share the nationalist and anti-imperialist discourse of other Latin American leaders. As for the always difficult relations between Colombia and its neighbor Venezuela, he has on occasion confessed himself a supporter of Hugo Chávez, but has branded Nicolás Maduro a dictator.
With this profile, it is not surprising that Podemos wants to intensify its relations with Petro's entourage, although no one from that party attended the inauguration in which the controversial episode took place about whether or not the King should rise up before the passing of the sword of the liberator Simón Bolívar. At that time, Podemos prioritized the investiture of Bóric in Chile and Luis Arce in Bolivia. We must not forget the ties with the Latin American left that cultivated the batch of leaders who promoted Podemos, from Pablo Iglesias to Íñigo Errejón or Juan Carlos Monedero. With his visit to Petro, Sánchez seems to have gotten ahead of his partners when it comes to making the wave of leftists that Latin America is experiencing profitable. It is not in vain that the leader of the PSOE tries to underline a progressive image linked to a prolific social agenda planned for the months that remain until the general elections as a way of mobilizing the left-wing electorate, whose apathy is favoring the PP leading the polls right now.
