“In honor of the persecuted magistrates, the former magistrate César Julio Valencia Copete will be Minister of Justice,” said Gustavo Petro, the same tweeter president of Colombia, this Thursday. The left-wing president was alluding to the very strong clash between his current cabinet member and the then right-wing president, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, more than ten years ago. But it wasn’t just a reference to recent political history. It was also a clear nod to the judicial leadership with which Petro has maintained tensions and frictions in his three years in office, to his “persecuted magistrates” who would be the opposite of other robes, which he criticizes. Thus, the appointment of his fourth Minister of Justice, and the first president of one of the higher courts, allows Petro to keep his questions to those who review some of his most important decisions, but to focus his attacks no longer against entire courts – something for which he was questioned – but on some of their members.
The relationship between Petro and the courts has been difficult. The president, who has complained about the difficulty of carrying out his reforms and the limitations of the head of state – “we have not conquered power, we have conquered an administrative government cornered by other powers”, he said in an interview with this newspaper – believes that among the robes hide the enemies of his political project, which he has called the “Government of change”, which is not in vain the first left-wing one in recent Colombia. It hasn’t always been this way.
As a congressman, during the last decade of the last century and the first of the present, the current president was a defender of the judiciary. Especially when it became a bulwark against the almost omnipotent power of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the popular right-wing president who managed to amend the Constitution to guarantee re-election and thus add a second four-year mandate to the 2006 elections, only to then clash with the Constitutional Court’s refusal to approve another mandate, in 2009, and achieve an unexpected combativeness. with a Supreme Court investigating the infiltration of paramilitarism among the deputies who supported him, including his cousin Mario Uribe Escobar. Petro investigated the phenomenon of parapolitics, defended tooth and nail some magistrates who were victims of surveillance and wiretaps by the government, and ended up on the side of his new minister, who denounced that Uribe had sought him out to investigate his cousin’s case. This clash, which resulted in Uribe’s failure to bring criminal charges against Valencia Copete for alleged slander, left Petro and the judicial leadership on the same page.
This changed as his rule progressed. Initially the friction was minor, such as the irritation of the magistrates when Petro failed to take charge of two of them, at the end of 2022. But when the president took a more combative speech against the other powers, friendliness gave way to coldness, and this to total shock. First, he called on his supporters to rally before the Supreme Court in early 2024, when it was taking time to elect a new attorney general from the shortlist he had sent to finalize the replacement of a prosecutor who had become his political opponent. On February 8, hundreds of people gathered in front of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. It was five days before the previous prosecutor’s departure, and the Court had added two months of debate, something Petro called “failure to fulfill judicial duty.” That day, the President of the Court, Gerson Chaverra, said before the microphones that “democracy is left in abeyance when any sector or actor of a country attempts to exert political, physical or moral pressure on the decisions of justice.”
Then, the Constitutional Court annulled some parts of the tax reform that the president had implemented in his first months; returned the National Development Plan to Congress; he left the Total Peace Law, which allows him to negotiate with criminal structures, lame; or left the creation of the Ministry of Equality without a legal basis due to processing flaws, even if it postponed the effects of its decision to 2026. And, for its part, the Council of State has suspended or annulled other substantial decisions of the Executive.
The president questioned some of these decisions, which has happened to all leaders, but he went further: he accused the courts of being part of a “soft coup” against him, of playing into the hands of law or be part of an “institutional bloc” that can only be overcome through a Constituent Assembly. Recently, its biggest criticisms have been aimed at the Constitutional Court, which holds the future of pension reform in its hands, one of the few substantial legislative changes it has been able to pass. “Ultra-conservative courts have been created, tainted by the robe cartel and judicial cronyism and which do not accord with the social rule of law,” he wrote in September, in an interpretation of the country’s recent history, and despite decisions advanced by that same justice in matters ranging from abortion to non-reelection.
These general criticisms are what changed. Regarding pension reform, for example, he focused his questions on the rapporteur of the Constitutional Court, its president Jorge Enrique Ibáñez. “Magistrate Ibáñez, due to his ideological hatred, cannot act as an impartial judge,” he wrote in July. “The magistrates prevented us from building the road, I don’t know what Mr. Ibáñez and his friends thought,” he had questioned in a televised Cabinet meeting just three days earlier, alluding to a previous ruling. “Ibáñez does nothing but desperately try to see how the pension law is destroying the elderly and women of Colombia. How it is destroying the rights of the elderly,” he wrote once again this Thursday.
