00:00I hear you perfectly, yes.
00:01Okay, okay.
00:02I hear you perfectly.
00:03So, Jonathan, we have been addressing the final week ahead of Sunday's general elections
00:08for Colombia.
00:10But can you tell us about the context on which these elections are going to take place?
00:15This take election, the context, international context like every other election in the world,
00:22Latin America particularly, suffers from being so close to the United States.
00:28Donald Trump is now wanting to enforce the Don't Draw Doctrine, which he already interfered
00:34in Honduras with the elections.
00:36And now there is a massive threat to the elections in Colombia by President Trump.
00:42Bernie Moreno, the senator, has threatened and made himself a monitor, so-called monitor,
00:49with 86 US so-called monitors of the elections because the Colombian government has been at odds
00:58with the United States due to the support of Cuba, Gaza, and other international issues.
01:04So, the United States is determined to decide the outcome of the next elections.
01:10That's the context.
01:11It's the same context with the war on Iran.
01:12What's happening in Venezuela is the war context.
01:15I think the Colombian elections are of historical importance.
01:19You were referring to threats to the elections and security concerns have been at the core
01:24of this electoral campaign.
01:25We even listened, we've seen President Petro denounce in several occasions the increase
01:31in paramilitarism activity, especially in the border with Ecuador and all the different
01:36denunciations of possible allegations of interference to use these kind of actions to interfere with
01:41the electoral process.
01:42So, how important is this security concern going to influence the electoral day and also
01:47the voters when they go to the polls?
01:50Yeah, it's not the first time and not the first place in the world where they use violence
01:54and threat and they use fear to scare the population and manipulate results.
01:58Colombia has a long history of it.
02:00It's a long history of mobilizing militias and right-wing militias and criminals, drug dealers,
02:08etc., drug lords, to intimidate the population.
02:11More specifically, this time in Ecuador, Novoa, the government of Novoa is to Serbian to the
02:17United States.
02:18So, he has facilitated a frame-up, manufactured a case against Petro, so that Petro is put on
02:27the OFAC list, one of those infamous sanction lists where the United States sees itself
02:33with the right of sanctioning those that oppose them.
02:37So, Novoa is part of this.
02:38They have been creating, manufacturing this.
02:41But it's also true that in Colombia there have been some security issues because Petro was
02:47trying to implement a policy that was sabotaged everywhere.
02:51The next president of Colombia is going to need a massive support.
02:55That's why it's so important that we win massively in the first round.
02:59But also, it's going to need a lot of support from the Congress, from the streets, from the
03:03trade unions, because the result of the sabotage of the ruling class against the peace program
03:09of Petro results in the issues that we have now, which of course they explode against us,
03:15or against the government that's trying to finally resolve the historical issues of peace
03:22and war in Colombia.
03:24This information campaign has also taken center stage as we head to the final stretch of the
03:30electoral campaign.
03:31For the electoral campaign, most candidates close.
03:34But in this final week, we have seen lots of this information campaign, especially in
03:38terms of polls.
03:39We have seen numerous polls putting Ivan Cepeda, the candidate for the historic pact, at the
03:43lead, followed by the right candidate, Al Alvarado, and then on third place, Paloma.
03:50But we have seen also the use of social media to try to slander and discredit the campaign
03:56of Ivan Cepeda.
03:57So how are these being influenced in the electorate?
04:04Yeah, well, they're always going to have an influence in the electorate.
04:07How are we fighting against that?
04:09The Cepeda campaign, one of the things that decided early on was to avoid the trap of the
04:15mass media debates that are manipulated by the mass media.
04:20So he went directly.
04:21He toured 23 departments of Colombia.
04:24The breadth of Colombia he toured to speak directly with people.
04:28Only in one of the cities was 80,000 in Barranquilla.
04:34And then in total, after 70 speeches, 177 events, he spoke to almost a million people
04:40directly, the people.
04:41So that's one of the other ways of fighting.
04:43The other way of fighting, of course, is everybody, citizens, because this has been a
04:48campaign that has been promoted by the population.
04:53Another way of fighting it is in the media.
04:56You know, those who know how to use Twitter and all the rest.
05:00Particularly important because Netanyahu and Millay, the Honduras gates, these tapes were
05:06released where it was clear that Netanyahu and Millay are comparing to interfere with
05:11the elections in Colombia and in Mexico using what you just say, which is media slanders.
05:16So we are working hard on that.
05:19And that's why Cepeda prefers to speak directly to people.
05:23And we all try to do as much as we can to spread the word and fight the false narratives.
05:29Taking into account that the agrarian reforms are something that Petro has fought for the
05:35last four years of his term, but he has seen a lot of, let's say, pushback coming from the
05:41so-called oligarchies that still remain in Colombia.
05:44How important going to be that rural sector for the upcoming electoral vote?
05:50It's so important that Bernie Moreno referred to the peasants who live in certain areas, areas
05:57of Colombia in the south, that he didn't even want to acknowledge their votes.
06:02He says certain areas of Colombia cannot be trusted who they're going to vote for because
06:07he came up with some excuses about drug lords and that.
06:09But what he would like to, is to, to annul the results and to disenfranchise these people,
06:14these peasants.
06:15So for Bernie Moreno, Senator of the U.S., to be so interested in that,
06:19it means that they're important, they're very important.
06:21They're also very important because really the agrarian question is what you asked me earlier
06:26about peace and war in Colombia, about crime and everything.
06:29The roots of it is that the agrarian revolution against the Spanish was not completed 220 years ago.
06:39The result is this unfairness on the land.
06:42And not coincidentally, Paloma, one of the adversaries of Cepeda, a right wing adversary,
06:50she comes from a family, a family that has a long standing in the south of Colombia,
06:55in that area, of being the inherited, the seudo-feudalistic ways of the past.
07:02And this family has actually called for rules dividing the indigenous from the Creoles.
07:09And she represents the landlords in Colombia.
07:12So Cepeda chose Ida Quilke, which is an indigenous who represents the fight against the land grab.
07:19And as the vice-presidential formula, Ida Quilke, she is an indigenous, because it is at the center of the
07:29issue.
07:29And one of the main reasons the ruling classes of Colombia oppose Petros and Cepeda projects
07:38is because they relied on the poverty and misery of the Colombian working class to stay really, really poor.
07:44And also that their main source of profit is super low wages.
07:49And for that, they cannot afford to liberate the land, according to the narrow-minded oligarchic interests.
07:55So yeah, the agrarian reform right in the middle of it.
07:58And very quickly, before we conclude, election day comes on Sunday.
08:03What do we need to keep our eyes peeled on?
08:06Everybody, we are calling on everybody around the world to come and volunteer,
08:10be the volunteers and the Colombian citizens, and also abroad and everywhere in the world,
08:15to look after the elections, to be ready to denounce any irregularities,
08:19because we need to look after these elections like we are looking after the future of our country.
08:24The sovereignty of our country is at stake, the same way that the sovereignty of Cuba is at stake right
08:30now
08:30and everybody else, even if they're going to use different weapons with us that they will use in Iran or
08:35Cuba
08:35or anywhere else, with all targets of imperialism.
08:38And the next great battle we have is on Sunday, turn up and decisively vote for Cepeda.
08:45Thank you, Jonathan, for your time here from the South and your inputs in this final week
08:49as we head to the polls in Colombia.
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