By Horacio Duque on March 1, 2025
ex Colombian president Alvaro Uribe
Lawfare is the legal war that the fascist far right has been waging since 2022 against the government of President Gustavo Petro of Colombia and his programmatic platform of structural transformations to achieve peace, social and environmental justice.
Now it is the attack on Law 2381 of 2024, which establishes the Comprehensive Social Protection System for old age, disability and death of common origin and makes other provisions.
In effect, this new legislation, inspired by popular mobilization and the programmatic basis of the popular government, establishes a set of norms that favor the rights of the adult population, in particular more than 3 million elderly citizens who find themselves in a situation of absolute vulnerability, poverty and social abandonment, to whom an allowance of 224 thousand pesos (55 dollars) will be paid monthly.
Once this law was passed, with the corresponding procedures, placed under the constitutional control of the Constitutional Court, a cascade of lawsuits and challenges was unleashed from the field of the neo-fascist far right, orchestrated by one of the most recognized figures of Uribismo, Paloma Valencia, who with trickery and legal quibbling has insisted on destroying all the rights enshrined in this important piece of social legislation, while those of her oligarchic social conglomerate are the beneficiaries of insulting pension and benefit privileges, precisely in Colpensiones, the public institution that attends to such prerogatives.
In these terms, a magistrate of the reactionary cave of followers of Uribe, Jorge Ibáñez, from the most obscurantist currents of the legal circles of the high courts, has presented a plan for the Constitutional Court in full to declare Law 2381 unenforceable, annulling the social advances achieved by the national government and popular mobilization. The law is set to go in effect on July 1.
The ruling has a clear political and antisocial edge that must be rejected by the popular majorities of the country.
In this sense, the main alternative to defend the law is social and popular mobilization in front of the Constitutional Court in the Palace of Justice.
We must not give any more time to the delay and the maneuver of the extreme right that wants to claim a victory against popular rights by annulling this significant social leap represented in the law that we are defending with determination and commitment.
May young people, women and the full power of the constituent multitude make their repudiation felt in the face of this barrage from plutocratic elites full of hatred against people in socially vulnerable conditions.
Source: Rebelion translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English