The Small COVID-19 Dictatorship in Colombia: Use and Abuse of Ordinary and Exceptional Regulations to Confront the Pandemic

Abstract

The use and abuse of the state of emergency in Colombia were constant during the XIXth and XXth centuries. Because of that, the constituent of 1991 was careful in regulating the emergency states by establishing a system of rigorous and demanding limits and controls. The main goal of this piece of writing is to make evident how extraordinary powers have been used in Colombia for facing ordinary situations. And nowadays, paradoxically, some ordinary competences are being abused for facing an extraordinary situation as the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 disease. The National Government and the local government have faced, for several months, the worst social and economic crisis in the history of the country with measures designed for normality, and the Police Code. This became a de facto state of emergency. Through a descriptiveanalytical methodology, this study could demonstrate that limiting the fundamental rights with police competences is a way of eluding the righteous constitutionality controls by the National Government. Furthermore, several controls established in the constitution and the law were not efficient during this crisis, which fractured the Constitutional Rule of Law and led us, for several months, to being governed by the little dictatorship of the COVID-19.