Colombia’s ongoing general strike, which began on April 28 against a regressive tax reform bill, is now entering its second month. Facing down deadly police force and food shortages, protesters across the country have remained in the streets while the right-wing government of Iván Duque continues to dig in its heels, hoping that exhausted and terrorized demonstrators will eventually return home.

As Forrest Hylton recently argues, “La Resistencia” seems to be winning the war of attrition and the Duque government may be headed for a legitimacy crisis with no way back. Meanwhile, with each passing day that protesters hold the streets, the general strike casts a longer shadow over 2022’s general elections.

Organizing the strike and channeling protesters’ demands presents a particular challenge, and the country’s diverse social movements have played a vital role in that sense. But three interrelated aspects of the general strike have proven especially challenging. The largely spontaneous nature of movement numbering in the millions has posed significant organizational questions, and the coordination of diverse demands — long neglected by Colombia’s thirty-year neoliberal order — is a daunting task. Similarly, Colombia’s cause-specific and geographically limited social movements are not always equipped to manage a protest movement whose scope is clearly national.