Bogotá, August 5 (Prensa Latina) Gustavo Petro of the Historic Pact, a force representing progressive and left sectors in Colombia, will take over the presidency next Sunday of the country he is trying to transform towards total peace.
His acceptance, after winning the June 19 election by more than 11 million votes, is viewed in advance as an unprecedented event in this nation ruled by conservative forces for the last 200 years.
Born on April 19, 1960 in the municipality of Ciénaga de Oro, Petro has been a member since adolescence of the April 19 Movement (M-19), an urban guerrilla that took part in the internal armed conflict between 1974 and 1990. He demobilized as part of a peace process, a milestone in Colombia’s history.
This organization later became the Democratic Alliance M-19 (AD M-19), the second most important political force in the 1991 Constituent Assembly, and under its acronym, Petro was elected a member of the House of Representatives in the election of the same year.
The next president is an economist with a degree from Externado University of Colombia, specializing in public administration and environment and population development, a master’s degree in economics and a doctorate in New Trends in Business Administration.
He was a personero and councilor of Zipaquirá; Representatives of the Chamber of Congress for Cundinamarca, also for Bogotá; Mayor of this capital and later Senator.
He has received recognitions such as the Luis Carlos Galán Medal, awarded by the Congressional Ethics Committees for his fight against corruption; Defender of the Year award for his work on animal welfare, World Climate Leadership Award and others.
He was also received as honorary professor at the Universidad Nacional Lanús for his defense of human rights and peace; and in 2014 he was named the sixth best mayor in the world.
In 1994 he was appointed diplomatic attaché for human rights at the Colombian Embassy in Belgium, a position he held until 1996.
In 1998, Petro re-entered the House of Commons with the support of the Vía Alterna movement, which he had co-founded with other former members of the AD M-19 party.
During this time he was voted top congressman by both his peers and the national press for his denunciations of corruption and his debates on political control, including paramilitarism in Antioquia.
He served as a senator from 2006 to 2010, during which time he exposed the so-called parapolitical scandal, which revealed links between politicians and paramilitary groups.
As Mayor of Bogotá from 2012 to 2015 he created the Secretariat for Women and the LGBTI Citizenship Center was inaugurated, centers for birth control and abortion treatment were established in the cases permitted by law proposed as government policy to preserve the Bogotá wetlands and plan water conservation in the face of global warming.
During his tenure, the process of suppressing animal-drawn vehicles used by recyclers, some of whom received motor vehicles and subsidies, began, and bullfights were suspended.
In 2018, he was the presidential candidate for the Significant Movement of Citizens-Colombia Humana, garnering a historic vote of more than eight million votes. Due to the opposition statute, he became a senator by achieving the second-highest vote in the presidential election.
In the general elections of March 13, which also included bipartisan consultations, he was elected the Historic Pact’s presidential candidate with almost five million votes, and subsequently named environmental activist Francia Márquez as his running mate. Formula.
Since winning the second round, he has appointed prominent Colombian political figures from a wide range of backgrounds (liberals, communists, conservatives, indigenous leaders, Afro-descendants) to his cabinet of ministers.
The first of them was Álvaro Leyva, who will head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose task, said the future Foreign Minister, will be “to defend peace as a fundamental right, because without it all other rights perish”.
«It will be an office of peace. Colombia will bring all of its efforts to the world to overcome the climate crisis and we expect all of the world’s efforts to overcome our endemic violence,” Petro said in announcing the appointment.
Petro assured – after his election victory – that change, hope, love and the enormous effort to win the elections are not right in this country without peace.
Referring to the regional environment, he suggested that Latin America should “integrate more resolutely” because it needs to engage in the great dialogue that will enable the salvation of humanity, Petro stressed, referring to the new forms of energy production and transformation pointed out.
He also said it is time to sit down with the United States government and talk about what it means that they are emitting greenhouse gases like few other countries and Latin America is absorbing them from its Amazon jungle.
Starting next Sunday, Petro faces the challenge of furthering his government program, which, while not radical, at least puts people first, to transform a country he showed in last year’s social outburst who isn’t doomed to live another hundred years of solitude.