Photo: Facebook / Gustavo Petro
He was born and grew up surrounded by poverty in the mining town of Zipaquirá, north of Bogotá. He was a guerrilla fighter, he’s the favorite to take over Colombia’s presidency next month, and he wants to attack the rampant poverty plaguing the country head-on. This is Gustavo Petro, the left-wing candidate with a strong chance of becoming Colombia’s next president, with a plan with a social-democratic approach and concrete measures to overthrow the state compared to the government of right-wing Iván Duque.
According to the World Bank, 40% of Colombians live below the poverty line and have one of the widest gaps in the world between rich and poor, which Petro cannot bear. “If we continue on this path, the country will fall into the abyss (…) People are disillusioned, that’s why I’m at the top of the polls,” Petro said in a recent interview with the US media NPR.
For decades, the left has been banned from Colombian politics due to a political pact between right-wing and conservative parties to take turns and share power, Petro says. This recent history led him in 1978 to join the April 19 Movement, one of the guerrilla movements that formed in Colombia after the Cuban revolution. His guerrilla name “Aureliano” was inspired by a fictional military officer who was constantly fighting a losing battle in Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The M-19, as it is also known, is accused of carrying out hijackings, robbing banks and staging a 1985 Supreme Court siege in which clashes with security forces killed more than 90 people. Although the military had been receiving intelligence reports since August suggesting the M-19 was taking the palace, security personnel provided by the National Police were withdrawn without notice two days before the attack, which is still being questioned.
Later, the guerrilla movement devoted itself to stealing trucks from supermarket chains to distribute groceries in marginalized neighborhoods.
“I walked through mountains and indigenous reservations. He was in daily contact with poor people,” Petro recalls of those years, believing that this close contact with hunger and misery has given him a focus that he can apply to executive branch politics.
Gustavo Petro with his vice presidential candidate Francia Mázquez. Photo: Facebook / Gustavo Petro
From disarmament to democracy
Petro was one of the key articulators of the M-19’s disarmament after becoming disillusioned with armed combat. In 1990, in negotiations with the Colombian state, the movement became a left-wing party.
But running for president of the republic was always a risk: It was not until 1990 that Carlos Pizarro, the supreme commander of the M-19, ran for president but was shot dead by an anti-Communist assassin weeks before the elections. A month earlier, Bernardo Jaramillo, another left-wing candidate from a different political force, had also died from a gun.
Between 1994 and 1996 he was appointed to a diplomatic position as Colombia’s representative in Belgium, but then returned to Colombia with a view to parliament: in 1998 he was elected to the House of Representatives, where he worked until 2006.
He always had to maintain a strong guard to protect his life, especially when he wanted to become mayor of the capital, Bogotá. Armored by bodyguards, he managed to seize the mayoralty in 2011, and his key achievements have been reducing poverty and crime to make Bogotá a major tourist destination in the region today.
Steps by the Presidency
In 2018, Petro ran for president again, losing to conservative Iván Duque. But under the Conservative president, drug-related violence has increased in rural areas, a nationwide strike has paralyzed major cities over the past year, and poverty has increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The government’s lack of capacity to deal with a national emergency has left many people upset and upset. And I think that gives Gustavo Petro a real opportunity,” says Sergio Guzmán, director of the Colombia Risk Analysis consultancy.
If Petro wins, he would become Colombia’s first left-wing president, a path paved in part thanks to the peace accords of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), now a political party with active participation.
As expected, his socially-focused proposals are alarming and uneasy among businesspeople and the country’s wealthy classes: he wants to raise taxes on the rich and print money to pay for poverty-reduction programs.
It is aiming for a greener and more decarbonized economy by halting new oil production entirely and reducing hard coal production, even though these commodities are the country’s two top exports.
Petro proposes a 12-year transition period, saying Colombia’s dependency on fossil fuels can be replaced with a boost to tourism, injections into agriculture and industries set to be carbon-neutral.
The left-wing candidate’s proposals are in line with the guidelines of last year’s UN climate change conference in Glasgow, which Iván Duque chose to ignore entirely.
He will seek more international help, particularly from the United States, to protect Colombia’s Amazon rainforest.
On drugs, he has a completely opposite vision to that of Duque, who favored a US Nixon-style frontal attack. In Colombia, little or nothing worked directly; on the contrary, the situation has deteriorated in some places. For Petro, a whole new relationship with Washington needs to be forged and bilateral drug cooperation agreements renegotiated.
And as if that weren’t enough, for the first time in Colombia’s history, an Afro-racial person would enter the presidential palace, despite 25% of the population being of this ancestry, according to the Ombudsman’s Office. Francia Márquez would be the vice president in a possible Petro government. “I am a daughter of blacks, Raizal and Palenquero, mother of two children and caretaker of the big house: the biggest womb, mother earth,” says the activist, who has campaigned against illegal mining in her country.
She is also a lawyer with a degree from the University of Santiago de Cali and was awarded the 2015 National Human Rights Award and the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize for her fight against environmental degradation.
“The rich are at risk of losing some of their privileges, as it should be in a true democracy that values equality and participation,” says Arlene Tickner, professor of international relations at the Universidad de Rosario in Bogotá. “Remember that Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America and the world, and it’s a shame we haven’t had a more progressive president.”