Colombia’s next president is a former guerrilla and an anti-corruption crusader
. He won 11m votes in an election in June. It was Mr Petro’s third run at the presidency, following defeats in 2010 and 2018. Colombia has been shaken by the covid-19 pandemic and rising poverty, which catalysed two big protests against. Mr Petro owes some of his success to these demonstrations, which spurred many young and apolitical people to vote.
Mr Petro has long fancied himself a revolutionary. In 1977, as a 17-year-old, he joined the April 19th Movement, a nationalist guerrilla group known by its acronym M19. Unlike the FARC and other peasant guerillas, M19 was an urban movement mostly made up of educated youths. Mr Petro chose Aureliano as his, after Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a character from “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, a novel by Gabriel García Márquez.
Mr Petro was in jail for allegedly storing weapons when M19 performed its most infamous act. In 1985 around 30 members stormed the Supreme Court. Half of the court’s 24 judges were killed in the ensuing crossfire after the army intervened; nearly 100 other people also died. This episode has been touted repeatedly by Mr Petro’s critics during election campaigns to cast doubt on his democratic credentials .
After M19 demobilised in 1990, Mr Petro worked as an adviser to the assembly that rewrote Colombia’s constitution. The following year he became a congressman for Alianza Democrática, a centre-left party of former guerrillas. In 1994 he left Colombia for a diplomatic posting in Belgium, after a failed bid for the Senate and because he had received his first death threat. Several former M19 members had been assassinated.
As president-elect Mr Petro has signalled a different tack. He still harbours some revolutionary spirit: during the campaign he promised to provide all unemployed Colombians—11% of the workforce—with a state job if they cannot find work in the private sector. He pledged to prohibit new licences for oil and gas exploration, even though extractive industries make up around half of Colombia’s exports. But much of his idealism is now tempered with pragmatism.
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