By: Staff Writer
June 21, 2022
Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla movement, who has vowed profound social and economic change, won Colombia’s presidency on Sunday, the first progressive to do so in the country’s history.
Mr. Petro, 62, received more than 50 percent of the vote, with more than 99 percent counted Sunday evening. His opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, a construction magnate who had energized the country with a scorched-earth anti-corruption platform, just over 47 percent. The margin was over 700,000 votes.
Just over 58 percent of Colombia’s 39m voters turned out to cast a ballot, according to official figures.
Mr. Petro’s victory reflects widespread discontent in Colombia, a country of 50m, with poverty and inequality on the rise and widespread dissatisfaction with a lack of opportunity, issues that sent hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets last year.
Petro’s win was welcomed by the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guteres who issued a statement: “The Secretary-General commends the people of Colombia for their participation and historic voter turnout in the second round of the presidential elections held yesterday, 19 June, that resulted in the election of Gustavo Petro and his running mate, Francia Marquez.
“The Secretary-General welcomes the largely peaceful conduct of the election, which reaffirms the strength of Colombian democracy and the progress brought about by the peace process.
“The Secretary-General welcomes the ongoing dialogue to ensure a harmonious transition between the outgoing and incoming administrations.”
The win is all the more significant because of the country’s history. For decades, the government fought a brutal leftist insurgency known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, with the stigma from the conflict making it difficult for a legitimate left to flourish.
But the FARC signed a peace deal with the government in 2016, laying down their arms and opening space for a broader political discourse.
Mr. Petro had been part of a different rebel group, called the M-19, which demobilised in 1990, and became a political party that helped rewrite the country’s constitution.
Hernandez, a late comer to the election, swept in and blew past previous candidates in a firestorm that was cult-like in nature. He came from nowhere and riled up Colombians and made a strong case for him becoming president, but Petro was too strong.
The election of Petro signals a move away from the centre-right politics that has dominated Colombia in the past three decades
Petro’s victory could spell more about Venezuela’s influence in the region than it is about his victory because it was reported that Petro was backed by Venezuelan President, Nicholas Maduro, in what some would call a direct slap in the face of the United States that looked for Colombian support on the Venezuelan political, economic and migrant crisis.
Shortly after the vote, Mr. Hernández conceded to Mr. Petro.
“Colombians, today the majority of citizens have chosen the other candidate,” he told his supporters in Bucaramanga. “As I said during the campaign, I accept the results of this election.”
Petro’s win is also significant because for the first time in Colombian history a woman of African-descent will hold the vice presidency. Francia Marquez, his running mate in Sunday’s runoff election, is an environmental activist from La Toma, a remote village surrounded by mountains where she first organised campaigns against a hydroelectric project and then challenged wildcat gold miners who were invading collectively owned Afro-Colombian lands.
The politician has faced numerous death threats for her environmental work and has emerged as a powerful spokeswoman for Black Colombians and other marginalised communities.
“She’s completely different than any another person that’s ever had a vice presidency in Colombia,” said Gimena Sanchez, the Andes director for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.
“She comes from a rural area, she comes from the perspective of a campesino woman and from the perspective of areas of Colombia that have been affected by armed conflict for many years. Most politicians in Colombia who have held the presidency have not lived in the way she has,” Sanchez said.