Polls show Gustavo Petro as the clear favorite in Colombia’s upcoming presidential election. Here we take a look at his political history.
After a solid display in Colombia’s congressional race and a landslide win in his coalition’s internal consultation, pollsters now have Gustavo Petro in pole position to become the first left-wing president in the country’s history.
With almost five decades in politics, despite being just 61 years of age, Mr. Petro witnessed firsthand how violence during the Cold War era made Colombia one of the most dangerous places on Earth in which to participate in public affairs.
As a member of the armed left, he was a protagonist in multiple landmark moments in the country’s contemporary history, from the demobilization of guerillas to the drafting of the Constitution.
Now, he could put an end to 25 years of right-wing dominance – in a country that has so far been the clearest exception to the so-called “pink tide” in Latin America.
The years of violence
Mr. Petro was imbued with politics from a young age. As a child in the 1960s, his mother recounted stories about Eliécer Gaitán, the popular leftist leader killed in 1948, whose death sparked the Bogotazo protests and then the proto civil war known as La Violencia.
These were the days of the Frente Nacional in Colombia, an alliance between the country’s two traditional parties, Liberals and Conservatives, which saw them sharing power and rotating the presidency while marginalizing other groups.
The main critic of that duopoly was General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, a popular dissident conservative that imitated Argentina’s Juan Domingo Perón, during his military interregnum in the 1950s.
Mr. Pinilla built a growing alliance with the left, and on the night of the 1970 election, official results had him as the unexpected winner against the Liberal-Conservative pact. But by the next morning, his narrow victory had turned into a narrow defeat, amid multiple accusations of fraud in distant regions. Political disenfranchisement paved the way to violence.
While Mr. Pinilla didn’t call for insurrection himself, many in the left-wing faction of his ANAPO party did, leading to the birth of the April 19 Movement, or M-19, named after the night of the infamous vote.
Growing up as an ANAPO sympathizer, the bookish Mr. Petro had been gravitating towards left-wing authors, making him an intellectual rebel in his Catholic high school. He also became increasingly convinced of the futility of peaceful democratic efforts, seeing the ousting of Salvador Allende in Chile as a repeat of the fraud in his home country.
Contacted on the quiet by M-19, he joined the group before his 18th birthday. He earned the nickname Comandante Aureliano, after one of the characters in Gabriel García Márquez’s best-selling novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Although Mr. Petro received some basic weapons training, his role in the group was not on the frontline, but he instead mainly carried out political work under his real name in poor neighborhoods around Bogotá, becoming a local councilman.
That changed in 1984, when he revealed his secret identity at a public rally, during one of the temporary ceasefires negotiated between the state and armed groups. When the ceasefire broke a year later, authorities chased him down and jailed him.
Tortured for days, Mr. Petro’s position was made even more precarious after the catastrophic M-19 attempt to occupy the country’s Justice Tribunal in late 1985 to demand a public trial of President Belisario Betancur. The army stormed the palace with tanks and helicopters, leaving more than 100 dead, including 11 out of the country’s 20 Supreme Court justices.
Peace deals and rise
Mr. Petro only regained his freedom in the last 1980s, as violence in Colombia reached its peak, with drug lords challenging state power, M-19’s historic leadership dead, and guerrilla movements seeking a peaceful way out of the conflict.
By now one of M-19’s top decision-makers and negotiators, Mr. Petro was involved in brokering a peace deal with the government in 1989, as the armed group morphed into a democratic socialist party known as Alianza Democrática, looking to take part in the upcoming year’s presidential election.
But peace, as has often been the case in Colombia, was extremely hard to sustain. Four presidential candidates were murdered in the build-up to the 1990 vote, including favorite Luis Carlos Galán, from the Liberal Party, killed by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s hitmen.
Colombia’s biggest guerrilla group, the FARC-EP, had followed a similar path to Petro’s M-19, laying down their weapons and forming the Patriotic Union party. But they dropped out of the electoral race after their candidates Jaime Pardo Leal, and then Bernardo Jaramillo, were gunned down.
A fourth assassination victim in short succession, Carlos Pizarro, was Mr. Petro’s presidential candidate and party leader.
In a recent interview, Mr. Petro confessed that, at the time, he had considered taking up arms again, though the cooler temper of Antonio Navarro – who replaced Mr. Pizarro in the presidential race, finishing third with a respectable 12 percent of the vote – prevailed, convincing Mr. Petro to stick with the peace process.
In 1991, Mr. Petro would serve as an economic adviser in the rewriting of Colombia’s century-old Constitution, a historic process to which his newly formed party contributed 19 out of 70 Assembly members.
After a stint in Congress, Mr. Petro took a diplomatic position in Brussels to escape a new wave of death threats at home. European life, he has commented, made him a more cosmopolitan person, helping broaden his political perspectives and to move him in a more social-democratic direction, incorporating new themes like environmental protection – central to his current presidential campaign.
Back in his country, Mr. Petro became arguably the main adversary of right-winger Álvaro Uribe, the dominant political figure in Colombia this century. Mr. Petro exposed ties between Uribe’s close circle and paramilitary death squads, denouncing multiple “false positive” cases according to which the military presented bodies of non-belligerent civilians as if they had been killed in action. He also uncovered an illegal wiretap scheme used against opposition leaders, judges, and journalists during Mr. Uribe’s presidency.
Mr. Petro even entered into a tacit political alliance with Mr. Uribe’s hand-picked successor, Juan Manuel Santos, as the latter drifted to the political center to sign a peace deal with the FARC, strongly opposed by Mr. Uribe.
It took Mr. Petro years to broaden his appeal sufficiently to simultaneously rally most of the left behind him, while remaining critical of corruption and violence, from his side of the ideological divide, to remain viable beyond these circles.
His win in the Bogota mayoral race in 2011 was far from a landslide, with just 32 percent of the vote, and his second-place finish in the first round of the 2018 presidential race was even narrower. But despite losing the runoff to the incumbent, Iván Duque, by 41 to 55 percent, pollsters now see him as the leading candidate in the 2022 contest.
With chaotic Venezuela to its east, Colombia is still suffering from the spillover of Chavismo’s socio-economic collapse, having welcomed almost 2 million refugees over the last decade. Mr. Petro will have to allay fears about his connection to the dreaded authoritarian regime in the home stretch of the campaign.
But with a political platform promising increased state intervention and redistributive policies, which dovetail with the large-scale left-wing protests that have taken place in the country since 2019, his chances are better than ever.