The new president of Colombia together with the vice president. /
The newly elected president affirms that his goal is national reconciliation and building “one” country without “sectarianism” or desire for revenge
The challenge of building a great national agreement in which all the political forces participate, the commitment to fight for the development of the Peace Treaty and the promise that the change it is pursuing for Colombia will be based on a policy of understanding and dialogue, never for build more hatred, were some of the most important promises that Gustavo Petro (62 years old), elected president for the next four years, made in Sunday’s victory speech in Bogotá.
Petro won in a second round in which he added 11,278,437 votes (50%), while his rival, Rodolfo Hernández, obtained 47%, more than 10 million votes. The triumph of the economist, former mayor of Bogotá and with a rebellious past in the M-19 guerrilla group, means a turnaround in Colombian politics, which for the first time will have a left-wing leader.
It was the third time that Petro attended elections for the Presidency. In the 2010 elections, the candidate of the Historical Pact coalition and founding leader of the Colombia Humana party was defeated by Juan Manuel Santos and in 2018 by Iván Duque. He won in the appointment in which more Colombians have approached the polls.
On the way to power, he had the important collaboration of Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian environmental fighter. A human rights defender who in a short time has become a political landmark, to the point of having suffered several death threats. Márquez will be the vice president of a government whose priority will be to achieve peace in a country that lives with the scourges of drug trafficking, paramilitarism, guerrillas and political corruption. A nation in which more than eight hundred social leaders have been assassinated and which has the sad statistic of being the second with the greatest inequality in South America. “Peace is that someone like me can be president or that someone like France can be vice president. Peace is that we stop killing each other », Petro pointed out in his first speech after knowing the results of the vote.
Decades of stigmatization
In its editorial, the newspaper ‘El Espectador’ pointed out the importance of Colombia having a leftist leader for the first time. Under the headline ‘To heal wounds with an opening to the democratic left’, the Bogota newspaper elaborated: “After several decades of stigmatizing everything that was left, to the point of annihilating an entire political party for their way of thinking, Colombia elected this Monday, for the first time and in a forceful way, a president of that ideological tendency. The coming to power of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez also represents the materialization of one of the promises of a country that dreams of peace: the alternation of power, openness to all positions and the ability to process our differences at the polls. . It is a resounding rejection of the Government of Iván Duque and the two decades of Uribe domination. Now the question is how we are going to heal so many open wounds together.
The former guerrilla (50%) prevails over the populist Rodolfo Hernández (47%) with a margin of more than one million votes
‘El Tiempo’, for its part, also placed special emphasis on Petro opening a path of dialogue with all the parties. ‘Unpublished relief’ was the title of the editorial: «The challenges that Petro will face once he takes office on August 7 are many and very complex. There will be time to stop at each one. But there is a fundamental one: to show the spirit of a leader called to unite a divided country. Act with generosity and a sincere spirit of inclusion, without accounts receivable, with the greatness of rulers who look to the future. This implies understanding that his leadership now also covers the more than 10,580,000 people who supported Hernández’s aspiration. It is crucial to demonstrate with facts his commitment to the responsibility that he embodies as the highest head of the State, guardian of the Constitution. Turn the page of a long history marked by critical positions and give way to one in which the safeguarding of the rule of law depends on his decisions ».
In his speech, the new president of Colombia had already said that the change he is proposing for his country «is not to take revenge. We want Colombia in the midst of its diversity to be one. The elections more or less have shown two close Colombias in terms of votes. In this sense, Petro also called on Rodolfo Hernández and Álvaro Uribe, former president of the country between 2002 and 2010, and a man to whom the bad government of Iván Duque is attributed, to participate in the dialogue.
Congratulations from all the Latin American left
Petro received this Monday the congratulations of all the leftist leaders of Latin America. From Gabriel Boric, who governs in Chile, to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico; passed by Alberto Fernández (Argentina), Miguel Díaz-Canel (Cuba) and Nicolás Maduro, Chavista leader who heads the Bolivarian regime of Venezuela, who hopes to resume and improve diplomatic relations, welcomed the change experienced by Colombia.