Gustavo Petro was still a teenager when he had to find a new name. Back then, in the late 1970s, Petro’s native Colombia had already seen decades of violence: conservatives against leftists, big landowners against small farmers, army against guerrilla organizations. That was one of them Movement 19 de April, M-19 for short. Ideologically comparatively moderate, their leadership had all the more sense for public campaigns. The M-19s ambushed delivery trucks and distributed the loot to those in need. Once the guerrillas stole the saber of Simón Bolívar, South America’s greatest hero of independence, from a museum.
All this made an impression on young students and also on Gustavo Petro, son of a teacher, gifted student and even more avid reader. When Petro joined the guerrilla he was just 17 years old. “I couldn’t use my real name on the M-19”, he later wrote in his biography. “So I had to look for a new one.”
That’s how he came up with Aureliano, like the main character of “100 Years of Solitude”, the novel by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, which tells the story of the village of Macondo, but also that of Aureliano Buendía, the colonel who goes to war with such conviction , but still loses all his battles – and so finally renounces violence.
In retrospect, this seems like an omen: after years in the guerrilla and a prison sentence, Petro campaigned for a peace treaty between M-19 and the government. He went into politics, became a deputy and mayor of Bogotá. Now the 62-year-old could even rise to the top of the South American country: Presidential elections are in Colombia on May 29 and Petro, the ex-guerrilla, is considered the most promising candidate.
Violence is escalating, drug trafficking is booming, and the economy is weakening
The vote is already seen as a crossroads. A choice that could shape Colombia’s course for decades to come – and one that comes at a time when things couldn’t be more tense.
In 2016, the government signed a peace agreement with the largest guerrilla organization, FARC. At the time, there was great hope that peace would return to the country. But promises have been broken on both sides, violence has long since escalated again, while drug trafficking is booming while the economy is weakening.
Even before the corona pandemic, Colombia was one of the countries in the world where wealth was distributed most unfairly. Today 40 percent of the people in the country live below the poverty line. Last year there were violent mass protests with street blockades, Molotov cocktails being flown and the police responding with brutal violence. Conservative President Iván Duque found it difficult to regain control of the situation.
In the population, however, he is more unpopular today than almost any other president ever before. He will not stand again in the elections at the end of May, and his party is now supporting the candidacy of Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, the former mayor of Medellín, who is fundamentally in favor of maintaining the political status quo in Colombia.
For decades, the country was ruled by more or less conservative politicians. Left-wing candidates quickly gained the reputation of being connected to the guerrillas and therefore had little chance at the polls. When Gustavo Petro ran for the first time in the presidential elections in 2010, he ended up in fourth place: not even a tenth of those entitled to vote had checked him at the time. But in 2018, when he tried again, the peace treaty between the government and the FARC guerrillas had already been signed. Voters’ confidence in left-wing candidates also grew – and so this time Petro made it into the runoff election.
If the latest polls are to be believed, it now looks like Petro may actually win the vote. It would be a turning point: Petro would be the first decidedly left-wing president in his country’s history. Critics from conservative and right-wing circles warn that Colombia could turn into a second Venezuela under him. “You are Chávez and Maduro!” Conservative competitor Fico Gutiérrez accused Petro during an election campaign debate.
Petro can hope for the most votes from first-time voters
Of course, there was an ulterior motive behind the warning: Conservative politicians in South America always use the socialist regime in Venezuela as a bogeyman when elections are coming up and left-wing candidates have prospects of success. This was the case in Chile, where former student leader Gabriel Boric was elected president last year, and this is the case again in Colombia.
However, the reality is quite different in both cases: Like Boric in Chile, Petro in Colombia is anything but a radical revolutionary. In Germany he might be associated with the left wing of the SPD or the Greens: he wants tax increases for the richest of the rich in the country and social programs for the needy. Colombia should make itself independent of the extraction and export economy, of coal, of gas and also of oil. For this, Petro wants to promote environmental protection and tourism. In this way, jobs should be created, poverty reduced and, ultimately, the violence should come to an end.
Since the 2018 presidential election, around four million young Colombians have been given the right to vote for the first time – and most of them will now vote for Petro. He’s also brought Francia Márquez on his team, an environmental and civil rights activist who, if she wins at the polls, could become the first black woman vice president in the country’s history.
The task that awaits the two of them would not be easy: heavily armed criminal gangs have entire parts of the country under their control. Poverty must be fought seriously, and the economy and old elites must be brought on board. But first of all, Petro and Márquez have to win the elections in the first place. If they don’t succeed in the first round on May 29th, there will be a runoff election scheduled for June 19th.