It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Gustavo Petro’s election as the President of Colombia. For the first time in the two centuries of the independent history of the region’s third largest country (in terms of population), the Left has reached the Casa de Nariño, the presidential palace in Bogotá. It has done so with the highest number of votes of any President (more than 11 million), and after an election with the highest electoral participation rate (58%). This is also with the overwhelming support of the country’s youth. It has also brought to the vice-presidency, for the first time, an Afro-Colombian woman, Francia Márquez, an environmental activist from Cauca, one of Colombia’s poorest and most marginalised areas.
A similarity
Colombia’s unique history, which inspired the magical realism genre in Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, makes it stand out on Latin America’s vast and colourful canvas. The same goes for Mr. Petro’s condition as a former urban guerrilla, a member of M-19, a group that wrought much havoc in a country marked by the dubious distinction of having had the longest armed conflict in the world — that between another guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Colombian government, from the 1960s to 2016. In another sense, though, the story of Mr. Petro’s election and the challenges he faces once he takes office on August 7, are not too different from that of several other countries in the rest of the region.
