- Daniel Brown
- BBC Mundo correspondent in Colombia
image source, Reuters
The first president of the left. The first African vice president. The first time that progressivism has majorities in Congress. Nobody so far from the political elites had come to power, much less a former guerrilla and an environmental activist.
The list of historical milestones produced by the rise of Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez is long. Reflection of an unexplored path that begins to be traveled this August 7, when the Historical Pact, the Petrista coalition, assumes the reins of the Colombian State.
Since the electoral victory, on June 19, the symbols and protest celebrations of a part of the population that until now felt not only underrepresented in politics, but also abandoned by the State, have dominated the public debate. There is talk of a national agreement for life and for peace. The expectations are huge.
It is likely that as days go by, the historical nature of the presidency will fade into the background. How the government seeks to meet complex social, economic, and political demands will focus Colombians’ attention.
The bar that Petro himself set is, as he admits, so high that it seems difficult to meet in four years of mandate. He also faces a sensitive economic situation, an uncertain international context and a persistent armed conflict in some regions of the country.
With 11.2 million votes, Petro is the most voted candidate in history. But for the other candidate, Rodolfo Hernández, 10.5 million voted and they will be alert to any movement they consider harmful. The opposition, although divided after the elections, promises rigorous oversight through Congress, the press and other state and non-governmental entities.
Only the performance of the government will make it possible to know whether Petro and Márquez lived up to their own historical status.
A look at the milestones of his presidency explains why expectations are so high.
image source, Getty Images
1. The first president of the left
In two centuries of republican history, there are few examples of alternative governments that sought a fundamental change in the political and economic model that governed the country from the beginning.
There were reformist presidents like Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo in the 30s or popular leaders who marked politics as Jorge eliecer gaitan in the 40s, but the changes of the former were frustrated by a reactionary right, and the latter was killed in the middle of the electoral campaign.
Petro, like them, has a critical reading of the Colombian model. He wants to reform sensitive elements such as land ownership, the exploitation of natural resources, and the pension, health, and education systems.
Former M19 guerrilla, vehement congressman who denounced the corruption of the political class and controversial former mayor of Bogotá who fought with all the existing powers, Petro has tried to moderate his figure during the campaign and after the victory.
The question that is beginning to be answered this Sunday is whether the left-wing Petro obsessed with rupture will be replaced by a fair-minded deal-maker seeking gradual and moderate change.
The scope of his leftist agenda, which comes to power for the first time in Colombia, will depend on which of those two versions ends up ruling.
image source, Getty Images
Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez.
2. The first former guerrilla in power
The absence of left-wing leaders in the Casa de Nariño is explained, in part, by the guerrilla war that began in the 1960s. The phobia for an agenda that sounded subversive, the right-wing of the Armed Forces and the alliance with the United States in the midst of the Cold War marked Colombian politics for at least 40 years.
But the country has been changing. An advanced Constitution was signed in 1991, the various regions were connected to each other thanks to an infrastructure revolution and the new generations began to turn the page of the armed conflict, especially after the signing of peace with the FARC in 2016.
These are fundamental changes that created the political space for a former guerrilla fighter to become president.
In 1977, at the age of 17, Petro joined the April 19 Movement (M-19), an urban and social democratic insurgent organization that was created after an electoral fraud in 1970.
He was in that guerrilla for a decade. He was twice detained and tortured, he denounces. He traveled all over the country promoting the revolution. In the end, when the M-19 demobilized in 1990, he had to go into exile in Europe for four years.
Since he returned in 1994, Petro has become a key figure in politics, but until now the economist had not been able to remove the label of former guerrilla.
“Peace is that someone like me can be president and someone like France can be vice president,” he said in his victory speech in June.
No one imagined that someone like him, who represents everything that millions of Colombians viscerally reject, could come to power. But he could. And he made history.
image source, Getty Images
“Live tasty” is one of Márquez’s campaign slogans
3. The first government that represents the diversity of Colombia
Colombia has one of the largest Afro populations in Latin America. Its regions also have the biodiversity of an entire continent. Few countries in the world have such a wide multiplicity of indigenous communities.
But Colombia’s immense ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity had not been represented in the national government. Until now.
the vice president, France Marquez, comes from one of those isolated and discriminated regions: Cauca, in the southwest. She became a politician because of her activism against multinational mining companies seeking to exploit her ancestral land. She is black and a feminist. She was a service employee and a single mother.
Márquez’s profile, so similar to that of millions of women, made Colombians talk about racism, classism and gender during the campaign. Themes absent in previous campaigns that now set the tone.
Such was the impact of Márquez on Petro’s candidacy that millions of people in peripheral areas of the country, where abstention prevailed for decades, participated in the elections. It was the key to victory in the second round.
Petro announced that the ambassador to the United States will be an Afro leader from Chocó, an expert in the environment, Luis Gilberto Murilloand that the ambassador to the UN will be an indigenous leader dedicated to defending ancestral rights, Eleanor Zalabata.
They are unprecedented, symbolic appointments, which are added to the list of novelties represented by the government that begins this Sunday.
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