Bogota: In a first for the country, Colombia will have a leftist president. Former rebel and longtime senator, Gustavo Petro, won presidential election held Sunday receiving more than 50 percent of the vote. Gustavo pledged to transform the country’s economic system and will now lead the third largest nation in Latin America in a radically new direction.
Petro, 62, defeated Rodolfo Hernandez, a construction magnate. Petro’s victory draws on the widespread discontent in Columbia, a country of 50 million, with poverty, inequality and unemployment on the rise that led to hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets last year.
Backdrop : For decades the Columbian govt brutally fought leftist insurgency known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, making it difficult for a legitimate left to thrive. In 2016, FARC signed a peace pact, laying down their arms and paving way for dialogue.
Gustavo Petro was member of a separate rebel group called M-19 that demobilised in 1990, and became a political party that helped rewrite the country’s constitution.
