In 2007, Gustavo Petro was visiting Washington, DC, when he made an uncommon request: to accompany his host’s good friend on a faculty pickup run.
On the time, Petro was a rising star within the Colombian Senate who was in the USA to obtain the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award for exposing politicians’ ties to paramilitary teams. His host was Sanho Tree, director of drug coverage on the Institute for Coverage Research (IPS).
“That’s one thing I can’t do in Colombia,” Tree remembered Petro telling him. “In case your assassins know you’re going to choose up your child at a sure time, that’s extraordinarily harmful.”
Such risks weren’t new to Petro.
He started his profession being hunted by troopers as an armed insurgent with the M-19, an underground scholar motion that sought a fairer, extra democratic Colombia. After laying down his rifle, he grew to become a whistleblowing senator, holding hearings on the shadowy alliance between politicians and paramilitary teams that reached the best echelons of energy – and earned him a value on his head from a paramilitary chief.
All through, he has pursued the identical points in a rustic torn aside by many years of armed battle and the place land has lengthy been concentrated within the fingers of the rich few.
“One factor we will say about Petro is that he’s been constant,” stated Alejandro Gaviria, Petro’s former training minister, who has been each a critic and ally of the president.
“For those who watch an interview of his 20 years in the past, he has precisely the identical concepts. Then he was speaking about peace, land reform; he was even forward of his time speaking about environmental points.”
In 2022, Petro was elected the primary left-wing president of the South American nation and entered the presidential palace with guarantees to steer Colombia in a extra equitable, eco-friendly route.
On the worldwide stage, he has been a uncommon determine amongst Latin American leaders as an outspoken critic of US President Donald Trump. After the US attacked Venezuela in early January and kidnapped the nation’s chief, Nicolas Maduro, Trump threatened army motion in opposition to Colombia. The previous insurgent responded by saying he would “take up arms” once more to defend Colombia. A detente quickly adopted after a telephone name between the leaders.
As Petro has struggled to place his concepts into observe all through his time period and confronted tensions with Trump, what drives Colombia’s president?
Bookish insurgent
Petro was born in 1960 to a middle-class household within the Caribbean coastal city of Cienaga de Oro, however spent a lot of his childhood within the wet capital, Bogota, and his teenage years within the metropolis of Zipaquira.
From a younger age, he questioned authority.
“He likes dialogue, however not dogma,” his father, Gustavo Petro Sierra, as soon as stated in an interview the place he recalled an incident when his son was three. He had tried to punish his son by slapping his hand, however missed and unintentionally struck his face. Petro had appeared his father within the eye and yelled, “Don’t hit me within the face, Dad!”
Petro’s father, a trainer, impressed his son’s love of studying, and Petro was notably influenced by the celebrated novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Colombian creator Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His father gave him a duplicate as a birthday present when he was a toddler, in line with former Tradition Minister Juan David Correa, who met Petro in 2021 because the editor of his memoir.
The magical realism epic immortalises Colombia’s civil wars and sophistication struggles by way of the saga of the Buendia household by way of the Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After independence from Spain in 1810, Colombia skilled intermittent warfare between its two principal political factions: the secular, reformist Liberals and the Conservatives, who needed to take care of the Catholic, colonial establishment.
“That was a ebook that was definitive in our lives as Colombians,” defined Correa, noting Petro’s perception that Colombians should know their historical past.
“We’ve to know who these oligarchies or aristocracies are that dominated the nation over the previous 200 years of solitude [since independence], as [Petro] referred to as it.”
Within the colonial period, the Spanish oversaw a feudal-like system by which landless campesinos (rural employees) toiled for a pittance on behalf of rich landowners. Within the Colombia that Petro grew up in, this method persevered. Even on the daybreak of the brand new millennium, just one % of landowners possessed half the arable land.
As a boy, Petro’s mom, Clara Nubia Urrego, would inform him tales concerning the turmoil within the nation, together with the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Gaitan, a presidential candidate for the Liberals, referred to as for reforms, together with land distribution, which landowners fiercely opposed. His homicide in 1948 kicked off a decade of bloodshed, generally known as La Violencia, between Liberal armed rebels and the Conservative authorities.
A truce in 1958 led to a power-sharing association between the Liberal and Conservative events, generally known as the Nationwide Entrance. Issues had seemingly calmed by the early Nineteen Sixties, however in 1964, impressed by the Cuban Revolution, the remaining Liberal rebels roaming the countryside got here collectively because the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller Nationwide Liberation Military (ELN).
In the meantime, the Nationwide Entrance blocked any professional options, going as far as to rig the election on April 19, 1970 in opposition to the populist ANAPO (Nationwide Fashionable Alliance), which attracted individuals fed up with the two-party system, together with Petro’s mom, who had joined the get together. Seeing his mom’s disappointment on the election outcomes grew to become Petro’s political awakening. He was 10.
At his Catholic faculty in Zipaquira, Petro and three different associates shaped a examine group and pledged to dedicate their lives to a greater Colombia. They learn Alternativa, a left-wing journal based by Garcia Marquez, which ran interviews with Chilean and Argentinian rebels and criticised the US sway over Latin America. They grew to become concerned with native unions, bringing collectively employees, salt miners and academics.
In his memoir, Petro remembers his “communist” beliefs didn’t make him well-liked with monks or his classmates whose dad and mom hung portraits of Spain’s fascist dictator General Francisco Franco on their partitions. However he credit his highschool because the place the place he realized about liberation theology, a strand of Catholicism that advocates uplifting the oppressed.
“Since then, love for the poor has remained by my facet,” he wrote.
“I didn’t study that from Marxism, however from liberation theology.”
Occupying a hillside
In 1978, after enrolling at college in Bogota to check economics, Petro was handed a doc by Pio Quinto Jaimes, a trainer concerned in activist circles. It outlined the objectives of an underground scholar motion generally known as the Nineteenth of April Motion or M-19, named after the 1970 election. Jaimes was impressed by Petro’s work with the unions and thought of him a worthwhile prospect for the group.
Though usually described as “city guerrillas”, M-19 was distinct from the uniformed rebels of the FARC or the ELN. Whereas the FARC recruited from rural employees and needed a Cuban-style Marxist revolution, M-19 primarily consisted of politicised college students who sought social democracy, denied by the two-party system.
In contrast to the FARC’s camouflaged commandos, who would raid military outposts earlier than disappearing into the jungle, M-19 operated within the cities and most well-liked symbolic stunts reminiscent of stealing the sword of Simon Bolivar, Colombia’s Nineteenth-century liberation hero, from a Bogota museum.
“Bolivar has not died,” learn a observe they left behind. “His sword continues his battle. It now falls into our fingers, the place it’s pointed on the hearts of those that exploit Colombia.”
The M-19 hijacked milk vehicles to redivert the products to poorer neighbourhoods, and orchestrated kidnappings concentrating on Colombia’s rich elite.
Petro learn the doc from cowl to cowl.
“The motion linked me with the fact of the nation, with my mom’s tales about Gaitan, Bolivar, and the ANAPO,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was as if it had struck a chord that intensely stirred some fibres inside me.”
Petro, together with two of his highschool examine group associates, joined the M-19.
Though he realized to make use of a gun, he didn’t participate in armed operations. He was as a substitute tasked with disseminating propaganda. He took on the nom de guerre Aureliano, after a insurgent chief in Marquez’s novel.
After commencement, Petro returned to Zipaquira and was elected an ombudsman, a public advocate, in 1981, to listen to residents’ complaints concerning the native authorities.
Within the early Eighties, Petro edited a publication – Letter to the Folks – the place he referred to as on readers to occupy a hillside on the outskirts and switch it right into a housing venture for poor individuals. Some 400 impoverished households answered the decision and located 22-year-old Petro and a bunch of younger activists measuring out 6-by-12 metre (19.7×39.4 ft) plots. There have been no wells or sewage, and residents needed to gather rainwater.
The squatters had been ultimately granted permission to remain by the mayor, and the group advanced right into a neighbourhood named Bolivar 83.
‘My youth was over’
By 1984, as peace negotiations between the federal government and M-19 gained momentum, Petro publicly acknowledged his involvement within the group.
“I did so at an illustration that was one of many largest within the municipality’s historical past,” he stated in an interview. “From then on, my life modified. My youth was over.”
After telling the group he belonged to M-19, Petro stepped again to applause.
However not everybody was happy.
Petro’s father, who had no concept about his son’s secret life, was shocked by the dangers he had been taking.
The talks with the federal government quickly fell aside, that means M-19 members had been as soon as once more targets for arrest. Petro was compelled to go underground.
He lay low in Bolivar 83, sleeping in numerous beds every night time, and wore a disguise, a yellow costume and a wig, pretending to be a girl.
Round this time, Petro had a psychedelic revelation beneath the steering of a shaman on a sacred mountain. Ingesting ayahuasca, a robust Amazonian brew, he skilled intense visions. The primary confirmed an Indigenous princess descending from above as he was enveloped by roots.
“What does this imply?” he requested the shaman.
“Effectively, you’re like a spirit caring for nature,” the non secular healer replied.
Petro, who recounted this expertise within the ebook Kids of the Amazon (2023), stated this was the second he realised his accountability in the direction of the surroundings. His second imaginative and prescient was extra troubling: he noticed his personal loss of life throughout an ambush.
In October 1985, troopers poured into Bolivar 83, scouring the neighbourhood for M-19 rebels and intimidating residents. A terrified boy revealed the key tunnels the place Petro was hiding.
Petro was arrested, tortured for 4 days in a army barracks, and imprisoned. He served 16 months for possession of weapons, which he claimed had been planted.
Whereas imprisoned, he missed the beginning of his first son, Nicolas. Katia Burgos, his spouse, who he had recognized since childhood, was additionally with M-19.
In the meantime, Colombia’s inside armed battle escalated past the rebels and the federal government.
The rise of narcos
The emergence of drug cartels or narcotics traffickers, aka narcos, added one other dimension to the battle.
Cocaine, a white powder refined from coca leaves, gained reputation within the Seventies, fuelled partly by US disco tradition. Initially, Colombia was primarily a transit level for cocaine smuggled from Peru or Bolivia, however it was not lengthy earlier than coca cultivation expanded inside Colombia, quickly turning into essentially the most viable livelihood in rural areas.
Cocaine barons and different rich businessmen started bankrolling personal armies and paramilitaries to guard their households and property from armed rebels.
Though each had been engaged in prison actions, the rebels sought to overthrow the ruling elite, however the narcos needed to turn out to be a part of it, pitting them on reverse sides of the battle.
After his launch from Bogota’s La Modelo jail in 1987 at age 26, the unease of Petro’s riot days caught with him, and he even took to sleeping with an assault rifle beneath his mattress.
The next 12 months, he met Mary Luz Herran, an ardent M-19 member since she was 14. They might go on to marry and have two youngsters, a daughter named Andrea and a son named Andres, earlier than splitting.
Quickly after they met, in 1990, the M-19 grew to become the primary important insurgent group to demobilise, reworking into the M-19 Democratic Alliance get together.
Nevertheless it was a harmful time to be in Colombian politics.
Within the Eighties and 90s, some 6,000 members of the left-wing Patriotic Union get together had been killed by narcos, paramilitaries and the safety companies.
M-19 weren’t spared, both. In 1990, their presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, was shot on board a passenger airplane mid-flight.
Whereas serving a time period in Congress, Petro started receiving loss of life threats from a paramilitary group referred to as Colsingue, or Colombia With out Guerrillas, and for his and his household’s security, he agreed to a diplomatic posting in Belgium in 1994. Whereas there, he studied environmentalism and economics on the College of Louvain, and he grew to become deeply within the work of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who warned that whereas the worldwide financial system depends on fixed progress, the Earth can’t be exploited without end.
However Petro grew stressed in Brussels. “I felt bored, nostalgic, and wanting to return to the political area,” he writes in his memoirs.
He returned to Colombia, the place he was re-elected to Congress in 1998. Two years later, he met his third spouse, then a 24-year-old regulation scholar named Veronica Alcocer. They quickly married, and regardless of preliminary pressure with Veronica’s father — whom Petro described as an “virtually fascist” in an interview with a Colombian journal — Petro and his father-in-law grew shut by way of their shared love of studying and intellectualism. His funeral in 2012 was one of many few occasions Petro cried in public. They’ve two daughters, Sofia and Antonella.
In the meantime, in a bid to start out peace talks in 1998, then-President Andres Pastrana conceded territory roughly the scale of Switzerland to Colombia’s largest armed group, the FARC. It was meant to be impartial floor, however the rebels used it to recruit and prepare youngster troopers, develop coca, maintain captives and implement their very own model of justice.
Enter Alvaro Uribe. A right-wing hardliner, Uribe received the 2002 presidential election by promising to quash the rebels with an iron fist.
With US assist, Uribe’s beefed-up army inflicted devastating defeats on the FARC. Washington had an curiosity in stopping the movement of cocaine from the supply to the US, and within the 2000s and 2010s, Colombia was the third-largest recipient of US army help after Israel and Egypt.
Defying loss of life squads
General, safety improved, however the Uribe period revealed that the authorities had been colluding with paramilitaries for years. Whereas presenting themselves as anti-communist vigilantes, the paramilitaries had been answerable for the lion’s share of civilian deaths, terrorising huge swaths of the nation.
In a single notably brutal episode in 1997, a band of armed males descended on the village of El Aro in Antioquia. Villagers had been brutally tortured and raped, and as much as 17 individuals had been killed. The paramilitaries burned the village down as they left, and witnesses reported seeing a helicopter circling above — a yellow plane belonging to the Antioquia governor’s workplace, which on the time was occupied by Uribe.
The ghosts of El Aro had been reawakened within the parapolitica (para-politics) scandal of 2006 after journalists and prosecutors revealed that a number of lawmakers had been in league with far-right paramilitary teams, permitting them to homicide and intimidate opponents whereas enriching themselves by way of bribes and unlawful land grabs.
What occurred subsequent grew to become one of many defining intervals of Petro’s profession. He held public hearings and accused the perpetrators of the El Aro bloodbath of working with Uribe’s blessing whereas he was governor, reminiscent of by helping set up civilian “self-defence” teams as a entrance for the militias.
“Why the silence, Mr President?” Petro pressed him at a listening to. “Or does the federal government settle for that violent narcoterrorists have a presence in its ranks?”
The then-president fired again, calling the senator a “terrorist in civilian garments”. Uribe’s alleged paramilitary ties later landed him in a years-long courtroom case from 2012, ending in his conviction for witness tampering final 12 months, which was quickly overturned on enchantment.
Having misplaced comrades like Pizarro to the bloody purges of the Eighties and 90s, Petro knew all too properly what he was up in opposition to. The scandal established him as a fearless crusader, however received him few associates.
“He was the one to [expose the paramilitaries] at a time when it was extremely harmful,” stated Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, a human rights advocate on the Washington Workplace on Latin America (WOLA).
“The impunity was so rampant … he was talking to a Congress the place 30 % of it was linked to those teams.”
Tree, who nominated Petro for the human rights award in DC, remembered how the senator was on edge throughout this era.
“After I would meet with him within the mid-2000s in Bogota, he couldn’t stand close to a window, and each night time he needed to go dwelling by a unique route,” Tree recalled.
Petro’s paranoia about standing close to home windows was not unwarranted; Salvatore Mancuso, the strongman behind the El Aro bloodbath, later confirmed that Petro’s identify had certainly been on his hit checklist.
Mayor of Bogota
In 2010, Petro launched his first presidential bid however discovered himself at odds along with his personal get together, the Democratic Pole, which sidelined him in favour of one other candidate. Petro ran anyway and got here in third general.
He based a brand new get together, Humane Colombia, and efficiently ran for mayor of Bogota in 2011.
Whereas the earlier mayor and his brother profited from corruption, Petro carried out many progressive reforms. A ban on brandishing firearms in public noticed homicide charges plunge to a three-decade low. Petro’s administration addressed animal cruelty, stopping the practices of utilizing horse-drawn carts for garbage assortment and bullfighting, and pioneered cellular clinics for homeless drug customers, treating dependancy as a matter of public well being.
“We had been the primary organisation to suggest these [drug] reform concepts,” stated Julian Quintero, director of Social Technical Motion (ATS), a Bogota-based NGO targeted on hurt discount and drug coverage reform.
“Petro participated with us, and he form of embraced the proposals we made to him.”
However Quintero famous that Petro’s governing model was additionally uneven, characterised by a fast turnover of employees – a preview of his presidential years.
“Petro did very properly as a senator as a result of he’s an excellent analyst who trembles with accusations when he’s within the opposition,” Quintero stated.
“However when he takes workplace, he doesn’t stand out for his bureaucratic and technical expertise. He’s not an excellent administrator. He modifies groups in a short time, not permitting for continuity in his tasks.”
Furthermore, he added, in Colombia, “the left isn’t used to governing”.
Quintero famous that deeply entrenched right-wing pursuits additionally made Petro’s job harder. A failed try to overhaul the capital’s waste administration system in 2013 ignited a political battle that noticed Petro ousted from workplace by the arch-conservative Legal professional Normal Alejandro Ordonez. That call drew mass protests, and Petro was reinstated a month later – an indication that his model of politics was gaining momentum.
Path to victory
In 2010, Petro had misplaced his presidential bid to Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s defence minister, who oversaw his marketing campaign in opposition to the FARC within the 2000s. Nevertheless it was Santos who – to Uribe’s dismay – brokered peace with the rebels in 2016.
When Uribe’s protege Ivan Duque took workplace in 2018, nevertheless, the federal government largely deserted that settlement, and violence surged.
“[The Uribe faction] needed a candidate, mainly a puppet, who was to tear up the peace settlement and never let it advance,” WOLA’s Sanchez-Garzoli defined.
Armed teams, together with rogue FARC commanders, drug cartels and paramilitaries, rushed to fill the power vacuum, the place they as soon as held sway.
Then, in 2021, Duque’s try to lift taxes prompted mass protests that had been met with police brutality and dozens of deaths. The unrest and rising public disillusionment with the established order, now totally uncovered by the collapsing peace course of and the pandemic-ravaged financial system, meant Colombia lastly had a gap for its first progressive president; a break from the conservative elite reminiscent of Uribe and Duque, who got here from, and represented the pursuits of, the rich landowning class.
A leftist coalition referred to as the Historic Pact rallied behind Petro for the 2022 elections.
Keen to incorporate Liberals as properly, Petro reached out to economist and former authorities official Gaviria.
“It’s form of humorous as a result of whenever you see him at a rally, he’s actually energised, however in a one-on-one interplay, he’s timid, he’s quiet, he’s tough to interact in dialog,” Gaviria stated, recalling Petro’s go to to his dwelling as he tried to construct a coalition.
“When he visited my condominium, I used to be attempting to ask him questions, and he by no means stated something to me. He stayed silent for 5 minutes.”
The presidential hopeful ultimately proposed that Gaviria, then the Liberals’ presidential candidate, ally along with his progressive forces.
Finally, within the second spherical of the election, Gaviria threw his assist behind Petro, who provided him a spot in his new cupboard as training minister when he took workplace that August.
Worldwide stage
As president, Petro took his message to the world. At his first United Nations speech, he warned, “the jungle is burning” whereas world powers had been combating over medicine and sources. He highlighted what he noticed because the hypocrisy of vilifying cocaine whereas defending coal and oil.
“What’s extra toxic for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?” he requested. With Colombia’s cocaine business having fuelled many years of civil conflict, Petro has referred to as for cocaine legalisation, calling the so-called conflict on medicine a failure.
“Cocaine is prohibited as a result of it’s made in Latin America, not as a result of it’s worse than whisky,” he instructed a broadcast authorities assembly in February 2025.
In confronting the local weather disaster, he has halted fracking and new fuel tasks to shift Colombia in the direction of clear power. In an financial system reliant on gas exports, nevertheless, this determination has been met with fierce scrutiny.
Petro has additionally sought to deal with the nation’s armed battle.
Influenced by French thinker Jacques Derrida, who believed true forgiveness meant forgiving the unforgivable, Petro offered Congress with a plan to convey all remaining cartels, armed rebels and paramilitaries to the desk, together with by suspending arrest warrants and empowering native leaders as mediators.
The plan was referred to as “Whole Peace”.
‘A dream’
Petro’s peace initiative was put to the check in Buenaventura, a key Colombian port on the Pacific Coast. The port had lengthy been a strategic hub for cocaine smugglers loading cargo onto ships certain worldwide.
Then, in 2019, a lethal turf conflict exploded. Residents had been terrified to go away their houses. In desperation, native archbishop Ruben Dario Jaramillo carried out a mass exorcism of town by spraying the streets with holy water from a convoy of autos.
However in October 2022, the leaders of two rival gangs met and shook fingers at a church service, due to a truce brokered by Jaramillo, constructing on the Whole Peace initiative. The next six weeks noticed just one killing, in contrast with the earlier month-to-month loss of life toll of 25.
The broader peace plan, nevertheless, has had flaws. Anticipating a deal, armed teams consolidated their positions to get the higher hand in negotiations whereas profiting from ceasefires to recruit and resupply.
As Quintero noticed, the teams calling themselves “guerrillas” at present are principally prison gangs utilizing the label to legitimise their actions. “There are not any guerrillas with the ideology to overthrow the state,” he stated.
“[Instead], at present there are gangs of very well-armed drug traffickers posing as guerrillas.”
The 2 most problematic ones are the Gulf Clan and the ELN. The Gulf Clan is a robust narco-paramilitary crime syndicate demanding talks to barter their give up whereas aggressively increasing its empire. The ELN continues to hold out assaults and kidnappings and is battling a renegade FARC faction within the dense jungles of Catatumbo, a fertile coca-growing area close to Venezuela, displacing tens of 1000’s of individuals and prompting Petro to declare a short lived state of emergency final January.
Gaviria stated that whereas reining in closely armed drug sellers hiding in mountains and jungles could be difficult for any authorities, Petro has not likely had a plan.
“He thought political will was sufficient to realize Whole Peace, which is totally unsuitable,” Gaviria stated.
He in contrast Petro’s strategy with Santos’s.
“Santos had a technique, a bunch negotiating with the FARC. He met with that group each week, having conversations along with his specialists around the globe … he was very disciplined in the best way he was conducting this tough subject.
“Petro was simply utterly totally different. No technique in any respect,” Gaviria added. “Huge bulletins and political will. [Petro] thought that was sufficient, and now we all know that no, it was not sufficient, particularly in case you’re coping with such a fancy drawback.
“Whole Peace was not a technique. Whole Peace was an concept, a dream.”
The chaotic nature of Petro’s cupboard has additionally sophisticated issues. The turnover fee is excessive, averaging a brand new minister each 19 days. Gaviria resigned in early 2023, together with three different ministers, throughout a fallout over well being reforms. And 13 ministers misplaced or left their jobs in simply three months between late 2024 and early 2025.
“I believe it is a direct results of his model of policymaking,” stated Gaviria, describing it as “undisciplined”.
Petro tends to exchange ministers with loyalists and former members of the M-19, whereas publicly squabbling with former employees and accusing them of disloyalty. Some join Petro’s perilous previous to this governing model.
“Petro has a paranoid model of presidency that just about defines him,” stated Gaviria.
“He’s at all times considering that there’s a conspiracy in opposition to him. And doubtless this concept is said to being a former guerrilla member and dwelling [in hiding].”
Correa agreed, noting that Petro doesn’t belief many individuals.
The replacements he selects, too, are usually not essentially the best-qualified.
For instance, Sanchez-Garzoli believes the ELN peace course of collapsed as a result of Petro appointed “an ideologue and fewer of an actual negotiator”.
“They mainly blew aside a course of that might have demobilised 1000’s,” she defined.
For Gaviria, Petro is nowadays extra involved in ideological battles on social media than in main the nation. “I believe he is aware of that he has not been an efficient president,” he stated. “Governing a rustic might be tough, boring … [and to be successful] it’s a must to have interaction in tough conversations. You need to change your thoughts.”
Petro, he believes, has struggled to simply accept that “tragic future”.
Legacy
Petro’s advocacy on Palestine – and the severing of diplomatic ties with Israel over its genocidal conflict on Gaza – the local weather disaster, drug reform and willingness to confront Trump have received him worldwide reward. Trump, with none proof, has accused Petro of operating cocaine mills and referred to as him a “sick man” on a number of events.
Again dwelling, Petro factors to having diminished poverty and toddler mortality charges, elevated agricultural manufacturing, and offered higher entry to training, however his criticised peace technique has didn’t ship broad demobilisation, and stark inequality persists. His approval rating has dropped from 56 % when he took workplace to virtually 36 %.
Petro’s presidency has been overshadowed by scandals, together with his eldest son Nicolas’s arrest for alleged cash laundering linked to narco marketing campaign funding. He calls such assaults concentrating on his inside circle “lawfare”, geared toward weakening him, one thing he skilled when he was briefly ousted as mayor of Bogota.
“The very first thing they tried to destroy was my household,” he instructed Spanish day by day El Pais final February. “They needed to destroy the emotional ties as a result of a person with out emotional ties turns into laborious, dangerous, and errs.”
He conceded that the presidency is a job that brings him “absolute unhappiness”.
As Petro faces the tip of his presidency this 12 months, his legacy could also be that of a polarising determine, a revolutionary who tried to overthrow the system from inside — but was unable to resolve Colombia’s hardest challenges.
Nonetheless, Petro’s supporters see his presidency as the beginning of a social transformation.
“Our nation is a really conservative society; our values, our classism are very, very evident,” stated Correa.
“I believe that it’ll take two generations to reconstruct the society … And I believe that this authorities represents solely a starting, a seed for the brand new era.”
