A review of the most controversial, questioned and outstanding moments of the political trajectory of the presidential candidate for the Historical Pact, since he served as councilor in Zipaquirá, when he was already a member of the M-19
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File photo. Colombian left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, of the Historic Pact coalition, waves as he arrives for a debate in Bogota, Colombia, on May 26, 2022. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez
“It was not a situation easy for me: the military believed that I was a mamerto, while those who lived in legality considered me a military man. I felt like the protagonist of Facundo Cabral’s song called ‘I’m not from here, nor am I from there’”. One life, many lives, p. 156.
Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego has roots in all sides and sectors, as well as in no one in particular. No city or movement can fully attribute the political success represented today by the coalition’s candidate for the Historic Pact. Today’s winner and, so far, the most likely candidate for the presidency of Colombia is a political melting pot.
The natural leader of the Colombian left is the son of Clara Nubia Urrego, a member of the National Popular Alliance (Anapo) from Gachetá (Cundinamarca), and Gustavo Ramiro Petro, a descendant of Italians, sympathetic to the ideas of the ultra-conservative former president Laureano. Gómez, who came from the department of Córdoba to study in Bogotá.
The love of Petro’s parents arose in the capital. Although the politician’s baptism certificate says that he was born in Ciénaga de Oro (Córdoba), on April 19, 1960, His childhood memories are shared between the Las Cruces neighborhood of Bogotá, the Colombian Caribbean and Zipaquirá (Cundinamarca).
In this last municipality he studied his first years. They first enrolled him in the San Felipe Neri school, where he said he had experienced mistreatment —and, with it, demotivation. Later, when a car ran over him on the adjoining road, Mrs. Urrego decided to enroll him in the Canadian Gymnasium. There he felt well treated and finished primary education.
His passing to high school coincided with the move of his family to the La Esmeralda neighborhood, in Zipaquirá, a municipality that then it was mining vocation. Petro describes it as a working-class neighborhood in his biography, “ One life, many lives” . He went to study at the San Juan Bautista de La Salle school —formerly called the National High School—, where the Nobel Prize for Literature Gabriel García Márquez was a graduate.
The day he turned ten years old, April 19, 1970, was the presidential election in which the controversial victory of the conservative Misael Pastrana Borrero over the Anapo candidate, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, was presented, which would give rise to the insurgent Movement 19 of April, the M-19, of which he himself would be a part years later. It was the time of the National Front: the liberals and the conservatives made a deal and had taken turns in power for four terms to remove Rojas Pinilla from power, who had staged a coup in 1953.
Gustavo Petro, who considers himself an expert in mathematics, assures that that day he did several calculations complex for his age and concluded that Pastrana’s triumph was not possible: something had happened in the counting of the votes. That day, he assures him, he had committed a fraud.
In 1973, after the coup in Chile and the suicide of President Salvador Allende, Petro participated in his first demonstration in Zipaquirá. That gesture did not go down well with the priests, who had it in their eyes, despite having good grades.
The current candidate thought that most of his companions were from the Zipaquireña middle class, while he studied there only because his father was the secretary of the educational establishment. Therefore, he found many differences between his living conditions and those of his companions.
Parents also did not like the mamerto child who went to their children’s homes to explain the issues to them and who was part of reading clubs organized by university students in the capital. Due to pressure from the guardians and priests, Petro graduated from high school without honors, despite having achieved one of the best scores in the state tests in the entire country.
In a report for the magazine Cartel Urbano in 2018, Father Miguel Ángel Serna stated: “I don’t like that Petro’s name is related to our school”; The priest assured that he and his classmates showed a “belligerent and immoral” character during their time on campus.
The adolescent Petro was not too interested in combining with his classmates either, he preferred the company of the workers who discussed the country accompanied by some bitter. He began studying Economics at the Externado University of Colombia because his father was a graduate from there and the teachers were the same ones who taught classes at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the National University of Colombia.
By then the “M” came into his life: the urban insurgent group founded on April 19, 1974 —when Petro was in the ninth grade— that took up arms after the alleged fraud committed against Rojas Pinilla and defended in the cities the popular demands of the left.
Petro, together with three friends from school —Jairo Navarrete, Germán Ávila and Gonzalo Galvis— founded the group JG3. Later, Navarrete joined the Police with the idea of creating an insurrection from the public force —a purpose that did not prosper—, and the others joined the M-19 in 1978. Petro was 18 years old and led a double life: he was a an average scholarship student in Bogotá and an M-19 militant in Zipaquirá. Among other things, his time in the insurgency left him with one of his hallmark characteristics: his imperturbability.
“Our military training was more in clandestine techniques, learning to resist torture in case we were captured. That moment greatly influenced my personality. We had to be strong, focused, silent: under pressure, we had to learn to remain calm. That has served me well in life, in the toughest parliamentary debates, to keep me calm and focused”. One life, many lives, p. 56.
In that Cundinamarca municipality, he led the occupation of land to build an invasion neighborhood called Bolívar 83, which still exists. According to him, people who had been dispossessed in Pacho by drug trafficker Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, alias El Mexicano, came to live there.
In 1984 he became a councilman, but the M-19 was not very enthusiastic about its members’ foray into politics or about Petro’s peaceful ways, so they expelled him, along with his friends, although he was later reinstated.
A prison first arrived in 1985, after a boy revealed his location to the Army, intimidated by the threat that his mother would be killed. Not long ago, he had found out that Katia Burgos, his girlfriend and also his combatant, a native of Ciénaga de Oro, was expecting Nicolás, his first son.
He was held without an arrest warrant, tortured by agents of the public force and confined in four places: the Cavalry School of the North Canton, the La Modelo Prison, the Picaleña de Ibagué —after they led a protest to let the prisoners work. prisoners—and La Picota de Bogotá—when there was an escape attempt in Ibagué and they blamed him.
Contrary to what some versions on the networks affirm Gustavo Petro watched the Palace of Justice takeover on a television in prison. However, due to a protest statement issued by the M-19 that bore his signature, he was blamed for it, and it remained in the popular imagination that he had participated in the takeover.
In February 1987, when he was released from prison, he preferred to go underground in Santander. There he met Mary Luz Herrán, his first wife, with whom he had his children Andrés and Andrea. This name is special for Petro. When he just joined the M-19 he had chosen the alias Aureliano, in honor of Gabriel García Márquez. Years later, he adopted the alias of Andrés, as a gesture of admiration for Andrés Almarales, a combatant whose integrity and ability to oratory stood out, and who died in the capture of the Palace of Justice.
< p class=”paragraph”>Carlos Pizarro Leongómez he had assumed command of the M-19 at that time. He had many discrepancies with him, since the new commander did not believe in peace and was so against entering into dialogue with the government that, on one occasion, he sent his troops to train with the FARC in the mountains of Tolima.< /p>
“I felt like a fly in milk there. My interest was to build regional dialogue, not to participate in a military operation. Through dialogue, he did everything possible to postpone the offensives and give space and time to political development. He felt that, sooner rather than later, there was going to be a collision between the two factions.” One life, many lives, p. 146.
The disagreements with Pizarro caused him to be demoted and sent to Barrancabermeja, where he was handed over to the Army through trickery. He was able to get out of jail, after the end of the state of siege, convincing an ordinary judge that the subversive was not him but his cousin, who was an accountant by profession and had been wrongfully apprehended. Mary Luz, who was not a member of Eme, was arrested in Ibagué in 1989.
In Petro’s version, the peace accords between the M-19 and the national government came about after he insisted to Pizarro tirelessly. According to sources collected by Juanita León and Laura Ardila, from La Silla Vacía, other combatants of the time affirmed that the M-19 always had a vocation for peace and it would be wrong to attribute the victory of the process to a single person. .
Petro found out about Pizarro’s murder at his home, along with Mary Luz, in April 1990. Despite disagreements with him, he was very sorry for his death and felt betrayed by the government. They were not the only ones: in a previous interview, the current senator Aída Avella pointed out the State’s responsibility in the death of the alternative candidates in the 1990 elections.
“We, from the Patriotic Union, felt this murder firsthand because they were the same ones who were assassinating those from the Patriotic Union in the company of the same ones who were doing it with the militants and candidates of the Patriotic Union. Afterwards, in the course of the events, it is seen that the same escorts of Dr. Galán helped and the same escorts of Bernardo helped in his death; And if we go back to Carlos Pizarro, some of the same escorts that were escorting Bernardo became escorts for Carlos Pizarro,” said the senator.
However, Antonio Navarro Wolff, who took the reins of the now M-19 Democratic Alliance party, tried to calm the waters and prevent the collective effort of the demobilized insurgency from collapsing. The movement debuted in national politics by participating in the National Constituent Assembly as one of its most relevant forces, along with the National Salvation Movement and the Colombian Liberal Party.
Petro points out as an error the agreement that Navarro signed so that the constituents were disqualified from participating in the immediately following legislative elections. With this, he froze the aspirations of many ex-militants. However, he was elected in the House of Representatives in 1991 with six other people.
According to his version, Petro invited the then rector of the National University of Colombia, Antanas Mockus, to who aspired to the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá. He was finally chosen, but Petro was burntin his attempt to ascend from the House to the Senate. This, added to the death threats that began to arrive from the paramilitary group Colombia without Guerrillas (Colsingue), forced him to accept a proposal from President César Gaviria: exile.
The Petro family arrived in Brussels to fulfill a diplomatic function without speaking English or French. The children were very young and learned French as their first school language, but Gustavo Petro began to feel lonely, isolated and depressed. In addition, the Colombian ambassador to Belgium, Carlos Arturo Marulanda, did not know where to put him and showed contempt for his insurgent past.
The now first secretary of the embassy did several things in his room. First, he enrolled in the Diploma in Environment and Population Development at the University of Leuven; there he had his first contact with ecological causes. Second, he learned to drive; he stopped doing it when he returned to Colombia, in accordance with his newly adopted environmental struggle.
Finally, Petro learned to use a desktop computer and accessed the internet. In his words, as any boomer would say when learning basic office automation, “I became a hacker. A rudimentary hacker, but with access anyway.”
With this new knowledge, he did several things: among them, he accessed the news from Colombia and discovered that his boss, the ambassador, was involved in a diplomatic operation to hide the real situation of the armed conflict in the country. In addition, a paramilitary massacre with more than 200 victims was carried out on a farm owned by him.
In 1997 Petro returned to Colombia with his family and made his first attempt to reach the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, but he did not have the media impact of Mockus: his defeat against Enrique Peñalosa was resounding. However, the AD M-19 was presented to the legislative in 1998 and Petro re-entered Congress, from where he did not leave until 2009.
During his time in the legislature, the congressman led all kinds of debates: from land grabs in Bogotá, through the case of Banpacifico and the wiretapping to the complicity of national and regional politics with paramilitarism. He was considered one of the best parliamentarians. At that time, in addition, he met his second and current wife, the sincelejana Verónica Alcocer García . The Polo Democrático party also emerged, which included the left at the end of the millennium.
Perhaps its only black mark in the legislature was recorded in 2008: Petro voted in favor of the election as prosecutor of Alejandro Ordóñez, a far-right Catholic man who has been against personal freedoms. In addition, it was the same official who dismissed him when he was mayor of Bogotá.
< p class=”paragraph”>During his time as a parliamentarian, Petro also had a face-to-face meeting with the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), Carlos Castaño Gil. The congressman described that interaction as one with “a mentally weak person, who was diluted by opponents with deep convictions and ideas. Within a few minutes he was stuttering and regressing.” In his version of the story, he warned Castaño that he would die at the hands of his own men if he did not advance a peace process. That’s how it was: Carlos died at the hands of his own brother, Vicente.
In 2009 he left the Senate of the Republic to aspire to the presidency the following year. He wanted the support of the Democratic Pole, but this party already had a projected candidate: Carlos Gaviria Díaz, from Antioquia, who had already lost to Uribe in 2006 and was considered one of the best jurists in the country.
The beginning of their presidential candidacies
Petro pressed for an internal consultation of the Pole and was the winner against Gaviria, but several aspects played against his presidential aspiration. In the first place, neither Gaviria himself nor other important figures of the Polo, such as Navarro Wolff and the then mayor Samuel Moreno, supported him.
“Gustavo Petro’s attitude and his incompatibility with Carlos Gaviria made joining forces impossible. Putting one’s own interests above those of the party was an attitude of Petro’s that Gaviria was unable to understand, stop or endure,” writer Ana Cristina Restrepo, author of Gaviria’s biography, told El Tiempo in an interview.
Secondly, this vote took place in October, while that of the newborn Green Party —which, according to Petro’s version, was founded with his help and from which he was later displaced— was at the same time as the 2010 legislative elections.
Although long presidencies were fashionable in Latin America, at that time the Constitutional Court did not like the idea of a second re-election of Álvaro Uribe Vélez and ruled against him. His strategy, from then until today, would be to govern in a foreign body . To do this, he would use Juan Manuel Santos, his last Minister of Defense. The Green Party’s consultation positioned them as the legitimate alternative against Uribe’s successor and wiped any other alternative candidacy off the map, including Petro’s.
In the end, Gustavo Petro was third in the first round with 1.3 million votes. Although Petro had been an ally of Mockus in the 1990s and despite the historical importance of that vote, the first without Uribe, the former candidate became a promoter of the blank vote for the second round.
Petro criticized the move in other politicians eight years later, when he went to the second round against Iván Duque to be the successor of Juan Manuel Santos, the winner of the contest in 2010, who did the opposite of what his mentor intended — with peace process included—.
The blank vote was not the only slam of Petro’s door that year: he was in charge of denouncing the irregularities in the hiring processes in Bogotá during the mayoralty of Samuel Moreno, grandson of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and member of his own party. In addition, he gave his party an ultimatum: if Iván Moreno, Samuel’s brother and president of Polo, did not leave, he would leave . So, Petro left behind a discredited party from the roots and that never believed in him at all.
In 2011 she created the Progressive movement, from which she ran for Mayor of Bogotá . He competed against nine candidates, including two old rivals: Gina Parody and Enrique Peñalosa . Petro won the election with 732,308 votes, 32% of the total, with a 10% advantage over Peñalosa.
During his four years as mayor (2012-2016), Gustavo Petro focused on engaging in social dialogue with vulnerable communities, such as homeless people and sex workers, to learn about their needs. It also extended the school day in the district, invested in cultural and musical programs, approached the problem of drug addiction as a matter of public health and not of security —something that no one had done before in Colombia— and freed 2,700 horses from work that were in the hands of recyclers.
The city also improved in other indicators in which he did not have as much influence, but which he has also attributed to himself: the implementation of the vital minimum —from the previous administration—, the reduction of poverty and the drop in the rates of criminality —which was occurring at the same time in the rest of the country—.
The attacks against his performance in the second most important position in Colombia came from several fronts. One came from the most affluent Bogotanos, who have the resources to educate their children without depending on the State and have a bad concept of drug use. The management of Petro’s mayor’s office was not for them, for their children or for their cars; it was the equivalent of doing nothing.
Another came from his own officials. According to the investigation of La Silla Vacía, later published in the book The Presidential Candidates , Gustavo Petro is a difficult, sullen and unpunctual boss, despite his good ideas . He had a very high turnover in his cabinet. The then Bogotá councilor Roberto Hinestroza counted a total of 65 changes in 19 secretariats, addresses and companies in the District. Daniel García-Peña wrote to him in an open letter that “a despot from the left, because he is from the left, does not stop being a despot.”
The biggest criticism came from the results of some of his ideas, such as the change in the garbage collection model. Aguas de Bogotá, the public company to which he assigned the task of cleaning the entire city, formally hired and uniformed people who were previously engaged in informal recycling. However, the company fell short of the task: some sectors of the city were left uncleaned for three days and private companies had to be hired to take care of the rest of the city.
That earned him the dismissal by Ordóñez, the same attorney he helped elect. He was out of office for a month; Rafael Pardo was the mayor (e) at that time. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in their favor, arguing that an elected official can only be removed by a judge.
That’s just to mention only one of the ideas that made him win enemies: the freezing of the TransMilenio fare, the hiring of the underground metro, the prohibition of the bullfighting show in the La Santamaría bullring, the rejection of the project of the Longitudinal Avenue of the West (ALO) because it passed through the reserve will not be delved into Thomas Van der Hammen —created in 2000 to protect it from urban speculation— and many other controversies.
Petro finished his term normally in December 2015 and handed over the position to Enrique Peñalosa. While the new mayor tore down several of the projects that he had advanced during the years of Bogotá Humana, the now former mayor had a lot of free time on his hands and a lot of debts and political disabilities, given the sanctions that weighed on him.
“I think I became the most indebted man in Colombia. Not even the corruption unleashed on the Sol II route, by the Odebrecht consortium, and Luis Carlos Sarmiento, was fined with the same magnitude as me. At that time, I had no income, my only property was my family home, which, because I had put it as the property of my children, was saved from the seizures, but I did not even have a way to pay the bank accounts of the mortgage loan of that home ” . One life, many lives, p. 316.
His income from him during those years came from university conferences to which he was invited. In addition, judgments against him have been handed down in court over the years, so his debt has been greatly reduced.
Petro arrived on the rims and with few alliances in his second presidential campaign, in 2018. In his book, he accused figures from the Alianza Verde party for having left him alone to go with Sergio Fajardo, who refused to do internal consultation and prevailed as a candidate. Petro participated with Carlos Caicedo in a consultation of the left during the legislative elections.
“That query, in reality, was not a contest between Carlos and me, but a competition of numbers with the query on the right. (…) When the results arrived, I got 2,800,000 votes and Carlos 500,000; rather, together we had 3,200,000. Only Duque’s office was above ours, which had the unrestricted help of Mr. Galindo, an obscure man, who distributed photocopies irregularly. One life, many lives, p. 320.
In the first round he got almost five million votes; he was in second place after Iván Duque, the candidate of the Democratic Center. To his surprise, the other candidates who represented an alternative to Álvaro Uribe Vélez’s party—Humberto de la Calle and Sergio Fajardo—decided not to support Petro in the second round.
Duque won with more than ten million votes —a difference of two million votes—, while Petro and his vice-presidential formula at the time, Ángela María Robledo, were left with seats in Congress due to the Statute of Opposition, by obtaining second place in the voting —although she lost hers due to alleged double militancy some time later.
This Gustavo Petro’s new passage through Congress, as a senator, was not highlighted like those of the 2000s: there were no major debates or relevant complaints. In any case, the last legislature was marked by virtuality, the pandemic and the lack of legislative initiative by President Duque.
Now, Petro has fulfilled his promise to be the visible leader of the opposition during this period. His figure grew stronger and stronger. This was especially seen in the national strike of 2021; The president and the government congressmen had the impression that the protesters were at the mercy of Petro, even though it was a spontaneous social outburst, accumulated since 2019 and stopped dead by the arrival of the pandemic .
For 2022, Petro made the same bet as in 2018: to make an inter-party consultation in the legislative elections. On this occasion, the card was in the name of the Historical Pact, a group of politicians, movements and parties of the alternative. It was clear from the beginning that the former mayor of Bogotá would be the winner, but his contenders drew attention.
The second highest vote was that of Francia Marquez, endorsed by the Afro movement I am Because We Are and the Democratic Pole; the same party that Petro left on bad terms. Also competing was Camilo Romero, from the Green Alliance; his figure has prompted some other politicians from that community to leave Sergio Fajardo behind and join the Pact.
Two other opponents were Arelis Uriana, from the party MAIS, and the controversial Christian pastor Alberto Saade. This last accession earned him much criticism, since Christianity is opposed to many of the positions of progressivism that Petro previously defended and raised him to the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá.
Like Saade’s , other adhesions to his current campaign have caused controversy due to his judicial record and his anti-progressive positions. For his opponents —especially from the center—, who apparently forget the implications of the term Pact, Petro is willing to do anything to win this opportunity.
However, two female forces drive him for this first round. One is Verónica Alcocer, his wife, who has been in her shadow during her most critical years in politics but has gained notoriety in recent years for her own initiatives. The other is Francia Márquez, whom he welcomed as a vice-presidential ticket after much insistence from his potential voters —in the feminist and ethnic sectors, especially— and after having relegated his legislative candidates to unreachable positions in your closed list.