MIAMI, United States.- This Sunday Gustavo Petro becomes president of Colombia, thus initiating a new political stage in the country. Petro is the first president from the left in 200 years of republican history to arrive at Casa Nariño. A former guerrilla who will command the Armed Forces, which for decades have fought illegal groups.
According to a note from the AP news agency, Petro’s presidential team, 62 years old, will have to overcome from this August 7 the growing violence that has claimed the lives of more than 560 human rights defenders since 2016 alone, the highest inflation high of the last two decades and the search for consensus in a highly divided country.
Gustavo Petro arrives at Casa Nariño with the aim of reforming agriculture, energy production, the police, pensions and tax collection, as well as a promise: less inequality.
According to the AP note, this Friday the new president of Colombia attended his first symbolic inauguration ceremony in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the north of the country, before the Arauhaco indigenous people, where one of the mamos -the highest hierarchy of the community – asked him to respond to the demands of society and gave him a cane that represents wisdom.
Petro militated in his youth in the nationalist guerrilla M-19, which abandoned arms in 1991 after signing a peace agreement with the State. This is why for some Colombian soldiers who fought against this armed group, the arrival of Petro to the presidency constitutes a difficult reality.
The left in Colombia represents an armed conflict that has left 50,770 people kidnapped, 121,768 disappeared, 450,664 murdered and 7.7 million forcibly displaced over the last six decades, according to the Truth Commission.
Gustavo Petro, who won the elections in Colombia in the second round with more than 11 million votes, he was born in 1960 in Ciénaga de Oro, Córdoba, in the north of Colombia.
This was the third time the leftist had run for president as the official candidate of the left.
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