Senator Gustavo Petro, the main presidential candidate of the left in Colombia and who leads the polls three months before the voting, assured this Thursday that he visualizes a progressive axis in Latin America, critical of Nicaragua from Colombia if he wins.
“The entire Sandinista leadership is already in prison, one of its members has already died in jail, my solidarity with Dora María Téllez,” said Petro, who participated in a debate of the candidates of the left coalition historical pact, Produced in partnership with Caracol Radio and El País.
Petro was referring to the death of Brigadier General Hugo Torres Jiménez, political prisoner of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortegajust like Téllez since last year when the repression against opposition, social and business leaders intensified in Nicaragua with which Ortega eliminated electoral competition and secured a fourth consecutive term, marked by international illegitimacy.
The progressive axis proposed by Petro would be made up of the president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, who takes office on March 11; Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil who is seeking another term next October and is also leading the pre-election measurements; and Petro in Colombia.
Boric has questioned Ortega, sharing messages on his Twitter account denouncing the death of retired General Torres and describing the recent conviction of Téllez as an embarrassment. On November 7th, he argued that the Nicaraguan vote was a farce.
I have no doubt that the Ortega-Murillo staging today in Nicaragua is a farce and does not meet the basic standards to be considered a legitimate election. my solidarity with @sergioramirezm, @DoraMTellezCristina Chamorro and all the people who resist.
— Gabriel Boric Font (@gabrielboric) November 8, 2021
Ortega is associated with a radical left in the region made up of Venezuela and Cuba, accused of serious human rights violations. Lula has oscillated rather between criticizing the Nicaraguan and wondering last November “Why Angela Merkel (former chancellor of Germany) can be in power for 16 years and Daniel Ortega cannot?”, as if both cases were comparable.
Will seek meeting with Boric
In Petro’s political calculations, these choices depend on the electorate of these three countries, but he assured that he will try to meet with Boric on March 11 at the presidential swearing-in with the idea of discussing, apparently, a new profile of the Latin American left.
“(The idea) is to lead Latin America precisely from an economy that focused on extracting; that grew when prices were high at the international level, and fell when those prices were lowered, towards a path like the one marked out by South Korea: knowledge societies that are capable of industrializing their countries, of modernizing agriculture through agrarian reforms, that build social equity”, explained the pre-candidate.
Petro’s main competitors for the leftist candidacy are Francia Márquez and the former governor of Nariño, Camilo Romero. On March 13, the consultation of the left-wing coalition Historical Pact will be held.
The presidential votes are scheduled for May 29. According to the most recent survey of the signature INVAMERpublished by the newspaper El Tiempo, Petro has a 42 percent favorable image.
The survey was carried out between February 4 and 13, 2022. Petro is an economist, his term as senator almost ended in the period 2018 to 2022, he was also mayor of Bogotá between 2012 and 2015, and is former M-19 guerrilla.
On Wednesday, February 2, the Colombian pre-candidate met with Pope Francis, one of the most notable events of his campaign, in which he insists on building in our Latin America with “a multicolored democracy. For Colombia, that means precisely an era of peace.”
For Latin America, according to him, the option is knowledge, production, the integration of decarbonized and highly productive economies.
