The two candidates who achieved the highest number of votes in the first presidential round on Sunday, May 29, were Gustavo Petro, from the Historical Pact, with 40.39%, and Rodolfo Hernández, from the League of Governors Anti-Corruption movement (Liga), with 27.99%.
Gustavo Petro
Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez, from the Historical Pact, obtained more than eight million votes in the first presidential round. Four years ago, when he ran in the elections against Ivan Duke the senator achieved 4.8 million votes.
Gustavo Petro was born on April 19, 1960, in Ciénaga de Oro (Córdoba). He is an economist from the Externado University. He has a specialization in public administration from ESAP, studies in economics at the Javeriana University, in environment and population development at the Catholic University of Louvain, and in new trends in business administration at the University of Salamanca.
After passing through the ranks of the guerrilla and the peace process in the government of Virgilio Barco, he was one of the founders of the M-19 Democratic Alliance, a movement that achieved great popular support and participated in the 1991 Constituent Assembly. With the support of this movement, he reached the Chamber in 1991.
Between 2006 and 2010 he was a senator of the Republic. The prestige achieved during his passage through Congress led him to run for the Presidency for the first time in 2010, a vote in which he obtained 1,331,267 supports.
In 2011, he was elected Mayor of Bogotá for the period up to 2015. However, Petro He starred in several controversies during his time at this dignity, including the dismissal and disability imposed by the Attorney General’s Office, headed by the current ambassador to the OAS, Alejandro Ordóñez, in December 2013.
Petro ran for president again in 2018, reached the second round, but was defeated by President Iván Duque.
Rodolfo Hernandez
Rodolfo Hernández and Marelen Castillo, from the League of Anti-Corruption Rulers movement (League) won 27.99 percent of the votes in the first presidential round.
The applicant was born in Piedecuesta (Santander) in 1945. His first years were spent between this municipality and Bucaramanga and he finished his engineering studies at the National University of Bogotá in 1970.
After this, he participated in the formation of an engineering company that carried out several works in Santander municipalities and that, according to the presidential candidate, has never contracted with the State.
Hernández ran for mayor of Bucaramanga in 2015 and won with 77,250 votes, according to information from the National Registry. The second in that vote was about 5,000 votes behind engineer Hernández.
In that position, Hernández had more than one controversy due to his iron position against corruption. Among them were the remarks made to one of his sons, Luis Carlos. This is due to the alleged use of privileged information by the Mayor’s Office for a contract related to the garbage collection system.
And the episode in which Hernández hit the councilman of Bucaramanga, of the ASI party, Jhon Claro, is also remembered. This incident caused the former mayor a sanction from the Attorney General’s Office and the payment of more than 124 million pesos.
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