Gustavo Petro
Gustavo Petro was president of Colombia from 2022 to 2026, the first of the left in the country's history, the former M-19 guerrilla who had spent eighteen months in prison and been tortured in 1985, elected in the run-off of June 2022 by three points over a seventy-seven-year-old builder with the Afro-Colombian activist Francia Márquez as his vice-president, on a programme of total peace with every armed group at once, an end to new oil exploration, a tax on the rich, and the land reform the country had promised since 1936. The peace produced ceasefires with the ELN and the FARC dissidents that broke down one by one. The oil policy produced no new licences and a falling peso. The tax reform passed and the health, pension and labour reforms were blocked or gutted in a congress where he had no majority, the pension one passing in 2024. The land agency bought a million hectares by his own count. He was born in Ciénaga de Oro on the Caribbean coast in 1960, grew up in Zipaquirá, and joined the M-19 at seventeen, organising a squatters' settlement in the town under the name Aureliano, after the Buendías. He was a councillor there when the army took him. After the M-19's demobilisation in 1990 he was a congressman, an exile in Belgium after death threats, and the senator who in 2006 exposed the parapolitics scandal from the floor with documents and photographs, which made him. He was mayor of Bogotá in 2012-15, removed by the inspector-general for a year over the rubbish collection and restored by the courts. He lost the presidential run-off of 2018 to Duque before winning that of 2022. The presidency was also the diplomatic quarrels, with Israel, whose ambassador he expelled over Gaza, with Trump over deportation flights, and with his own ministers, whom he changed sixty times. There was the campaign-finance investigation of his son, and a habit of governing by tweet from abroad. He could not run again and his coalition's candidate lost in June 2026. He handed over in August to a country that had tried the left once.
- Lived: 1960 CE – ?
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: president, politician
