Colombia Elects Leftist Ex-Guerrilla Gustavo Petro as President
‘A NEW MOMENT’
He beat a business mogul by less than half a percent.
Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty
Colombia has elected a new president—ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro, who will be the first leftist to lead the country, and whose vice president will be the first black woman in that post. Petro was a fighter in the M-19 army in the 1980s and served as mayor of Bogotá. He defeated scandal-prone business titan Rodolfo Hernández with just 50.47 percent of the vote in a runoff. “It really is a new moment for Colombia,” Luis Eduardo Celis of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation told The Guardian.
