The left won two of the three presidential elections held in South America in 2021: Pedro Castillo was elected in Peru and Gabriel Boric in Chile – the exception was Guillermo Lasso in Ecuador.
In the first election for president in the region in 2022, another leftist appears as a favorite: Senator Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla and former mayor of Bogotá, is in first place in the polls for the election in Colombia, whose first shift will be on May 29.
The most recent survey, carried out by the National Consultancy Center (CNC) last week, showed Petro with 38% of voting intentions, with his closest opponent, centre-right Federico Gutiérrez, appearing with 23.8%. The 62-year-old senator is also leading the simulations for the second round.
It is the third time that Petro has contested the presidential election. In 2010, he placed fourth, and in 2018, he reached the second round and lost to Iván Duque, who will not seek a new term because Colombian legislation does not allow reelection.
The legislative elections, held in Colombia in March, reiterated the favorable moment for the former guerrilla, since his party, the Historic Pact, was the one that won the most seats: 22 of the 108 seats in the Senate and 34 of the 188 in the House of Representatives. . The legend’s gains in the two houses were respectively 11 and 27 seats.
Among Petro’s proposals are increasing taxes for the owners of the 4,000 largest fortunes in Colombia and for unproductive properties of more than 500 hectares, funding the university education of all public security servants, making women occupy at least 50% public office and encourage the use of clean energy.
However, a report released by US bank JPMorgan Chase expressed concerns about the Colombian senator’s proposals.
The bank pondered that Petro’s government plan “combines laudable goals of environmental protection, gender equality and social equity with a far more state-centric economic approach than Colombia has attempted in generations (if it ever has). ”.
“Petro’s plan projects to carry out a significant increase of 5.5% of GDP in revenues to fund a wide range of social programs, although the specific costs of the latter are not defined”, he added. “If disbursements exceed new revenue projections, Colombia’s Fiscal Rule could be compromised,” warned JPMorgan Chase.
The US bank also highlighted that the increase in the tax on unproductive rural properties “seeks to force the fragmentation of large agricultural properties into smaller parcels”, but “critics point to the likely lack of buyers of highly taxed land and the likely role of the state in acquisition and re-appropriation of land”.
Friend of Chávez, disaffected by Maduro
Gustavo Petro has ambiguous relationships with Chavismo. In 2013, when he was mayor of Bogotá, he was in Caracas for the wake of Hugo Chávez and told the Venezuelan state channel Telesur that he had known the dictator for 19 years.
“We both spoke the same language about [Simón] Bolivar and about the possibilities of social justice that were dreams at that time”, said Petro, who highlighted that the two committed themselves to a project of “Bolivarian integration” for Latin America.
“We promise to fight for it. He didn’t know he was going to be president of Venezuela, and neither did I. [que seria] mayor of Bogota. I am part of the peaceful transformation of Latin America experienced in Venezuela, I was elected president of the people of Bogotá by popular election”, said the current senator and presidential candidate.
However, Petro distanced himself from Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, and today he and the Venezuelan dictator are disaffected. In February, Maduro criticized Latin American’s new left-wing leaders on a television program.
“It is a cowardly left against imperialism, against oligarchies. They want to put on varnish so that the oligarchies will forgive them and the worst thing is that they will not forgive them, none of them”, he criticized.
On Twitter, Petro countered: “I suggest that Maduro stop his insults. Cowards are those who do not embrace democracy. take out venezuela [da
dependência] from oil, take it to the deepest democracy, if you have to walk away, do it,” he wrote.
In another controversy, Petro was removed from the post of mayor of Bogotá in December 2013 and had his political rights stripped for 15 years by the Colombian Attorney General’s Office for trying to break garbage collection contracts in the capital, but he resumed his post after a court decision. .
In February of this year, he was criticized for appearing allegedly drunk at a rally. He later apologized and said that “a drink” he had taken before the event “went wrong”.
This month, there was more controversy when Petro spoke of “social forgiveness” to justify a meeting in prison between his brother and former senator Iván Moreno, convicted of corruption.
According to information from the Efe news agency, after much criticism, the presidential candidate stated that the concept does not mean “that the corrupt get out of jail or their sentences are reduced” and that his brother visited the prison as part of his work at the NGO Interecclesial Justice Commission. and peace.
“In the conversation between the interecclesial commission and the prisoners, there was no offer of reduced sentences or requests for votes. Anyone who claims that social pardon is a pact to reduce penalties for the corrupt, which we would be combining in exchange for votes, is simply slandering us and we will resort to the judicial path to defend ourselves”, he argued.
#guerrilla #fighter #leads #polls #Colombia #victory #left #South #America