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Barranquilla (Colombia) (AFP) – French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, a former hostage of the former FARC guerrilla, withdrew her presidential aspiration to join the campaign of independent businessman Rodolfo Hernández, the candidate that is growing the most according to the latest polls, which give him third in voting intentions.
“I have made the decision to support the only candidate who can defeat the system today (…), we are going to step aside to support Rodolfo,” Betancourt said at a press conference with the 77-year-old candidate.
In a survey released on Friday by the firm Invamer, Hernández registered 20.9% of support compared to 13.9% in April, behind the leftist Gustavo Petro (41%) and the rightist Federico Gutiérrez (27.1%). ).
If none of the candidates obtains more than 50% of the votes, the election will be defined in a runoff between the first two on June 19.
Betancourt assured that Hernández “is the only candidate who can reach the second round and defeat Petro or Fico (Gutiérrez),” the name under which the former mayor of Medellín (northwest) campaigns.
Kidnapped by the FARC guerrilla between 2002 and 2008, when she was rescued in a military operation, Betancourt registered a 0.8% voting intention before giving up her candidacy.
Twenty years after her first attempt at running the country was foiled by kidnapping, the 60-year-old politician returned to the ring in January as a centrist alternative.
But in less than three months he sowed chaos in that coalition and then resigned, deciding to run on his own and withdrawing again this Friday.
Hernández, an indecipherable candidate
Hernández, former mayor of the city of Bucaramanga (2016-2019), has surprised with his progress in the polls, despite not being attached to any party or having participated in the March primaries, in which the center-right coalitions and left defined their candidates.
His rise has left the winner of the centrist primary, Sergio Fajardo (5.1%), with practically no options.
With great spontaneity to express himself in front of the cameras and an anti-corruption message, the engineer and builder has penetrated the Colombian electorate, tired of the conservative and liberal elites that have traditionally governed the country.
But his short political career and his government program make it difficult to place him on the political spectrum.
On the one hand, it takes up progressive flags such as legalizing the recreational use of marijuana and rethinking the global anti-drug fight in the world’s largest cocaine producer. He also agrees with the left in questioning the impact that free trade agreements have had on Colombian agriculture and proposes curbing the importation of food produced in the country.
As for the ELN guerrilla, the last recognized in Colombia, it proposes an agreement similar to the one that the government of Juan Manuel Santos signed in 2016 with the FARC.
But he has other right-wing proposals: he opens the door to fracking to boost the oil industry and proposes toughening the immigration policy of the current government, which regularized almost a million undocumented Venezuelans. In this regard, he warns that hundreds of thousands of migrants who have not started this process “may be deported.”
“We don’t care if it’s from the left or from the right, what matters to us is that it’s clean, that it’s honest,” Betancourt emphasized.
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