Gustavo Petro: Colombia's First Leftist President Takes Office

Gustavo Petro crossed the finish line on June 19 with more than 11 million votes, becoming Colombia's first president from the left. At 62, he was taking office on a Sunday in August 2022, carrying with him a political biography that reads like a country's contested history compressed into one man's life.

Born in 1960 in Ciénaga de Oro, a town in northern Colombia, Petro had run for president twice before. This third attempt succeeded where the others had failed, but the path to the presidency wound through terrain that his opponents never stopped highlighting: his membership in the M-19, an urban socialist guerrilla group he joined as a young man. The group's most infamous act was the seizure of the Palace of Justice on November 6, 1985, in downtown Bogotá. For two days, insurgents held roughly 350 hostages—judges, court employees, visitors. When the military retook the building, 98 people died and 11 more vanished. Petro has consistently maintained he was not present; he was detained by the Army at the time, he says, being tortured in a cavalry barracks across the city. The M-19 had also stolen the sword of Bolívar from a military fortress in 1978 through a tunnel—a symbolic act, Petro later explained, because the sword belonged to the people and had been held captive. The group returned it when they signed a peace accord in 1990.

What made Petro's victory remarkable was not just that a leftist won in a traditionally conservative country, but how he got there. He moderated his tone between 2018 and 2022, a shift that drew criticism from his own base but proved strategically necessary. He aligned himself with evangelical pastor Alfredo Saade and with two former Uribe loyalists—Armando Benedetti and Roy Barreras—politicians who had once belonged to the traditional right. This was a departure from his earlier campaigns, a deliberate broadening of coalition.

Petro's political career had been marked by both triumph and persecution, real or perceived. He served as a congressman, an ambassador's attaché in Belgium, and then as Bogotá's mayor starting in 2011. In 2013, the Procuraduría removed him from office over his handling of a garbage collection crisis and banned him from public service for 15 years. Rather than ending his political life, the removal seemed to crystallize his image as a figure persecuted by the establishment. Thousands filled Bolívar Plaza to defend him. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered his reinstatement in 2014, a victory that propelled him forward.

He defined himself as a progressive leftist in a nation he saw as trapped by extraction—oil, gas, copper. "The only possibility for sustainable development in Latin America is knowledge, is production," he told CNN in 2021. He wanted to restructure the economy around life itself, around natural wealth and environmental protection, to deepen democracy. But Colombia remained polarized. Political analyst Jorge Andrés Hernández noted that many Colombians saw major change as a leap into an abyss. Conservative sectors, particularly evangelical churches, spread theories that Petro would bring homosexuality, communism, Satan. He was compared to Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. He generated what Hernández called "visceral passions"—people who idolized him and people who hated him with equal intensity.

Within his own movement, Petro faced criticism from feminists who said he had not adequately addressed machismo in his ranks and had dismissed feminism as stuck in old-left intellectualism. He later said feminism was the future and the path to change, and promised a gender-balanced government, though the criticism persisted.

As he took office, Petro called for a National Agreement—an invitation to all parties across the political spectrum to build consensus on fundamental reforms. It was a signal that he intended to govern differently than his opponents feared, though whether a polarized nation would accept that invitation remained an open question.