By Sabrina Martín
The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, begins his first official visit to Spain this Wednesday, where he will position his ideological agenda.
Petro recently traveled to the United States, meeting with Joe Biden and some congress members.
Now he travels to the European continent to boost his image as a regional leader of the left and where he can advance lobbying actions in favor of Nicolás Maduro‘s regime and against sanctions.
Petro will hold a bilateral meeting with the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, and will address the Congress.
After a decimated Gabriel Boric in Chile, an Alberto Fernández without electoral aspirations in Argentina, an Andrés Manuel López Obrador without popularity in Mexico, and a Nicolás Maduro surrounded internationally, Gustavo Petro is emerging as the leader of Ibero-American socialism and perhaps as a new ally of the Popular Party and the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party).
FROM TERRORIST TO IMPEACHED MAYOR
Petro became President of Colombia with the populist promise of implementing “profound social changes and a new economic model” for the country.
He is a former guerrilla fighter who has always expressed his intentions of coming to power to the point that he participated in three presidential campaigns.
At the age of 17, Petro joined the M19 terrorist guerrilla.
He called himself “Aureliano” and was imprisoned for over a year.
Between 1970 and 1989, the M19 kidnapped more than 500 people and is attributed with hundreds of crimes, robberies, and murders, and the assault on the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985, one of the most tragic violent episodes in the country’s history.
He was a senator, and in 2011 he became mayor of Bogotá, where he was temporarily removed for a failed garbage collection model with which he tried to attack the management of a private enterprise.
Petro de-privatized garbage collection in the Colombian capital, handing over the waste collection system to the Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá.
The transition process in 2012 led to garbage collection chaos in the city that lasted three days and caused millions in expenses and environmental impact, which was considered a “serious fault” by the then attorney general, Alejandro Ordóñez.
Following his dismissal, Petro went to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ruled in his favor and ordered his reinstatement as mayor of Bogotá.
His legal victory and his return to the mayor’s office allowed him to catapult himself as the main leader of the left in that country.
His administration was so ineffective and deplorable that he ended his term with a 68% disapproval rating.
THE WADS OF CASH SCANDAL
During a November 2018 debate in the Colombian Senate on the Odebrecht scandal, Congresswoman Paloma Valencia presented a video in which then-Senator Petro was seen receiving wads of money and putting them in a bag.
Petro shared on his Twitter account a statement from his lawyer saying that the video was an attempt to “discredit and disqualify his political management” and, although he never explained what it was about, he added that it was taken illegally by a “former colleague.”
He said it was an internal activity to collect resources for the “maintenance and support of the movement”.
FALL OF MINISTERS AND LINKS TO DRUG TRAFFICKING
Not even a year old, Petro has already faced several crises that resulted in the devaluation of the Colombian peso and inflation that skyrocketed to historic figures.
He recently announced the surprising departure of several people who have repeatedly expressed harsh criticism against the President’s health reform, with which he wants to transform the health system.
But this is not the only crisis Petro has had to face in recent weeks.
The Prosecutor General’s Office opened an investigation against Nicolás Petro Burgos, one of the President’s sons, and his brother Juan Fernando Petro, for allegedly using their surnames to collect various commissions from business people and inmates who were promised favors.
He went so far as to promote the legalization of drugs by declaring that he thought it was stupid to keep marijuana underground.
And the former President of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana, referred to Gustavo Petro on several occasions as the “Trojan Horse of drug trafficking”.
With information from LGI
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