August 7. Gustavo Petro, 62, a former guerrilla fighter of the M-19 revolutionary group who suffered incarceration and torturewith 50.5 per-cent of the votes. It was his third presidential race. His right wing opponent, Rodolfo Hernandez, a construction magnate had 47.3 per cent of the votes.It will be the first time in the country’s 210-year post-independence history that a leftist would make it to the presidency.
Colombia, is a long suffering country witha history of death squads, paramilitary squads and self-defence forces who carry out extra judicial executions,forced disappearances, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Those groups also run the drug cartels, rackets and forced land acquisitions by corporate organisations.
However, the M-19 gave up armed struggle in 1990 to participate in writing a new constitution and electoral politics. Petro who joined the group when he was a 17-year old student of Economics, explained that: “The M-19 was born in arms to build a democracy.” Latin America has for centuries been the backyard playground of Western powers particularly the US. It was a region where governments were replaced at will, those who resisted, massacred and the countries run down. The Financial institutions like the World Bank and World Trade Organisation had tested on them, unworkable, ruinous and neo-liberal programmes like structural adjustment backed by invisible market forces that drove the people into unimaginable poverty.
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