Latin America
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PRAY FOR COLOMBIA!!!
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/27/11017...ntial-election
Colombia goes into elections Sunday with a leftist looking to make history
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — At his final campaign rally before Colombia's first-round presidential election on Sunday, Gustavo Petro gleefully noted that the powers that be are cringing at the thought that he could win.
"Of course they are scared," Petro, a former left-wing-guerrilla-turned-politician, told thousands of supporters in Bogotá, the capital. "They're scared because we're going to kick them out of power."
Polls place Petro as the clear front-runner and, if elected, he has pledged to bring major changes to Colombia that have upset the business class. But if none of the candidates garners more than half of the ballots on Sunday, as the polls are also predicting, the two top vote-getters will meet in a runoff on June 19.
Competition is rising toward a second round. The other main candidates are Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative former Medellín mayor, Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman and former mayor of the city of Bucaramanga, and Sergio Fajardo, a centrist former Medellín mayor and former governor of Antioquia department.
Polls predict that in a second round, Petro would beat Gutiérrez or Fajardo. But some surveys place Petro in a statistical dead heat with Hernández, who has avoided debates and in-person campaign events in favor of social media videos. Still, he has moved up in recent polls and has connected to many Colombians with his pledges to eliminate corruption.
Petro claims such criticisms are unfair and has pointed out that President Iván Duque, who isn't allowed to run for a second consecutive term, also passed economic laws by decree during the pandemic.
Frustrated over accusations from opposition candidates that he plans to seize private property if he wins the presidency, Petro held a news conference at a notary public where he signed a document pledging not to expropriate farms and businesses.
And in an interview with NPR last month, Petro denied that he had a radical agenda. He pointed out that the United Nations is urging countries to transition away from hydrocarbons and that raising taxes on the rich to help the poor is common sense in the wake of a pandemic that drove Colombia's poverty rate from 35.7% to 42.5% in 2020.
"These are normal things," Petro said, speaking on Zoom. But in Colombia "they are seen as leftist and revolutionary."
Many frustrated Colombians agree with Petro.
They include Sara Gallego, 34, an athletic trainer who attended Petro's closing campaign rally. She checked off a long list of the country's woes — from unemployment to malnutrition — that she says have been ignored by President Duque and previous governments.
That's why, she says, the traditional ruling elite has only itself to blame for Petro's popularity.
Originally Posted by Incal
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