Gustavo Petro is elected as President of Colombia.

• Colombia’s presidency has been won by Gustavo Petro, a former rebel warrior who has pledged significant social and economic transformation.
• Petro became Colombia’s first left-wing President.

About Gustavo Petro:

• Decades earlier, Petro was a part of the urban guerrilla outfit known as M-19. Established in 1970, the M-19 sought to gain power through violence following claims of fraud in that year’s elections.
• Petro, who spent time in jail for illegal arms possession, joined the urban military group at the age of 17, and was among the many university students and artists who fought against the government.
• The M-19 was demobilised in 1990 in what is considered a historic success in Colombia’s long history of conflict. The group metamorphosed into a political party, and aided in the rewriting of the constitution.
• For almost a half century from 1964, a violent Marxist-Leninist insurgency led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC in Spanish — raged in the country.
• Despite his early revolutionary actions, the President elect has spent many years in Colombia’s Parliament, having served in the lower house, the Chamber of Representatives, from 1991-94 and then from 1998-2006, before entering the Senate where he served until 2010, and then again from 2018 onward. In between, Petro was Mayor of the capital city of Bogota from 2012 to 2015.