BOGOTÁ — Ex-guerrilla and former mayor
Gustavo Petro will be sworn in Sunday as Colombia’s first-ever leftist
president, with plans for profound reforms in a country beset by economic
inequality and drug violence.
اضافة اعلان
The former senator, 62, takes over from the deeply
unpopular Ivan Duque for a four-year term during which he will enjoy support
from a left-leaning majority in Congress.
Petro’s hard-fought victory in June elections
brought Colombia, long ruled by a conservative elite, into an expanding
left-wing fold in Latin America that could be consolidated in October with a
likely victory for Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva in Brazil.
At a ceremony in Bogotá on the eve of his
inauguration, Petro said his government would aim to “bring to Colombia what it
has not had for centuries, which is tranquility and peace.”
On the campaign trail, Petro had promised to raise
taxes on the rich, invest in health care and education, and reform the police
after a brutal crackdown on anti-inequality protests last year that was
internationally condemned.
He has vowed to suspend oil exploration, to promote
clean energy and to reactivate diplomatic and commercial relations with the
government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, suspended since 2019.
Petro starts from an “enviable position, with a
large majority in Congress and, in terms of the street, with support that no
government had in recent years,” analyst Jorge Restrepo of the Resource Center
for Conflict Analysis told AFP.
Petro’s presidency is historic in another sense,
too: by his side will be the country’s first-ever Afro-Colombian woman
vice-president, environmental and women’s rights activist Francia Marquez, 40.
The pair will grapple with an economy reeling from
the coronavirus pandemic, a spike in violence and deep-rooted anger at the
political establishment that culminated in last year’s protests.
Almost 40 percent of Colombia’s 50 million people
live in poverty, while 11.7 percent are unemployed.
Inflation reached 10.2 percent year-on-year in July.
Read more Region and World
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
