Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández on Second Round in Colombia

After counting the 12,263 tables at the national and international level, Colombians decided that the Presidency will be defined in a second round, next June 19^th, between Gustavo Petro, of the Historical Pact, with 8,499 017 votes (40.3%) and Rodolfo Hernández, from the independent League of  Anticorruption Governors, with 5,942,173 (28.19%), scrutinized 99% of the votes.

In order to find a winner, it must exceeded 50% of the vote.

Unmarked votes were 29,186 (0.13%); void 239 812 (1.13) and blank 363,301 (1.73%).

The great loser was the right candidate and Uribism, Federico "Fico" Gutierrez. With his lost, being third with 5,031,701 votes (23.8%), the traditional party apparatus also fail like the Conservative, Liberal, Radical Change and the Democratic Center, which always filled with ideas and banners the events of "Fico" everywhere in the country. A strong message from those citizens who always associated it with continuity.

The conclusion of the day was quite reliable with what predicted the multiple polls of  intention to vote, since Gustavo Petro always led polls and the feelings of many people; also Rodolfo Hernandez showrapid improvement in recent weeks.

It was reported that 39,002,239 citizens were eligible for vote, that is, they can go to polls to cast their vote for any of the six pairs of candidates (for Presidency and Vice  residency) registered for these elections. However, the entity reported that more than 21,180,000 people voted.

Conceding his defeat, Gutiérrez announced that the entire spectrum of the right will support Hernández, in the face of what he called the threat of changes announced by Petro. The independent candidate mounted an anti-corruption campaign that won him votes in recent weeks.

Thus, with Uribism at the forefront, the reaction plans to use Hernández to defeat Petro, by adding the votes of the independent with those defeated candidates «Fico», Sergio Fajardo, Enrique  Gómez, John Milton Rodriguez and Ingrid Betancourt.

However, it’s assured that Fajardo’s supporters prefer to vote for Petro, so the candidate on the left still  have options to avoid a possible continuity of uribism.

ULTRAREACTION AND EMPIRE AGAINST PETRO

Gustavo Petro joined, in his youth, the ranks of the April 19^th Movement (M-19), a political-military organization that was disbanded in the 1980s to become a political party. Between 2012 and 2015 he was mayor of Bogotá and revealed himself as the maximum exponent of the opposition to Álvaro Uribe, the Colombian leader of the right, repeatedly accused of being associated with drug trafficking. In the last presidential elections, in 2018, Petro came to dispute the second round against current President, Ivan Duke.

In this challenge, the senator presents as his colleague the Afro-Colombian militant Francia Márquez Mina, linked to the feminists, ecological-environmental activism movements and the fight against racism. In March primary elections, the former mayor of Bogotá won the first place among the preferences of the progressive sectors, while Francia Márquez – who survived an attempt on her life in 2019–,became the third most voted candidate. The Historical Pact achieved more significant voting percentages in the departments where the social outbreak of 2020 and 2021 became more evident.

The possibility of the first win of the left – in the country of America Latin America and the Caribbean that has more affinity with the policies of Washington– has triggered multiple alerts from agencies dedicated to the "hemisphere western”, label with which the State Department locates the continent where they ae in. After the primary elections and parliamentary elections on March 13^th, the Southern Command -which coordinates the military activities from Guatemala to the south – has reinforced the relations with the Colombian military brotherhood.

Petro is the first candidate from the left to reach a second round. Those who tried to reach that instance in the past were killed.

Among them Jaime Pardo Leal and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, candidates of the Patriotic Union, the former member of the April 19 Movement, Carlos Pizarro and liberal progressive leader Luis Carlos Galán. The candidate of The Pact denounced two weeks ago that there was a plan to assassinate him in the tour scheduled in the city of Pereira, controlled by the paramilitary  organization La Cordillera, associated with drug cartels linked to the Mexican gangs that introduce cocaine and heroin in the United States.

WHAT ABOUT HERNANDEZ?

The hatred and fear towards Petro and the hostility that arises the friendship of «Fico» with Duque and Uribe made the majority media controlled by the right and social networks have partly promoted the candidacy of the engineer Rodolfo Hernández for the second round, leading a so-called League of Anti-Corruption Governors.

79 years old, he calls himself "the King of Tik Tok", and has passed through politics not without controversy and pending issues with the justice.

Rodolfo Hernández has supported himself in a campaign where, social networks have been his main way of promoting his proposal, based on the confrontation and the caricature of his opponents.

The creator of the independent movement League of Anti-Corruption Governors took a leap in popularity on the networks – with videos of up to three million views–, which was reflected in the surveys.

Hernández, using the typical resources of viral postings, he promises to fight against the corrupt and "eliminate the hunger of families."

However, his opponents look to his past, when he was mayor of Bucaramanga (2016-2019), and they remember that he was accused by the Prosecutor's Office in the midst of a corruption scandal.

Beyond his character from TikTok's "old man, but cool", this 77-year-old businessman, who defines himself neither on the left nor on the right, has more than 30 processes opened by the Attorney General's Office, one of them by the physical and verbal aggression against a councilman.

This is the character that now wields the reaction to prevent Petro from winning the presidency and try to implement a program that hits the interests of the always powerful.

Hernández, generally described as right-wing, apparently has not had links with Uribism and he knows that the current situation of the people of  Colombia is unsustainable. His message is still very insubstantial, with very weak points of change.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff