Petro began his public life in the late 1970’s as a member of the M‑19, the bloodthirsty urban guerrilla group that—among its many acts of terrorism— stormed the Ministry of Justice in November of 1985, held its magistrates and hundreds of employees as hostages, and ultimately caused the violent death of 111 people.

In 1994, a mere two years after the M‑19’s final official amnesty, which coincided broadly with the introduction of a new constitution in 1991, Petro—then a congressman—invited Hugo Chávez to Bogota, where he hosted him for over a week. At the time, Chávez himself had been recently amnestied, having been sentenced for leading a failed and bloody coup attempt in Caracas in 1992.

Reflecting on his time with Chávez in the Colombian capital, Petro said: “We found an ideological understanding in the fight against corruption and in the Bolivarian discourse.”

This editorial originally ran April 19 in the Cato Institute Blog. It is generously shared under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.

Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1999. By 2003, Petro was boasting to a Colombian magazine, which described him as “one of Chávez’s closest advisors on the new model being implemented in Venezuela,” about the country’s change of tack. “We are in a transitional stage,” Petro said, “from a neoliberal model to one that I would call ‘neo‐​populism.’”

Eventually, under Chávez’s price and currency controls, food and basic goods in Venezuela became scarce. So too did Petro’s public statements about the Chavista model. “Neo‐​populism,” it turned out, had been a euphemism for old‐​fashioned socialism. And Petro tried to distance himself from the consequences that he had helped bring about. While running for president in March of 2010, he tweeted:

“We are socialists of the 21^st century and Chávez is a 20^th century socialist. I don’t expropriate the workers’ property.”

But Petro later deleted said tweet.

When Chávez died in 2013, Petro, who was then the mayor of Bogota, attended his funeral in Caracas. At the time, Petro claimed that Chávez had been “a great Latin American leader.” On Twitter, he posted a photograph of a supermarket shelf full of goods, adding a denial that food was scarce in Venezuela, as it had already been for some time.

During his stay in Caracas, Petro spoke to Telesur, Venezuela’s state‐​run media agency, of his initial encounter with Chávez. According to the Bogota mayoralty’s website, Petro said that, in 1994, he and Chávez had sworn to carry out “a Bolivarian integration” of Latin America. “We pledged to fight for that goal,” he said.

Nonetheless, in the run‐​up to the 2018 presidential election, which Petro lost, he once again tried to downplay his close ties to Chavismo. Petro continually claimed that, since he opposed all future oil exploration in Colombia, his economic policies had nothing to do with Chávez’s model for Venezuela, which was oil‐​dependent.

Petro’s radical, even apocalyptic, environmentalist rhetoric helped him to win the 2022 election. His not too subtle pivot from traditional statist to climate change alarmist went largely unopposed. Petro’s political rivals, the news media, and center‐​left opinion leaders meekly allowed him to change the axis of political debate.

It fell to a foreign journalist, Mexico’s Jorge Ramos, to provide the only memorable exception. In a 2018 CNN interview, Ramos asked Petro whether he thought that Chávez had been a dictator. After eluding the question for around 40 seconds, Petro said: “I think that international politics is sharply divided by the issue of climate change.” The following exchange ensued:

Ramos: “No, no, no. Was Hugo Chávez a dictator or not, Mr. Petro? […] We can talk afterwards about climate change if you would like.”

Petro: “Hugo Chávez was elected by the people several times.”

Ramos: “Do you think that Chávez was a dictator?”

Petro: “I think that there was no doubt about his elections according to the information I have.”

Ramos: “But you have not answered me whether Chávez was a dictator or not. [Ramos proceeds to quote Petro’s 2013 tweet praising Chávez as a great leader]A great Latin American leader? He had political prisoners, caused many deaths, censored and controlled all news media. Is that a great political leader?”

Petro: “I think that Chávez died and, since his death, a part of Venezuela admires him and another part does not admire him.”

Ramos: “But you, Mr. Petro […] Many Colombians fear that you will do the same.”

Petro: “I cannot do the same for two fundamental reasons. First, because what I propose for Colombia is to separate the economy from oil and coal….”

Ramos: “But you have not wanted to answer me. It is very simple. For you, was Chávez a dictator or not?”

Petro: “I think that he was elected by the people.”

Petro eventually admitted—with an evident lack of conviction in his body language—that the Venezuelan regime had become authoritarian, but only under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, and that Cuba’s statist economy harmed democracy. But Ramos’s pushback had exposed his rhetorical tactic: to claim that Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian collapse was not due to Chávez’s socialist policies, which Petro had celebrated and promoted, but rather to the primacy of the country’s oil industry.

Hence, Petro claimed that his center‐​right opponents, who did not intend to shut down oil exploration and production in the country, were the true proponents of Chavismo in Colombia. Not Petro himself, the one Colombian politician who had helped to bolster Chávez’s power in Venezuela.

Petro got away with his sophistry. Also with his claim that, despite earlier statements about the supposed need to change the constitution, he did not plan to summon a constitutional assembly if elected, as Chávez had done in Venezuela in 1999. Thus, leading politicians and opinion leaders of the center‐​left allowed themselves to be convinced that Petro was a democrat and, as such, represented no menace to Colombia’s republican institutions. In other words, Petro was no Chávez. Nor was Colombia, South America’s longest‐​running democratic republic, as institutionally weak as Venezuela had been when Chávez took over.

A pillar of this theory was the formidable opposition that Petro could face from Congress, where Petro’s party did not hold a majority. But this overlooked the longstanding Colombian tradition of a pro‐​government Congress, whose members are always susceptible to the patronage of a powerful presidency.

Indeed, as Petro was preparing for his inauguration, he formed a coalition not only with the center‐​left Green Party. It also came to include the Liberal Party, a member of the Socialist International since the 1990’s, the nominally center‐​right Party of National Unity, and even the Conservative Party. The formidable opposition theory collapsed even before Petro was sworn into office.

By November of 2022, Petro’s coalition had already approved a tax law that raised rates on formal sector employees and businesses, reinstated a national wealth tax, introduced a sugar tax (which falls most heavily upon the poorest in society), and forbade mining companies from deducting royalty payments from their income taxes. Petro’s “tax reform” really meant hefty tax increases (although this was already the norm in Colombia well before Petro came to power).

More recently Petro has garnered support from the Liberal Party and from Conservative senators for his sabotage of the private pension system. Petro aims to end workers’ ability to choose between the private and public pension alternatives for their mandatory retirement savings; the private system consists of individual retirement accounts, whereas the public version is an unsustainable, pay‐​as‐​you‐​go system that is subsidized through the national budget. Workers in the formal sector are currently free to choose between both models. Petro seeks to force all workers into the state‐​run system, leaving private funds as a voluntary alternative for those earning over three times the minimum wage.

Liberal and Conservative politicians are supporting Petro’s statist pension scheme despite their parties’ official exit from the government. Petro’s original, “National Agreement” government only lasted until the first half of of 2023, when it dawned on the political class that Petro truly intended—as he had said all along— to uproot private sector involvement in the healthcare sector.

Last March, Congress refused to approve Petro’s bid to expand state control of the healthcare system at the expense of private health insurance companies. Petro’s government responded by taking control of the administration of one of the largest private insurance companies, which manages the health funds of 5.7 million members. Petro also announced that it was time to summon an extralegal constitutional assembly since Congress could not “rise to the challenge” of implementing his agenda in full.

When it came to healthcare, the opposition finally became formidable. And Petro moved to make it futile. Analysts had failed to consider that, when push came to shove, Petro did not intend to respect constitutional protocols.

While the current constitution allows the creation of a new constitutional assembly, it requires both chambers of Congress to vote in favor by a majority, followed by the approval of the Constitutional Court and a majority of voters in a plebiscite, after which an election to choose the assembly members must take place. But Petro says that none of these requirements are necessary to change the constitution.

Petro argues that the “constituted” power that emerged in 1991 has been corrupted, while the “constituent” power is “the people,” which he claims to represent. “The constituent power is not summoned,” he said in an interview. “It is the people, which summons itself to decide the country’s fundamental questions. That is the constituent power.”

Petro has hinted that “the people” will express their support for a new constitution through a series of cabildos or town hall meetings that the government will summon across the country.

He thus claims that he can bypass Congress, the courts, and the need for a legal plebiscite to usher in a new constitution. Its pillars, Petro says, should include “the struggle against climate change” and “the decarbonization of the economy.” This implies a constitutional mandate for Petro’s ongoing war against Colombia’s hydrocarbon industry. Petro’s constitution also would include “a monetary policy that prioritizes employment and production.” That is, a takeover of the nominally independent central bank.

Petro’s attempt to create a new, statist constitution is reminiscent of Hugo Chávez’s own methods, replicated by Latin America’s “21^st Century Socialists” Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia. Like Petro, who implies that Colombia’s 1991 constitution is obsolete, Chávez affirmed that the Venezuelan constitution was “moribund” when he was sworn in as president.

But even Chávez’s opponents admitted that, in 1999, his constitutional convention “began as a democratic process that in its origins did not involve the rupture of the previous political regime.” Petro, on the other hand, is attempting a full rupture with the established order. He aims to bypass all existing checks and balances to his power.

Petro’s plan is more akin to Nicolás Maduro’s spurious constitutional assembly of 2017, which nullified the power of the National Assembly, where the opposition held a majority since its victory in the election of December, 2015. In that sense, the commentators who still claim that Petro is no Chávez are correct, albeit for none of the reasons they put forth (such as the strength of Colombian institutions).

Rather, Petro’s contempt for the rule of law is arguably greater than that of Chávez during the initial stages of his rule. Then again, whereas Chávez sought to conceal his true intentions during his campaign for the presidency in 1998, Petro campaigned while offering Chavista recipes openly. There were, for instance, his threat to expropriate specific companies, his ambiguity on his intention to change the constitution, and his defense of Marxist doctrine, such as the labor theory of value.

In 2022, a small majority of Colombian voters acted against their better judgment and allowed Petro to hold power. A large majority is now firmly opposed to his government. The question is whether the republic itself will withstand Petro’s imminent constitutional onslaught.

The boom times for Colombian pot came to an end due to the onset of the War on Drugs—which President Nixon officially declared in 1971— and the rapid rise of indoor cannabis farming in the fifty states. Today, with nearly half of U.S. states having legalized recreational consumption, and with the end of federal prohibition perhaps in sight, is there any chance that Colombian cannabis can regain its former glory days—this time legally— in the American market? Much depends on if, when, and how federal prohibition is repealed, but also on Colombia’s capacity to reform its own byzantine drug laws.

A law approved in 1986 (no. 30) defined any quantity up to 20 grams of marijuana as the “minimum dose” for personal consumption, and it applied a series of criminal charges for its possession. In 1994, however, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that no individual could be penalized for carrying said minimum dose. However, the law, which is still in effect, makes it a criminal offense to possess or carry a narcotic, “whatever its quantity, for the purpose of distribution or sale.”

As I wrote in Foreign Policy, the minimum dose rule provides a good example of Colombia’s trademark legalism: unless one grows cannabis oneself (more on which later), the only way to obtain a legal gram for personal consumption—or 20—is by buying it, illegally.

Eventually, local drug warriors would have their say. In 2009, former president Alvaro Uribe passed a Legislative Act (no. 2) which altered Article 49 of the constitution so as to prohibit “the possession and consumption of narcotic or psychotropic substances, unless prescribed by a medical doctor.” The following year, Uribe’s government introduced a bill (Law 248) that sought to regulate the legislative act and criminalize the minimum dose. The objective, professors Hernando Londoño and Adrian Restrepo argue, was to bolster the war against the drug cartels by targeting internal consumption. This latter initiative failed and the minimum dose was maintained. Nonetheless, by enshrining drug prohibition in the constitution, Uribe made any future reform of the country’s drug laws extremely difficult.

In 2015, when the government of former president Juan Manuel Santos sought to legalize medical marijuana, it had to resort to a decree (2467) that expanded on Law 30 of 1986. The decree regulated cannabis production for “strictly medical or scientific purposes.” While legalizing the medical use of marijuana was a step in the right direction, the local industry has been saddled by red tape.

This editorial originally ran June 15 in the Cato Institute Blog. It is generously shared under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.

For instance, physicians still are allowed to prescribe only manufactured cannabis‐​based products, not dry cannabis flower. Also, the use of CBD—a multibillion‐​dollar industry in the U.S.—is not allowed in Colombian food, beverages, supplements, or veterinary products. Since the local market has not been allowed to develop, local cannabis firms—including a few that raised funds in the U.S. and are even listed on the Nasdaq—are on the verge of bankruptcy. Potential investors, meanwhile, are eyeing other markets, and rightly so.

The black market, however, has thrived, not least because the 2015 decree allowed the “self‐​cultivation” of up to 20 cannabis plants for personal use without a license from the Health Ministry. Since each plant can produce around a kilo of marijuana, massive amounts of pot are grown legally, only to be transported and sold illegally. Which is to say, Colombian lawmakers have created the worst of all worlds for consumers and legal producers alike, this in spite of the industry’s immense potential to generate profits, jobs, and tax revenues.

But Colombia’s Congress now has a chance to unravel the marijuana muddle. A new Legislative Act, introduced by Representative Juan Carlos Losada, a member of the Liberal Party, seeks to insert an exception for adult, recreational cannabis consumption into Article 49 of the constitution. This would create a legal market to buy, sell, and distribute marijuana in Colombia. After being approved in seven debates in Congress, Losada’s project faces one final hurdle in the Senate on Thursday, June 15.

Legislators should approve the measure. Colombian conservatives should keep in mind that extreme leftist Gustavo Petro, the current president, did not bring forth the initiative (despite his supposedly revolutionary stance against the drug war). Hence, supporting marijuana legalization does not involve supporting the government. Center‐​right politicians also should remember the words of the great Alvaro Gómez, the conservative leader who warned as early as 1976 that the war on drugs was doomed to failure.

Regulating marijuana use for adults, on the other hand, implies seizing the local market from violent, criminal gangs and leaving it in the hands of the legal, regulated businesses that can assure quality, safety, and transparency. Eventually, when the United States and other countries open their markets to cannabis products from other latitudes, Colombia can regain its standing as a global exporting powerhouse. Far more than foreign aid handouts, the country could use a legal marijuana bonanza.

According to poll data from June 1, 2023, only 26 percent of Colombian citizens approved of Petro’s performance as president. And this was before the scandal that shook the country’s political scene last Sunday evening, when Semana magazine released a series of WhatsApp audio files sent by Armando Benedetti, Petro’s former ambassador in Caracas, to Laura Sarabia, the president’s former chief of staff.

Among the least bombastic revelations is Benedetti’s claim that Alfonso Prada, Petro’s former interior minister, “stole the whole ministry with his wife.” This implies massive levels of corruption around Petro, who came to power with an anti‐​corruption agenda (quite cynically given his disreputable political alliances). Prada proceeded to sue Benedetti for libel.

Petro’s dwindling number of supporters may dismiss this as a politician’s petty slander against a rival in the cabinet. Far more concerning for them—and for Petro—is Benedetti’s matter‐​of‐​fact assertion to Sarabia that he himself obtained COP $15 billion (around USD $3.58 million at today’s exchange rate) for Petro’s 2022 presidential campaign, during which he served as the former candidate’s right‐​hand‐​man and main political handler. Petro’s campaign did not officially report any donation nearly as large. Its declared funds consisted mostly a series of bank loans, which were meant to be paid with the “reimbursement” sum that the Colombian state guarantees to candidates for each vote received in an election.

This editorial originally ran June 11 in the Cato Institute Blog. It is generously shared under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.

In many countries, an insider’s admission of how millions of undeclared dollars flowed into the president’s campaign coffers would bring down the government. Alas, Colombia is not one of them. This is not due to a lack of unashamedly corrupt presidents; as I wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, the opposite has been the case. Rather, since the 1950’s, the Colombian elite’s idiosyncratic approach to presidential corruption has followed the maxim, attributed to journalist Hernando Santos (1922–1999), that the trouble with overthrowing a president is that he may fall upon those doing the toppling.

Already in Petro’s case, the three‐​member House of Representatives commission created to investigate Benedetti’s statements includes two members of the president’s own party. The enquiry will be a charade, which is a pity since the source of the undeclared campaign money is as important as the sum itself. In an interview, Benedetti told Semana that the money “did not come from entrepreneurs,” meaning the legal business community. Suspicion has fallen on the Marxist guerrilla groups and other drug trafficking organizations, but also on the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro. Anonymous, the hacker group, claims that Maduro financed “part of the campaign of the current president of Colombia,” but has not published evidence hitherto.

What is certain is that, in regional terms, the Maduro regime has been the principal beneficiary of Petro’s election. To begin with, Colombia recognized Maduro’s presidency after a three‐​and‐​a‐​half‐​year hiatus, and Petro himself has met Maduro four times since his inauguration. His government, which opposes any future hydrocarbon exploration in Colombia despite dwindling reserves, has promoted the idea of importing Venezuelan natural gas.

While Petro wages a political war against Colombia’s key petroleum industry—crude oil has been the country’s main legal export for decades—he lobbied President Joe Biden to end American sanctions against the Maduro regime. This would imply renewed Venezuelan oil exports to the U.S. market (even if socialism devastated Venezuela’s oil industry well beyond immediate or even medium term repair). Petro’s “shoot yourself in the foot / prosper‐​thy‐​neighbor” policy is devoid of any rationality. Unless, of course, Colombia’s increasingly authoritarian president is somehow subject to the Venezuelan tyrant.

Petro’s eco‐​fanatical crusade against the hydrocarbon industry is but one example of how his government is bent on destroying the few areas of the Colombian economy that are functional. Other examples include his plans to put the state in charge of centralized funding for the healthcare and pension systems, both of which are efficient—although certainly not perfect—thanks to private sector involvement and some degree of consumer choice. Where things are already problematic, Petro’s policies would make them worse. For instance, he wants to make a rigid, overregulated labor market even less flexible and more hostile to businesses.

Then there is the matter of rising insecurity, an old problem that, until recently, appeared mostly solved, only to resurface dangerously in the last year. Under Petro, illegal armed groups have expanded their power as they launch constant, deadly attacks against the armed forces and police. It all brings to mind the dark era of the late 1990’s, when Colombia was on the verge of becoming a failed state as it came under siege from the FARC guerrillas, which are still up in arms despite the much‐​touted “peace” agreement of 2016.

Usually, a crisis in government breeds economic instability. Under Colombia’s current government, however, the opposite has been the case. Since the Benedetti scandal broke, the peso rallied to reach its highest value against the dollar since mid‐​2022, when Petro was about to win the presidential election. In October, two months after he took office, the peso reached an all‐​time low against the dollar. Amid the current political turmoil, forward‐​looking markets are anticipating the failure of Petro’s legislative initiatives in health care, pensions, and labor law. Which is to say, there is speculation that Colombia’s institutional framework has already survived Petro’s statist onslaught. The weaker his position, the thinking goes, the less likely it is that non‐​leftist parties will lend him their support, which he needs to obtain congressional majorities.

I fear, however, that markets may be getting ahead of themselves. The Colombian congress is minimally ideological and highly transactional. There is still a good chance that, issue by issue, Petro’s government can negotiate just enough votes to have his “reforms” approved, in which case only the courts will stand in the way of his agenda.

Not that Petro is respectful of any check or balance. This week, he propounded the theory that, since he was elected, his government represents “the will of the people,” meaning that any opposition to his political project—including from the news media—is part of an illegitimate, “soft coup.” The onslaught, in other words, is far from over.

In my view, the worst part about Petro’s election victory is that, at this time last year, Colombia was in need of radical reforms. Above all, a chronically sluggish economy required budget discipline, public spending cuts, drastic debt reduction, a strong currency (ideally through dollarization), far lower taxes, labor market deregulation, subsoil privatization, school choice, and an end to non‐​tariff barriers. By electing Petro, however, voters decided to do precisely the opposite on all fronts. As warned, most already regret it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Colombia has changed since then. The establishment is now made up of left‐​wing academics, woke journalists or “influencer” celebrities, public sector grandees, and career politicians. One mantra that binds these subsectors together is that the country’s heavily interventionist economy, which ranks 92^nd in the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index, is a “neoliberal” outpost in dire need of even more taxes, regulations, and welfare handouts. Another is that the only way to deal with Cuba‐​backed, communist insurgents is to tremble before the bearded, cocaine‐​dealing Kalashnikov‐​wielders and offer them generous amnesties.

The establishment is now made up of left‐​wing academics, woke journalists or “influencer” celebrities, public sector grandees, and career politicians.

The last came in 2016, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (FARC) killers were granted 10 unelected seats in Congress. Since 2018, they have carried out their parliamentary duties as middle‐​aged legislators with taxpayer‐​funded SUV’s and expanding waistlines. They sit alongside elected yet otherwise indistinguishable specimens. Even guerrilla group membership has become a semi‐​formalized part of the cursus honorum.

As such, Petro, an amnestied member of the M‑19 guerrilla group who has held some type of government post for well over 30 years, is pure neo‐​establishment. His admiration for Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, whom he advised, still spooked a part of the Keynesian technocracy, as did his intentions to end all exploration of oil, Colombia’s main legal export, expropriate all private pension accounts, and print money to pay for subsidy schemes. But he still managed to woo a former “neoliberal” finance minister, several ex‐​members of the central bank’s board, and other sacred cows of the technocrat class.

Petro’s rival was Rodolfo Hernandez, a 77‐​year‐​old construction magnate who was a one‐​term mayor of a medium‐​sized city and a neophyte on the national stage. He became a true threat to established politicians and mandarins alike with his popular pledge to cut all wasteful spending, a revolutionary stance by Colombian political standards. He even threatened to make congressmen pay for their gas guzzlers and mobile phone plans out of their own pockets. This blunt, petit bourgeois businessman simply could not be allowed to win.

Colombian Professor Daniel Raisbeck is a policy analyst on Latin America at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

On Sunday, Petro claimed that he owed his victory to the young and to oppressed minorities. However, what likely drove him over the finish line—he beat Hernandez by a mere 700,000 votes—was the support of well‐​oiled, often corrupt political machines, whose bosses sought to protect their guaranteed slices of the annual budget or regional bureaucratic fiefdoms.

Both bien pensants and political machine operators seem to bet that they somehow can curb Petro’s more fanatical tendencies. Some commentators claim that Congress, where his party does not hold a majority, can resist Petro’s push for autocracy, and that the central bank will be able to maintain its independence. Others interpret his promise to “develop” Colombian capitalism during his victory speech as a sign of moderation.

I remain a skeptic, not least due to my personal dealings with Petro in online debates—he once wrote to me to defend the labor theory of value—and during his mayorship of Bogota, when, arbitrarily, he attempted to shut down the city’s 25 very successful charter schools due to ideological posturing and pressure from the local teachers’ union. Which is to say, I believe he can cajole or bribe sufficient congressmen in order to form a majority. He might even try a hostile takeover of the central bank.

I am Colombian and certainly don’t want Petro to pull off what his allies did in Cuba and Venezuela, whose tyrants profusely congratulated him yesterday as, perhaps shockingly to some in Washington, Bogota likely drifts toward the Havana‐​Caracas‐​Managua axis. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the more prosperous, urban, multiple degree‐​holding types who supported Petro thinking he was some sort of Nordic social democrat live to regret it.

This article is generously shared with Finance Colombia by The Cato Institute under the Creative Commons license. The original article can be found here.

Also read:

• The Reason Foundation’s Daniel Raisbeck On What Peru’s Election Can Tell Us About Economic Liberty In Colombia & Latin America

• A Candid Conversation With Bogotá’s Libertarian Candidate For Mayor

Headline image: Twitter @petrogustavo

Petro, who is praised by his friends for his “solid Marxist foundation,” plans to ban all exploration of oil, Colombia’s main export, to expropriate the nearly $100 billion that are now saved in individual, private pension accounts, and to print money to pay for public spending, à la next‐​door Venezuela.

The polls correctly predicted that Petro, a former mayor of the capital city of Bogota (2012–2015), would win the first round of voting, held last Sunday, by a wide margin. However, they failed to foresee that his opponent in a run‐​off would be the unpredictable, unorthodox Rodolfo Hernández, a 77‐​year‐​old construction magnate whose only recent political foray was his mayorship of Bucaramanga, a medium‐​sized city of 600,000 inhabitants in northeastern Colombia.

The austere Hernández, who unexpectedly came in second place with 28 percent of the vote compared to Petro’s 40 percent, addressed his followers via Facebook Live from his kitchen table. He now leads the polls.

Colombian Professor Daniel Raisbeck is a policy analyst on Latin America at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Petro, a skilled demagogue, had recognized Hernández’s own demagogic abilities early on, inviting him to enter an alliance in which Petro, of course, would be the leader. Hernández had other ideas. Still, Petro only began to attack him during the last two weeks as a “corrupt millionaire” and a supposed “uribista,” that is, a follower of disgraced former president Álvaro Uribe. The latter’s party did not even field a candidate in the election.

Petro, who is running on an agenda of “change,” regularly denounces Colombia’s “oligarchy,” unleashing fury against the political class. The irony is that he now faces a rival who makes him look like a routine establishment pencil‐​pusher. After all, Petro has spent eight years as a senator, eleven as a representative in the lower chamber of Congress, two as city councilman in the town of Zipaquirá, and two more as First Secretary of the Colombian embassy in Brussels. Not to mention his three extravagant presidential campaigns. Comically, his allies now claim that Petro is an experienced “statesman,” just when 60 percent of voters rejected his agenda for being recklessly statist.

If Hernández wins the presidency on June 19th, Colombia will have kept clear of Chávez‐​inspired socialism yet again, which is not to say that Hernández, an interventionist, will implement a classical liberal agenda. As Spanish economist Juan Ramón Rallo argues, Hernández’s program contains the heavy doses of social democracy and mercantilism that are common in Colombia’s politics.

For its part, the New York Times is already branding Hernández Colombia’s Donald Trump for “his fuzzy orange hair and his businessman’s approach to politics.” But the comparison fails to consider his fiscal conservatism, which he demonstrated as mayor of Bucaramanga. Hernández also supports individual liberties and is a poignant critic of the drug war, a stance that could trigger a positive change in the country’s relations with the United States. Nor are there signs that Hernández would meddle with the constitution to prolong his stay in power, as Petro has often hinted he would do.

The impact of Hernández’s coarse style reflects citizens’ deep concerns. The country’s class of often foreign‐​trained technocrats—among them current president Iván Duque, Uribe’s protégé—is about to hand over an indebted economy with double‐​digit unemployment, chronically high levels of informal employment, a sharply devalued currency, and a renewed inflation problem. Frustration with the mandarins and professional politicians of all stripes could send a self‐​made builder, unknown until recently, to the presidency. The current demand for change, it seems, was much stronger than Petro anticipated.

This article is generously shared with Finance Colombia by The Cato Institute under the Creative Commons license. The original article can be found here.

Also read:

• The Reason Foundation’s Daniel Raisbeck On What Peru’s Election Can Tell Us About Economic Liberty In Colombia & Latin America

• A Candid Conversation With Bogotá’s Libertarian Candidate For Mayor