Gustavo PetroFernando Vergara (AP)
Something must be happening with the tectonic plates in Colombia so that, for the first time since our independence, a politician like Gustavo Petro, from the left and with a guerrilla past, is today the candidate most likely to win the next presidential elections in Colombia .
Its rise, slow but consistent, has on tenterhooks an important part of Colombian society that still exudes a staunch anti-communism, inherited from the war waged against the Marxist-Leninist FARC guerrillas.
Four years ago in his second attempt to reach the presidency, Petro was defeated by Iván Duque, former President Uribe's candidate.
However, the eight million votes he obtained showed that the left could come to power.
The political establishment closed ranks and once again dusted off the apocalyptic thesis that if Petro came to power, Colombia would become a second Venezuela, but the scare did not spread.
Four years later, Petro is on his way to surpassing his own record.
He won the consultation of the left with the largest vote by putting four million five hundred thousand votes, double the vote obtained by Fico, the almighty candidate of the Duque Government and former President Uribe.
He has established himself as the candidate who embodies change, a perception that is expressed in all the polls,
He has the luxury of not going to the presidential debates and has a legion of followers on the networks who follow him as if he were their god.
With only three weeks to go before the first round, Petro does not seem to have reached his ceiling because he continues to rise in the polls while Federico Gutiérrez stagnates.
This thing about the left having a vocation for power is a new experience for Colombians.
Until recently, being on the left was synonymous with terrorist, guerrilla supporter, disposable.
Since Simón Bolívar made us independent, the presidents who have governed Colombia have come from the quarries of the liberal party and the conservative party.
The bipartisanship that dominated politics in Colombia for almost a century and a half was anti-reformist and anti-communist.
Presidents like López Pumarejo who broke out of that mold were punished and candidates like Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, with progressive ideas, ended up assassinated.
In the 1960s, the two parties formed the National Front, a political agreement that ended inter-party violence and allowed them to co-govern the country for 20 years.
Gustavo Petro does not resemble López Obrador, even if he shares a certain archaic vision of what feminism and women's struggles are.
He doesn't look like Maduro either, as his fierce critics say, who graduated from Castrochavista to Juan Manuel Santos, whose family is the cradle of the establishment.
Petro has criticized Venezuela's extractivist economy and its corruption.
The candidate of the Historical Pact, that's what his movement is called, is a direct son of the conflict that Colombia had, of that exclusive two-party system that stopped the great social changes and that pushed many young people into armed struggle.
Petro does not come from select clubs but from the quarries of the guerrilla left that was planted in Colombia since the sixties.
He militated in the M-19, an urban guerrilla that was founded in 1970 after fraudulent elections that prevented the coming to power of the candidate who questioned the closed system of the National Front.
Its members were young people like Petro, who felt excluded from power and who did not see themselves represented in a guerrilla group like the FARC, which paid homage to Moscow and did not interpret the discontent of the new urban middle class.
Petro is not a Marxist, nor was the M-19, a guerrilla that was socialist and Bolivarian.
His terrorist acts were more brutal than those of the FARC: he kidnapped ambassadors, assassinated industrialists, union leaders and took part in the capture of the Palace of Justice in 1985. He was imprisoned and was tortured.
In 1990, when the M-19 demobilized, he was one of the guerrillas who turned in their weapons.
The former M-19 guerrillas became the great defenders of the current constitution, because together with the right and the center, they participated in its discussion.
Many of them have already been governors and mayors.
If Petro wins the elections, he would become the first former guerrilla to reach the presidency.
At 62 years old, Petro has walked the corridors of power and its sewers.
He was a councilman, representative to the House and Senator.
He was always in the opposition until he was elected mayor of Bogotá.
His election was seen by many anticommunists as the arrival of the antichrist.
The control organisms applied a different standard to him for being from the left, but the problems he had in managing him showed that the left in Colombia was not yet ready to govern, a concern that still haunts him.
The fact that the left has become an option for power is not only due to Gustavo Petro.
The signing of the peace agreement that deactivated the FARC left the right wing speechless.
For years, the war and its narrative created an anticommunist culture in Colombia that made us intolerant of everything that smacked of the left and was different.
However, since the FARC deactivated those fears have not materialized.
The interventions of President Duque against Petro using the channels of the Government and its media have not served either.
Duque, who has 80 percent disapproval, has dedicated himself to demonizing Petro in his speeches using the same tactic as four years ago, when fear of Petro caused many people to go out and vote for him.
His example has been followed by the army commander who is also in a shameful campaign against the leftist candidate.
This time, however, things are going wrong for them because every time they take it out on him, he rises higher in the polls.
There are two things that could slow Petro's rise.
Let him make a mistake or get killed.
choose.
Subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber