Luis Gilberto Murillo, new Colombian ambassador to the United States

As was speculated a few weeks ago, the president-elect of Colombia has announced Luis Gilberto Murillo as his new ambassador to the United States.

Murillo is an Afro-Colombian politician with a career admired by his peers for his past as a former Minister of the Environment, and also for his work strengthening bilateral relations between Colombia and the United States.

Due to his years living in the US, Murillo is close to Joe Biden's Democratic party, particularly to the African-American caucus, which already gives him a good gateway for his new role.

However, Murillo is forced to make a great sacrifice when accepting this position: a few weeks ago Petro explained that, due to legal and political conflicts, Murillo would be forced to renounce his US citizenship to be Colombia's ambassador.

Upon accepting the post,

Murillo was one of the leaders of the political center who, for the second presidential round, did not hesitate to ally himself with Petro and his vice president Francia Márquez with the message of bringing "an ideological perspective of the center" to the Historical Pact.

It had been the vice-presidential formula of the candidate Sergio Fajardo, who, unlike Murillo, decided to approach the candidate on the right, Rodolfo Hernández, but finally decided to vote blank.

Murillo, on the other hand, explained that he supported the Historical Pact because he saw in that project the possibility of implementing the 2016 peace agreements and governing taking into account the most remote areas of the country.

He was also motivated by Márquez's candidacy, since having the first Afro-Colombian vice president would have "an enormous historical significance for women, for the communities of that other Colombia,

Luis Gilberto Murillo will have the challenge, as ambassador to the United States, of maintaining good diplomatic relations but also taking some of the Petro's proposals to Washington.

As the president-elect recently explained to EL PAÍS, Petro would like the United States to support his agrarian reform since, if successful, it could be a better solution to reduce coca production in the country than other measures of the past.

“The United States has concentrated its effort in a very ineffective way on glyphosate and extraditions.

The result has been a total failure,” he said.

Luis Gilberto Murillo has an exceptional journey in Colombian politics.

He was born in the small town of Andagoya, 55 years ago in the department of Chocó, one of the poorest in the country and where the vast majority of the population is Afro-Colombian.

“It was a mining camp, now it is a town like any other in Chocó, in the middle of the jungle.

We are culture of the river, of the water”, Murillo told EL PAÍS.

When he graduated from high school, Murillo achieved the best score in the state tests in his department and that allowed him to obtain a scholarship to study mining engineering in the former Soviet Union—he arrived there in the eighties, when the bloc was already in decline. .

Murillo returned to Colombia in the 1990s and began to be linked to politics when he joined the student movement that led to the 1991 Constitution, and obtained some positions in Chocó and Bogotá as director in charge of the Department of the Environment.

But after being kidnapped in 2000, he left the country to find refuge in the United States.

There he started out as a nightclub bouncer but later lobbied several African-American congressmen and linked up with human rights organizations.

Being the new ambassador in Washington, Murillo starts with a prior rapprochement with the Democratic party.

He has also been a researcher at the American University of Washington, a consultant to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations,

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