The presidential ballot in Colombia, with almost 100 percent of the polling stations counted according to the National Electoral Council, ended on Sunday 19 June with the victory of the progressive candidate Gustavo Petro for the Historical Pact, who received 50.45 percent of the votes, for a total of 11,278,938 people, while the representative of the extreme right and the continuist Uribist party, Rodolfo Hernández, received 47.29 percent, equivalent to 10,571,757 of the votes.
The democratic forces that supported the winner, Gustavo Petro, range from sectors of liberalism critical of the establishment, to social and political organisations of an anti-capitalist nature, which synthesises a progressive political construction that, for the first time in more than 200 years, managed to break at the ballot box the electoral hegemony of the most reactionary, authoritarian, conservative and oligarchic dominant groups in the country, openly under the tutelage of Washington’s interests.
The electoral result, among other factors, can also be explained by the unprecedented popular revolt that shook the tectonic plates of profound Colombia in 2021, which was capable of modifying the relations of force in many dimensions thanks to the massive participation of the youth, women, the most precarious workers and peasants, the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, and the most historically excluded and discriminated social groups in the country.
It is the same people who led the popular outburst of the previous year, using their legitimate and legal right to protest, who paid for the mobilisations against poverty and crime with almost a hundred people murdered and thousands tortured, wounded, imprisoned and prosecuted by the military, state police and paramilitary forces, The armed extensions of the paramilitaries, all of them linked to the traditional political power, the drug trafficking industry, the landed classes of agribusiness, the exploitation and plundering of natural resources by the big transnational economic groups, and the state police.
The awakened people of Colombia, fed up with the narco-terrorist and murderous regime of social leaders and defenders of human and environmental rights, managed to destroy the centuries-old atavism that kept them in resignation and fatalism in the face of the oligarchy and pentagonist interests, which maintains several military bases on its soil and has turned the country into the emblematic pivot of the US State Department for long and painful decades.
This historic turning point is today a moment of celebration. The Colombian people, Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez, received the affectionate embrace of countless personalities from Latin America and the world due to the victory achieved, including congratulations from the President and Vice-President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca.
