the ghost of a assassination covers the campaign for the presidential elections on May 29, in which for the first time the left has options to come to power in the hands of this senator and former guerrilla. In the past, bullets have turned the tide of an election in Colombia.
In the 20th century, five presidential candidates were assassinated by opponents, drug traffickers or far-right paramilitaries with the help of state agents: three leftists, one of them a former guerrilla like Gustavo Petro, and two liberals.
Although it is no longer such a violent country, Colombia still faces the threat of drug traffickers and slips in efforts to consolidate peace after several agreements with rebels and paramilitaries.
In February, Gustavo Petro told AFP: “The ghost of death accompanies us. It does not stop appearing as a flash, when I mix in the crowd, when I am on a platform and there is a full square, that someone could shoot anywhere.
It was before his team exposed a plan to kill him. Faced with the threat, the also former mayor of Bogotá had to go up to the stage practically armored on May 5 in Cucutaon the border with Venezuela.
Since then, his scheme of 60 escorts has been strengthened, not counting the troops that the public force reserves for him on his trips.
Felipe Botero, professor of Political Science at the Universidad de Los Andes, believes that an assassination in 2022 “is a very real risk.”
“Not only that they kill Petro as a candidate, but it is also highly possible that they will try to assassinate him if he wins the presidency and that is an equally or more worrying scenario,” the analyst told AFP.
France Marquez, the black environmentalist who accompanies the former guerrilla’s ticket for vice president, also denounced threats, while the right-wing rival campaign Federico Gutierrez He has expressed concern for his own safety.
Three shots, Bogotá, 1948. The liberal candidate for the presidency Jorge eliecer gaitan collapses on a central avenue. His murder sets the city on fire and fuels an internal conflict that, half a century later, is still not extinguished.
Four decades later, in a bloody string, the communist Jaime Pardo Leal (1987), The Liberal Luis Carlos Galan (1989) and the leftists Bernard Jaramillo Y Charles Pizarro (1990), all presidential hopefuls.
Alexander Gamba, a professor at the Santo Tomás University, lists three reasons why an attack against Gustavo Petro “is possible”: In the first place, in Colombia there are “professionals of violence” with the capacity to carry it outlike the twenty mercenaries who participated in the assassination of the president of Haiti in 2021.
Second, certain sectors present a possible victory of Petro as “a great national catastrophe” and created an “environment” in which “such an action is patriotic”, pointed out the sociologist. And finally, the country “has not had a political alternation” that gives rise to the left, associated with the armed rebellion in conservative sectors.
The candidate’s campaign considers that it may be a strategy to remove him from the public square, where he is very active.
However, for the government Ivan DukeGustavo Petro is “one of the most protected people” in Colombia and the suspicions of an attack were not confirmed.
“To subtract credibility from a death threat in a country where hundreds of people are murdered annually for their political ideas seems to me to be short-sighted at best,” criticized Botero.
But not only Petro fears for his life. “Watch out for the security of Federico Gutiérrez,” the former president tweeted in recent days Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), who suggested “having serious information” related to a possible plot.
In 2002, Uribe himself escaped unharmed from an attack with explosives perpetrated by the then guerrilla of the FARC, who unsuccessfully tried to cut short his run for the presidency. In his biography, the former right-wing president claims to have escaped 15 attacks.
Gutierrez is Petro’s main rival. When he was mayor of Medellin (2016-2020), he gained supporters with his strong-arm policy against organized crime.
The polls anticipate a ballot between the two on June 19, with which Colombia will have to hold its breath for another month in the face of the real threat of wanting to govern it.
Source: Ambito
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