Gustavo Petro

His great-grandfather, Francesco Petro, migrated from Southern Italy in 1870, which is why he has Italian citizenship.

Petro was raised in the Catholic faith and has stated that he has a vision of God from liberation theology, although he also questioned God's existence.

Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego (born 19 April 1960) is a Colombian politician, economist, and former member of the M19 armed guerrilla movement.

He has been serving as the president of Colombia since 2022.

Upon his inauguration, he became the first left-wing president in the recent history of Colombia.

Petro was born in Ciénaga de Oro, in the department of Córdoba, in 1960.

Seeking a better future, Petro's family decided to migrate to the more prosperous Colombian inland town of Zipaquirá, just north of Bogotá, during the 1970s.

Petro studied at the Colegio de Hermanos de La Salle, where he founded the student newspaper Carta al Pueblo ("Letter to the People").

Convinced that the guerrilla struggle could change the political and economic system of Colombia, around the age of 17, Petro became a member of the 19th of April Movement (M-19), a Colombian guerrilla organisation that emerged in 1974 in opposition to the National Front coalition after allegations of fraud in the 1970 election.

He used the pseudonym of Aureliano, a character in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The M-19 group was responsible for the death of 13 colombian politicians at a shooting they produced on the Justice Palace.

This group was also involved with kidnapping and several armed problems in villages all around Colombia.

With the M-19, he led the seizure of a piece of land to house 400 poor families who had been forcibly displaced by paramilitary groups, and then contributed to the construction of what would become the Bolívar 83 neighborhood.

He then went completely underground and became close to Carlos Pizarro, one of the main commanders of the M-19, and insisted with him on the need for a negotiated political solution to the Colombian armed conflict and on the transition to a Constituent Assembly.

During his time in 19 April Petro became a leader, and was elected ombudsman of Zipaquirá in 1981 and councilman from 1984 to 1986.

In 1985, Petro was arrested by the army for the crime of illegal possession of arms.

he was tortured for ten days in the stables of the XIII Brigade, then sentenced to 18 months in prison.

It was during his incarceration that Petro shifted his ideology, no longer viewing armed resistance as a feasible strategy to gain public backing.

In 1987, M-19 engaged in peace talks with the government.

Petro graduated with a degree in economics from the Universidad Externado de Colombia and began graduate studies at the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública (ESAP).

Later, he earned a master's degree in economics from the Universidad Javeriana.

He then traveled to Belgium and started his graduate studies in Economy and Human Rights at the Université catholique de Louvain.

He also began his studies towards a doctoral degree in public administration from the University of Salamanca in Spain.

At 17 years of age, Petro became a member of the guerrilla group 19th of April Movement, which later evolved into the M-19 Democratic Alliance, a political party in which he was elected to be a member of the Chamber of Representatives in the 1991 Colombian parliamentary election.

After the demobilization of the M-19 movement, former members of the group (including Petro) formed a political party called the M-19 Democratic Alliance which won a significant number of seats in the Chamber of Representatives in 1991, representing the department of Cundinamarca.

In July 1994, he met with Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez (just released from prison after the February 1992 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt) during an event on Bolivarian thought at the Simón Rodríguez Cultural Foundation in Bogotá, directed by José Cuesta, Petro's parliamentary assistant.

In 2002, Petro was elected to the Chamber of Representatives representing Bogotá, this time as a member of the Vía Alterna political movement he founded with former colleague Antonio Navarro Wolff and other former M-19 members.

As a member of Vía Alterna, Petro created an electoral coalition with the Frente Social y Político to form the Independent Democratic Pole, which fused with the Alternativa Democrática in 2005 to form the Alternative Democratic Pole, joining a large number of leftist political figures.

In 2005, while a member of the Chamber of Representatives, Petro denounced the lottery businesswoman Enilse López (also known as "La Gata" [the cat]).

He served as a senator as a member of the Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA) party following the 2006 Colombian parliamentary election with the second-largest vote.

During this period, Petro received 25 votes of 125 consulted representatives to be chosen as the 2006 "Best Congressman", against 24 that held that no representative was worthy of being considered the best because the legislative period was characterized by absenteeism and shortage of sessions.

In 2006, Petro was elected to the Senate, mobilizing the second highest voter turnout in the country.

During that year he also exposed the Parapolitics scandal, accusing members and followers of the government of mingling with paramilitary groups in order to "reclaim" Colombia.

Senator Petro vehemently opposed the government of Álvaro Uribe.

In 2009, he resigned his position to run in the 2010 Colombian presidential election, finishing fourth in the race.

Due to ideological disagreements with the leaders of the PDA, he founded the Humane Colombia movement to compete for the mayoralty of Bogotá.

As of May 2009, she was imprisoned and under investigation for ties to the (now disbanded) paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).

On 30 October 2011, he was elected mayor in the local elections, a position he assumed on 1 January 2012.

In the first round of the 2018 Colombian presidential election, he came second with over 25% of the votes on 27 May, and lost in the run-off election on 17 June.

He defeated Rodolfo Hernández Suárez in the second round of the 2022 Colombian presidential election on 19 June.