“Petro’s case is because the campaign against him bothers me a lot. It is, truly, unworthy, mean, and it is what we have already faced. I hope that the people in Colombia do not allow themselves to be manipulated and that they act freely and vote for whoever they want, but not for that dirty war”, he pointed out.
The Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed its dissatisfaction with what it considered to be interference in the electoral process in its country.
On Sunday, the Mexican president celebrated the triumph of the former mayor of Bogotá and described his election as historic.
“Colombian conservatives have always been tenacious and tough. The writer José María Vargas Vila recounted that the dictators of his country ‘dipped his dagger in holy water before killing,’ ” the Mexican president wrote on social networks.
“In 1948, that same procedure caused the assassination of the great liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The people inflamed by the crime destroyed all the public buildings in Bogotá and there were thousands of deaths, in a spontaneous and cruel popular revolution”, he recounted. “Today’s triumph may be the end of that curse and the dawn for that brotherly and worthy people. Congratulations,” he added.
In his morning conference on Monday, López Orador celebrated the fact that another man from the left has reached another government in Latin America and said that he hopes to work with Gustavo Petro in uniting the region.
“What we have been proposing, all together, is a new stage, with respect to the autonomies and the sovereignty of the peoples, as was the European community that later became the European Union, that is our approach. We are looking for that and we are going to insist that we unite throughout America,” he added.
Analysts consider that the election of Petro and the eventual return to power of Lula da Silva in Brazil —whose elections are held in October— could facilitate regional dialogue, broken by the ideological differences of the Latin American leaders.
With information from AFP and Reuters