Background and career
Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego (born 19 April 1960) is a Colombian politician and economist who served as the 35th president of Colombia from 2022 to 2026. He founded and leads the political party Historic Pact (PH) and is considered the first, and so far only, left-wing president in the recent history of Colombia. At 17 years old, Petro joined the guerrilla group 19th of April Movement (M-19). Petro also served as a councilman in Zipaquirá. He was arrested in 1985 by the army for his affiliation with M-19, which had attacked the Palace of Justice that year and resulted in the death of 11 of the twenty-five justices in the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia. After the peace process between the Colombian government and the M-19, he was released and later elected to the Chamber of Representatives in the 1991 parliamentary election. In the 2006 election, he was elected to the Colombian Senate as a member of the Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA). In 2009, he resigned his Senate seat to run in the 2010 Colombian presidential election, finishing fourth in the first round. Due to ideological disagreements with the leaders of the PDA, Petro founded the Humane Colombia party to compete for the mayoralty of Bogotá, and was elected mayor in 2011. He ran for president of Colombia in the 2018 election, losing the second round with 41.77% of the vote. He ran again in the 2022 presidential election, defeating Rodolfo Hernández Suárez in the second round with 50.42% of the vote. As president, Petro pursued a progressive domestic agenda, increasing the minimum wage, strengthening the legal framework for labor protections, redistributing land to peasants, and increasing social spending. Poverty and unemployment declined during his presidency and public debt increased. His health and labor reforms stalled in Congress. His security policy, "Total Peace", which aimed to demobilize the country's remaining armed groups, has been criticized as ineffective. In foreign affairs, he restored diplomatic relations with Venezuela and suspended diplomatic ties with Israel over the Gaza war. Relations with the United States deteriorated sharply during Donald Trump's second term; shortly after Trump took office in January 2025, Colombia and the US had a dispute over deportation flights and in September, the US revoked Petro's US visa. The U.S. Treasury in October 2025 added Petro, his wife, his son, and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list, alleging involvement in the global illicit drug trade. For the 2026 Colombian presidential election, Petro was constitutionally barred from seeking a second term. He instead endorsed fellow Historic Pact Senator Iván Cepeda to be his successor. In what became the closest election in Colombia's history, Cepeda was narrowly defeated by Abelardo de la Espriella, who succeeded Petro as president of Colombia on August 7, 2026. Petro condemned foreign interference in this election. Hours later Petro acknowledged the results, announcing that his administration would begin the formal handover process.
Petro was born on 19 April 1960 in the municipality of Ciénaga de Oro, Córdoba, Colombia. He is the son of Gustavo Petro Sierra and Clara Nubia Urrego. Petro is predominantly descended from long-established mestizo Colombian families, though his father is of one quarter Italian descent through Petro's paternal great-grandfather, Francesco Petro, who migrated from Southern Italy in 1870, and Petro's mother is of half Italian descent via Petro's maternal grandmother, Lucia Pellegrini, who was from Conza della Campania, thus earning him dual Colombian and 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. 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.
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. During his time in M-19, Petro was elected ombudsman of Zipaquirá in 1981 and councilman from 1984 to 1986. He led the M-19's seizure 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 underground and allied with Carlos Pizarro, one of the main commanders of the M-19, insisting on the need for a negotiated political solution to the Colombian armed conflict and the transition to a Constituent Assembly. In 1985, Petro was arrested by the army for illegal arms possession. 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 in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in economics from the Universidad Externado de Colombia and began graduate studies at the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública (ESAP). Later, he started a master's degree in economics from the Universidad Javeriana but never graduated. 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. In April 2016, an investigation by El Espectador concluded that three academic degrees listed by Gustavo Petro were false, as he had not obtained a specialization in Public Administration, a master’s degree in Economics, or a doctorate (PhD) in New Trends in Business Management as stated in his résumé. Petro confirmed the investigation in a column published in the same outlet, responding to the article about the false degrees, though he explained that for the specialization he had finished coursework but had not completed a thesis nor chosen another graduation option, saying he “simply wanted to study the specialization.” Regarding his master’s studies, he likewise said he completed coursework but did not receive the degree because he could not reach an agreement with the Pontifical Xavierian University about his thesis, and therefore did not finish it. Concerning the alleged doctorate, he stated he only completed the theoretical cycle, without developing research, and attended the semesters taught in Colombia, without traveling to Spain where the final semesters were held. Petro’s defense argued that while his résumé had inconsistencies like that of Enrique Peñalosa, he had in fact begun doctoral-level studies even if he did not finish them, so the cases were not comparable.
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 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. 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. 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 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 2005, while a member of the Chamber of Representatives, Petro denounced the lottery businesswoman Enilse López (also known as "La Gata" [the cat]). 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). Petro alleged that the AUC financially contributed to the presidential campaign of Álvaro Uribe in 2002. Uribe refuted these statements by Petro but, during his presidential reelection campaign in 2006, admitted to having received financial support from Enilse López. During Álvaro Uribe's second term as president, Petro encouraged debate on the Parapolitics scandal. In February 2007 Petro began a public verbal dispute with President Uribe when Petro suggested that the president should have recused himself from negotiating the demobilization process of paramilitaries in Colombia; this followed accusations that Uribe's brother, Santiago Uribe, was a former member of the Twelve Apostles paramilitary group in the mid-1990s. President Uribe responded by accusing Petro of being a "terrorist in civilian clothing" and by summoning the opposition to an open debate. On 17 April 2007, Petro began a debate in Congress about CONVIVIR and the development of paramilitarism in Antioquia Department. During a two-hour speech, he revealed a variety of documents demonstrating the relationship between members of the Colombian military, the current political leadership, narcotraffickers and paramilitary groups. Petro also criticized the actions of Álvaro Uribe as Governor of Antioquia Department during the CONVIVIR years, and presented an old photograph of Álvaro Uribe's brother, Santiago, alongside Colombian drug trafficker Fabio Ochoa Vázquez. The Minister of Interior and Justice, Carlos Holguín Sardi and the Minister of Transport, Andrés Uriel Gallego, were asked to defend the president and his government. Both of them questioned Petro's past as a revolutionary member and accused him of "not condemning the warfare of violent people". Most of Petro's arguments were condemned as mud-slinging. The day after this debate the president said "I would have been a great guerrilla because I wouldn't have been a guerrilla of mud, but a guerrilla of rifles. I would have been a military success, not a fake protagonist". President Uribe's brother, Santiago Uribe, affirmed that his father and the Ochoa brothers had grown up together and were in the Paso Fino horse business together. He then mentioned that he also had many photographs, taken with many people. On 18 April 2007, the Vigilance and Security Superintendency released a communique rejecting Petro's accusations concerning the CONVIVIR groups. The Superintendency said that many of the groups mentioned were authorized by the Departments of Sucre and Córdoba, but not by the Antioquia government; it also added that Álvaro Uribe, then Antioquia's governor, had eliminated the legal liability of eight CONVIVIR groups in 1997. It was also mentioned that the paramilitary leader known as "Julian Bolívar" had not yet been identified as such and was not associated with any CONVIVIR during the authorization of these groups.
