PRESIDENT OF COLOMBIA
PRESIDENT GUSTAVO FRANCISCO PETRO URREGO
He is an economist from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. He has a specialization in Public Administration of the ESAP (Superior School of Public Administration), as well as studies in Master of Economics of the Javeriana University, studies in Specialization in Environment and Population Development at the Catholic University of Leuven and Doctoral studies in New Trends in Business Administration at the University of Salamanca.
He founded, together with the demobilized members of the peace process, the political party Allianza Democratica M-19, a movement that received great popular support and participated in the drafting of the 1991 Constitution.
With the support of this movement, Gustavo Petro came to the House of Representatives in 1991 for the department of Cundinamarca. In 1994 he was appointed to the Colombian Embassy in Belgium as diplomatic attaché for Human Rights, a position he held until 1996.
He returned to Colombia in 1998 and went again for the House of Representatives, this time for the electoral district of Bogotá with the endorsement of the Via Alterna Movement, which he had founded together with other former members of the AD M-19 Party; he was again elected Representative to the Chamber for the period 2002-2006.
From 2006 to 2010, Gustavo Petro was a Senator of the Republic, where he was elected the best congressman both by his colleagues and by the national press, thanks to his denunciations about corruption and his debates of political control, including that of paramilitarism in the department of Antioquia.
He was elected Mayor of Bogota from 2012 to 2015, and in 2018 he was Presidential candidate for the Significant Movement of Citizens - Colombia Humana. With historic results of more than 8 million votes, he made use, for the first time, of the Statute of the Opposition (Act 1909, 2018); since he was the second in the round of voting in the presidential elections, he became Senator of the Republic for the period 2018 - 2022.
On July 19, 2022, he was elected President of the Republic of Colombia, along with his vice-presidential candidate, Francia Márquez Mina.
