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His Excellency Gustavo Petro bio photo

His Excellency Gustavo Petro

President of the Republic of Colombia

President Gustavo Petro is an economist from the Universidad Externado de Colombia. He has a specialization in Public Administration from the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública of Colombia (ESAP), a Master's degree in Economics from Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, a specialization in Environment and Population Development from the Catholic University of Louvain and PhD studies in New Trends in Business Administration from the University of Salamanca, in Spain.

He founded, together with the demobilized members of the peace process, the political party Alianza Democrática M-19, a movement that achieved great popular support and participated in the drafting of the 1991 Political Constitution of Colombia. With the support of this movement, Gustavo Petro became a member of the House of Representatives in. 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 again ran for the House of Representatives with the endorsement of the Vía Alterna Movement, which he had founded together with other former members of the M-19 Party and was again elected Representative for the 2002-2006 period.

From 2006 to 2010, Gustavo Petro was Senator of the Republic, where he was elected the best congressman both by his colleagues and by the national press, thanks to his denunciations of corruption and his political control debates, including the one on paramilitarism in Antioquia.

He was elected Mayor of Bogota for the 2012 to 2015 term, and in 2018 he was a Presidential candidate for the Significant Movement of Citizens - Colombia Humana, with a historic result of more than 8 million votes; having obtained the second highest vote in the presidential elections and making use, for the first time, of the Statute of the Opposition, he acted as Senator of the Republic for the period from 2018 to 2022.

On June 19, 2022, he was chosen as President of the Republic of Colombia, together with Vice President Francia Márquez Mina.

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