From Rebel to President: The Unlikely Journey of Colombia's Gustavo Petro

In 2007, a Colombian senator made an unusual request while visiting Washington DC: he wanted to accompany his host's friend on a simple school pickup run. "That's something I can't do in Colombia," Gustavo Petro told his host. "If your assassins know you're going to pick up your kid at a certain time, that's extremely dangerous."

Nearly two decades later, that same man sits in Colombia's presidential palace – the first left-wing leader in the country's modern history. But Petro's path from hunted rebel to president reveals more than just a personal transformation. It illuminates the deep fractures that have shaped Colombia for generations and the persistent questions about whether democratic change is possible in a country where violence has long been the language of politics.

The Making of a Revolutionary

Petro's political awakening came at age 10, watching his mother's tears after a rigged 1970 election. The defeat of the populist ANAPO party demonstrated how Colombia's two-party system – Liberal and Conservative – had created what amounted to a political monopoly, blocking any genuine alternatives.

Growing up in a middle-class family, Petro was shaped by two powerful influences: his father's gift of Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and his mother's stories about Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the reformist presidential candidate whose 1948 assassination triggered a decade of bloodshed known as La Violencia.

The novel's magical realism captured Colombia's cyclical violence and class struggles, while Gaitán's story showed what happened to leaders who challenged the established order. These influences converged when Petro encountered the M-19 movement in 1978 – an underground student organization named after that rigged election eight years earlier.

Unlike the rural, Marxist FARC guerrillas, M-19 was an urban movement of politicized students seeking social democracy. They specialized in symbolic actions: stealing Simón Bolívar's sword from a museum, hijacking milk trucks to redistribute food to poor neighborhoods, and targeting Colombia's wealthy elite through kidnappings.

Petro took the nom de guerre Aureliano, after a rebel leader in Márquez's novel, and focused on propaganda rather than armed operations. But his most significant early action came in 1981 when he organized 400 impoverished families to occupy a hillside outside Zipaquirá, creating makeshift plots for housing. That community, Bolívar 83, still exists today – a tangible reminder of his lifelong focus on land reform and social justice.

From Guns to Ballots

The transition from rebel to politician wasn't smooth. M-19 attempted to enter democratic politics in the 1980s, but Colombia's establishment had little tolerance for former guerrillas seeking power through ballots rather than bullets.

When M-19 laid down their weapons and formed a political party in 1990, their presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro was assassinated during a commercial flight. The message was clear: some paths to power remained closed, even for those who chose democracy.

Petro survived and gradually built a political career, first as a local ombudsman, then as a congressman and senator. But his most dangerous period came in the 2000s when he exposed the parapolitics scandal – the shadowy alliance between politicians, drug traffickers, and paramilitary groups that reached the highest levels of government.

His congressional hearings revealed how right-wing paramilitaries, originally created to fight leftist guerrillas, had evolved into a parallel state that controlled vast territories and influenced elections. The revelations led to the investigation of more than 150 congressmen and the imprisonment of dozens of politicians.

The work earned Petro international recognition, including the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award in Washington. But it also put a price on his head from paramilitary leaders, forcing him to live under constant security threats – hence his wistful observation about something as simple as a school pickup run.

The Persistence of Vision

What strikes observers about Petro is his consistency across five decades of political life. Alejandro Gaviria, his former education minister, notes that "if you watch an interview of his 20 years ago, he has exactly the same ideas. Then he was talking about peace, land reform; he was even ahead of his time talking about environmental issues."

This consistency reflects the enduring nature of Colombia's challenges. Despite decades of economic growth, the country remains one of the world's most unequal. As recently as 2000, just 1 percent of landowners possessed half the arable land – a concentration of wealth dating back to the colonial era when Spanish overseers managed a feudal-like system.

Petro's2022 presidential victory represented a historic break with this pattern. For the first time, Colombians elected a leader who explicitly challenged the traditional power structure rather than promising to manage it more efficiently.

Confronting Trump's America

Petro's presidency has coincided with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, creating an early test of his commitment to sovereignty and non-intervention. When Trump threatened military action against Colombia in early January 2026, the former rebel's response was characteristically direct: he would "take up arms" again to defend his country.

The confrontation, which was quickly defused through diplomatic channels, highlighted the complex dynamics between a progressive Latin American leader and a U.S. administration with little patience for regional autonomy.

For Petro, the exchange likely evoked memories of decades when U.S. policy in Latin America was defined by support for right-wing governments and suspicion of any leftward movement. His response – invoking the possibility of armed resistance – drew on both his personal history and Colombia's broader experience with foreign intervention.

Petro's journey from armed rebel to elected president raises fundamental questions about political change in societies marked by deep inequality and entrenched power structures. His story suggests that sometimes those who challenge the system from outside – even through violence – may be better positioned to transform it from within than those who rise through traditional channels.