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Uribe, however, has managed to distract Colombians by exploiting Venezuela’s economic collapse to stoke fear among voters. His tirades against “castrochavismo,” a term fusing the surnames of Fidel Castro and former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, which he loosely applies to progressive opponents, are often echoed and amplified by his supporters. Comparisons likening Petro to Venezuela’s current president, Nicolás Maduro, are common. “We don’t want another Maduro in Colombia. That’s what Petro is,” said Ruth Teresa Ramos, 48, who was volunteering as an electoral witness in Bogotá for Duque’s campaign on election day. Fredy Urrego, another volunteer for Duque who spent two decades serving in the military, said he was voting “so that Colombia doesn’t become another Venezuela.”
Despite Petro’s efforts to distance himself from Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and his attempts to woo moderate voters, other left-leaning, peace-supporting factions refused to support him in the runoff, even under the looming threat of a potential Duque presidency. Sergio Fajardo and Humberto de la Calle, two center-left candidates who finished with a collective 26 percent in the first-round vote, both called for their voters to cast empty ballots in the runoff instead of voting for Petro. Others, like prominent center-left politicians Claudia Lopez and Antanas Mockus, only announced their support for Petro’s campaign after he pledged to uphold twelve political “commandments,” which were actually written in stone. Among them were promises against land expropriation for rural development and against convening a constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution, as Maduro had done last year in Venezuela. “If politics were clean, if we focused on political platforms, arguments, and proposals alone, we’d win,” said Gustavo Bolivar, a senator recently elected to Congress with Petro’s Colombia Humana party.
full: https://www.thenation.com/article/right-wing-wins-colombia-amid-divisions-left/
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