Gustavo Petro: first leftist president faces tough challenge in Colombia

Despite the election euphoria, Petro has a thin mandate and is viewed with suspicion by manyHe spent 12 years of his youth in the ranks of an urban guerrilla group, taking the alias of a revolutionary general from Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Later, he would serve as a progressive mayor of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, and as a senator. He ran for president unsuccessfully twice, unable to overcome the conservative wall erected nearly two