Long earlier than Gustavo Petro emerged because the apparently victorious leftist candidate for president, he was a part of the M-19, an city guerrilla group that sought to grab energy via violence within the identify of selling social justice.
For some Colombian voters, his previous was a supply of concern after a long time of armed battle. For others, it supplied an indication of hope for certainly one of most inequitable nations in Latin America.
The M-19 was born in 1970 as a response to alleged fraud in that 12 months’s presidential elections. It was far smaller than the nation’s essential guerrilla drive, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which was Marxist and sought haven in Colombia’s jungles and rural areas.
The M-19 was an city navy group fashioned by college college students, activists and artists who wished to topple a governing system they believed didn’t bridge a continual divide between the wealthy and the poor.
“The M-19 was born in arms to build a democracy,” Mr. Petro informed The New York Times in an interview.
It initially tried to advertise a Robin Hood picture, robbing milk from grocery store vehicles to distribute in poor neighborhoods and, in a symbolic act of rebel, stole a sword from a museum that Simón Bolívar utilized in Colombia’s warfare for independence.
Mr. Petro, 62, joined the group when he was 17 and an economics scholar, dismayed by the poverty he witnessed within the city the place has residing, outdoors Bogotá, the capital.
While the M-19 was much less brutal than different insurgent teams, it did orchestrate what is taken into account one of many bloodiest acts within the nation’s latest historical past: the 1985 siege of Colombia’s nationwide judicial constructing that led to a battle with the police and the navy, leaving 94 folks useless.
The group additionally stole 5,000 weapons from the Colombian navy and used kidnapping as a tactic to attempt to wrest concessions from the federal government.
Mr. Petro, who spent 10 years within the M-19, largely stockpiled stolen weapons, stated Sandra Borda, a political science professor on the University of the Andes in Bogotá.
“What’s key is that he wasn’t part of the main circle who made the decisions in M-19. He was very young at that moment,” she stated. “He didn’t participate in the most important operations of the M-19, the military operations.”
At the time of the justice constructing takeover, Mr. Petro was in jail for his involvement with the group and he has described being crushed and electrocuted by the authorities.
The group finally demobilized in 1990, which was thought of some of the profitable peace processes within the nation’s lengthy historical past of battle. It changed into a political get together that helped rewrite the nation’s structure to focus extra on equality and human rights.
Mr. Petro ran for Senate as a member of the get together, launching his political profession.
Sofía Villamil and Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Bogotá.