Colombia presidential electionIn Colombia, a Leftist and a Right-Wing Populist Move on to June Runoff

The New York Times cubrió la primera vuelta presidencial de Colombia en inglés y español. Aquí puedes leer nuestra cobertura en español.

After Sunday’s vote, Colombia’s election heads to a runoff.

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Voters lined up at a polling station in Medellin, Colombia, during the first round of the presidential election on Sunday.Credit...Chelo Camacho/Reuters

Two anti-establishment candidates, Gustavo Petro, a leftist, and Rodolfo Hernández, a right-wing populist, captured the top two spots in Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday, delivering a stunning blow to the country’s dominant conservative political class.

The two men will compete in a runoff election on June 19 that is shaping up to be one of the most consequential in the country’s history. At stake is the country’s economic model, its democratic integrity and the livelihoods of millions of people pushed into poverty during the pandemic.

The Petro-Hernández face-off, said Daniel García-Peña, a Colombian political scientist, pits “change against change.”

Fifty-four percent of eligible voters participated in the election, the same rate as 2018, when Mr. Petro faced the current president, Iván Duque, and a slate of other candidates.

The day was largely peaceful as millions of Colombians voted, despite growing unrest in parts of the country that have seen a resurgence of armed groups.

If Mr. Petro wins the runoff election next month, he will become Colombia’s first leftist president, a watershed moment for a nation that has long been led by a conservative establishment.

In his postelection speech at a hotel near the center of Bogotá, Mr. Petro stood beside his vice-presidential pick and said Sunday’s results showed that the political project of the current president and his allies “has been defeated.”

He then quickly issued warnings about Mr. Hernández, painting a vote for him as a dangerous regression, and daring the electorate to take a chance on what he called a progressive project, “a true change.”

His rise reflects not just a leftist shift across Latin America but also an anti-incumbent fervor that has gained strength as the pandemic has deepened poverty and inequality, intensifying feelings that the region’s economies are built mostly to serve the elite.

Mr. Petro has vowed to transform Colombia’s economic system, which he says fuels inequality, by expanding social programs, halting oil exploration and shifting the country’s focus to domestic agriculture and industry.

Colombia has long been the United States’ strongest ally in the region, and Mr. Petro is calling for a reset of the relationship, including changes to the approach to the drug war and a re-examination of a bilateral trade agreement that could lead to a clash with Washington.

Mr. Hernández, who was relatively unknown before he began surging in the polls in the campaign’s closing days, pushes a populist anti-corruption platform, but has raised alarms with his plan to declare a state of emergency to accomplish his goals.

“Today the country of politicking and corruption lost,” Mr. Hernández wrote in a Facebook message to his supporters following Sunday’s results. “Today, the gangs who thought that they could govern forever have lost.”

Many voters are fed up with rising prices, high unemployment, low wages, rising education costs and surging violence, and polls show that a clear majority of Colombians have an unfavorable view of Mr. Iván Duque, who is largely regarded as part of the conservative establishment.

The election comes as polls show growing distrust in the country’s institutions, including the country’s national registrar, an election body. The registrar bungled the initial count in a March congressional vote, leading to concern that losing candidates in the presidential vote will declare fraud.

The country is also seeing a rise in violence, undermining the democratic process. The Mission for Electoral Observation called this pre-election period the most violent in 12 years.

Mr. Petro and his running mate, Francia Márquez, have both received death threats, leading to increased security, including bodyguards holding riot shields.

Despite these dangers, the election has invigorated many Colombians who had long believed their voices were not represented at the highest levels of power, infusing the election with a sense of hope. That feeling of optimism is partly inspired by Ms. Márquez, a former housekeeper and environmental activist who would be the country’s first Black vice president if her ticket won.

Her campaign has focused on fighting systemic injustice, and its most popular slogan, “vivir sabroso,” means, roughly, “live richly and with dignity.”

Reporting was contributed by Sofía Villamil, Megan Janetsky and Genevieve Glatsky in Bogotá.

Petro, a leftist, and Hernández, a right-wing populist, head to a runoff in a blow to the establishment.

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Counting ballots at a polling station in Medellín, Colombia, on Sunday.Credit...Joaquin Sarmiento/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Two anti-establishment candidates, Gustavo Petro, a leftist, and Rodolfo Hernández, a right-wing populist, captured the top two spots in Colombia’s presidential election, delivering a stunning blow to Colombia’s dominant conservative political class.

The two men will compete in a runoff election on June 19 that is shaping up to be one of the most consequential in the country’s history. At stake is the country’s economic model, its democratic integrity and the livelihoods of millions of people pushed into poverty during the pandemic.

With more than 99 percent of the ballots counted on Sunday evening, Mr. Petro received more than 40 percent of the vote, while Mr. Hernández received just over 28 percent. Mr. Hernández beat by more than four percentage points the conservative establishment candidate, Federico Gutiérrez, who had been polling in second place.

Mr. Hernández’s unexpected second-place victory shows a nation hungry to elect anyone who is not represented by the country’s mainstream conservative leaders.

“This is a vote against Duque, against the political class,” said Daniel García-Peña, a Colombian political scientist, referring to the current president, Iván Duque, who swept into office four years ago with the support of the country’s most powerful conservative kingmaker, Álvaro Uribe.

Mr. Petro, the leftist, is a senator and former rebel who is proposing an overhaul of the country’s capitalist economic system. He had been expected to face off next month against Mr. Gutiérrez.

Instead, voters decided that Mr. Petro will face Mr. Hernández, a businessman and former mayor with an anti-corruption platform and Trumpian irreverence who was largely unknown until just a few weeks ago.

The election was characterized by deep frustration with chronic poverty, inequality and growing insecurity. The country is saddled with 10 percent inflation, a 20 percent youth unemployment rate and a 40 percent poverty rate.

At the same time, polls from the firm Invamer show growing distrust in almost all institutions, including congress, political parties, the military, the police and the media.

Such widespread disillusionment has led many voters to reject two driving forces in Colombian politics, said Mr. Peña-Garcia: political dynasties dominated by a few families, and Uribismo, a hard-line conservatism named for its founder, Mr. Uribe, who was president from 2002 to 2010.

Both Mr. Petro and Mr. Hernández are proposing new — and radically different — paths forward for the country.

If elected in the runoff, Mr. Petro would be the first leftist president in the nation’s history. He proposes a broad expansion of social programs, while halting all new oil exploration, cutting off a key revenue source.

His base includes many Colombians who believe the right has failed them.

“This is the awakening of many young people who have realized, truly, that our grandparents and parents were lied to,” said Camila Riveros, 30, a Petro supporter. “They were sold a story of salvation that wasn’t true.”

Mr. Hernández, a former mayor of a midsize city, has based his campaign around one issue — jailing the corrupt — but his position on other issues is less clear.

He has suggested combining ministries to save money and declaring a state of emergency for 90 days to address corruption, leading to fears that he could shut down Congress or suspend mayors.

Some voters said they were attracted to what Mr. Hernández has promised. “I think his entrepreneurial view of things is comparable with Trump,” said Salvador Rizo, 26, a tech consultant who lives in Medellín.

“I think that the other candidates are watching a house that is on fire and they want to extinguish that fire and reveal the house,’’ he said. “What I think the view of Rodolfo is: that there’s a house that can be a massive hotel in the future.”

Reporting was contributed by Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá.

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Establishment conservatives quickly align with Hernández after his unexpected second-place win.

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Supporters of Rodolfo Hernández celebrate the first round voting results in Bucaramanga, Colombia on Sunday.Credit...Mauricio Pinzon/Associated Press

“Today the country of politicking and corruption lost,” Rodolfo Hernández, a right-wing anti-establishment candidate, said in a Facebook message to his supporters, following Sunday’s results that put him in second place behind Gustavo Petro.

Mr. Hernández’s unexpected second-place victory underscored the anti-incumbent fervor that has swept through the country and left it hungry to elect anyone who is not represented by the country’s mainstream conservative leaders.

The candidate had run a campaign outside of many of the traditional trappings of Colombian politics, and on Sunday his team shared images of him spending Election Day in his swimsuit, at the pool with his granddaughter, while his rivals voted amid hordes of reporters and voters.

“Today, the gangs who thought that they could govern forever have lost,” his victory message said.

In the months before the election, most of the country’s most powerful conservative politicians, and much of the business community, had lined up behind Federico Gutiérrez, the candidate of the conservative establishment.

But just minutes after Mr. Hernández’s win over Mr. Gutiérrez was solidified, key members of the establishment political class began to throw their support behind him for the June 19 runoff election.

“Rodolfo’s triumph is the triumph against the establishment,” Maria Fernanda Cabal, an influential right-wing senator whose husband leads a powerful cattle industry association, said on Twitter. “The country needs changes, not the suicide that Petro offers, but authority, order and the prosperity.”

On Sunday night, Mr. Gutiérrez said he would support Mr. Hernández, a move that is likely to hand many of Mr. Gutiérrez’s five million votes to the former mayor of Colombia’s 11th largest city in the June runoff.

At a business complex in Bogotá, surrounded by supporters, Mr. Gutiérrez called his decision an effort to “safeguard democracy and safeguard freedom.”

“We don’t want to lose the country,” he said.

Mr. Gutiérrez was never expected to back Mr. Petro, an ideological opponent. But it wasn’t clear if he would support Mr. Hernández.

The announcement presents a major challenge to Mr. Petro, who some political analysts believe has hit his ceiling in terms of voters, and it could effectively hand the presidency to Mr. Hernández, a wild-card candidate with few firm policies and who was largely unknown in most of Colombia just a few weeks ago.

Megan Janetsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.

Colombia’s runoff vote could reshape America’s regional policy.

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Demonstrators protesting in Cartagena in January against powdered milk imported from the United States as part of a bilateral free trade agreement. Credit...Ricardo Maldonado Rozo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Colombia’s presidential runoff election next month could test America’s relationship with its most reliable ally in Latin America, with potentially significant consequences for the region.

A victory by Gustavo Petro would usher in the first leftist government in Colombian history, potentially reshaping the special ties Colombia has built with the United States over decades of conservative rule.

The bond between the two nations has made Colombia the cornerstone of Washington’s security policy in Latin America and, in return, the largest recipient of American aid in the region.

During his campaign, Mr. Petro promised to reassess the relationship, including crucial collaborations on drugs, Venezuela and trade.

If elected, Mr. Petro said he would review Colombia’s free trade agreement with the United States, implying that the current deal is hindering his country’s ability to move beyond exporting commodities and developing more of its own industries.

He has also said that he would restore Colombia’s relations with the authoritarian government of president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, threatening the last bulwark of America’s faltering attempts to isolate its biggest South American adversary.

Colombia is the only South American country that is fully enforcing America’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Mr. Maduro, which has resulted in Venezuela’s isolation from the global economy, sanctions against top Venezuelan officials and Washington’s recognition of the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s interim president.

But the sanctions have failed to dislodge Mr. Maduro or force him to accept free elections, as the Venezuelan strongman has adapted to economic pressure and other leaders in the region who were aligned with the United States lost power.

Mr. Petro said Colombia needs to have diplomatic relations with Venezuela to address the endemic violence along large parts of the more than 1,000 miles of border the two nations share and to allow Colombian businesses to restart cross-border trade.

Perhaps most crucially, Mr. Petro said he would revise Colombia’s position in America’s war on drugs. The United States has poured billions of dollars in Colombia in the past two decades to help its governments halt the production and export of cocaine, to little effect.

“Without a doubt we have to change this policy that has failed,” Mr. Petro told journalists during a campaign event in March. “We can’t maintain a policy because of inertia or business interests that has not been efficient for Colombia or United States.”

To tackle Colombia’s drug trade, Mr. Petro said he would prioritize rural development instead of the current focus on eradicating coca plants and extraditing traffickers to face charges in the United States, though he ruled out legalizing cocaine.

Still, his vow to change how his country deals with drugs has raised major alarm bells in Washington, said Adam Isacson, an expert on Colombian security policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group.

Should Mr. Petro win, he said, “I think this will be a flash point of conflict between the two countries.”

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Is Colombian democracy under threat?

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Gustavo Petro, a leftist presidential candidate, was heavily guarded during a campaign stop this month.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Colombia is home to one of the longest-running democracies in Latin America, surviving even amid decades of violence that have threatened to tear the country apart.

Yet this presidential election cycle has raised serious questions about whether the country is headed toward a democratic crisis.

“I am very worried,” said Elisabeth Ungar, a longtime Colombian political analyst, adding that the country was in the midst of a democratic “regression” unlike anything she’d seen before.

There is widespread distrust in the voting system following a March congressional election in which the registrar, a top election body, failed to include more than a million votes in its initial count, many for Mr. Petro’s coalition.

A recent poll by the firm Invamer showed that 40 percent of the country had a negative view of the registrar.

Amid the electoral doubts, there is also growing tension between Mr. Petro and the armed forces, escalating concerns that the two are headed for a clash should he win.

That tension hit a high last month, when Mr. Petro accused several generals of taking money from a criminal group, without providing proof. The head of the army, Gen. Eduardo Zapateiro, shot back, calling Mr. Petro the corrupt one, despite a constitutional provision that bars members of the armed forces from political participation.

President Iván Duque, a political opponent of Mr. Petro’s, defended the general, further inflaming tensions.

If Mr. Petro wins, “I don’t think there will be a coup d’état,” said José Luis Esparza, a retired colonel. “But there are going to be many internal conflicts.”

All this is unfolding in a nation with a long history of political assassinations.

Laura Gamboa, a Colombian political scientist at the University of Utah, said there were major reasons to be concerned about the health of Colombia’s democracy.

First, in her view, the country’s watchdog institutions, including the offices of the prosecutor and the inspector general, had been weakened under Mr. Duque, a conservative president who she described as appointing partisan allies to top positions, and who has repeatedly stood by security forces following accusations of human rights violations during his presidency.

The situation is only worsened, Ms. Gamboa said, by a new cycle of violence that has led to displacement, massacres and the killing of hundreds of community leaders, stifling democratic participation.

The Mission for Electoral Observation, a local civil society organization, called this recent pre-election period the most violent in 12 years.

Second, said Ms. Gamboa, if elected, Mr. Petro would enter office amid accusations of an authoritarian streak.

Daniel Garcia-Peña, a political scientist who worked with Mr. Petro between 2002 and 2012, said that as mayor of Bogotá, the capital, Mr. Petro circumvented the City Council and often failed to listen to advisers.

In 2018, when Mr. Petro ran for president and lost, he declared the election a fraud, a claim he has repeated.

A victory for the candidate polling in second place, Federico Gutiérrez, could also pose a threat to the country’s stability, Ms. Gamboa said. Mr. Gutiérrez is widely viewed as Mr. Duque’s successor at a time when many voters are frustrated with growing poverty, economic inequality and insecurity — and calling for significant change.

“If Fico wins,” she went on, using the candidate’s nickname, “I think it’s true that what we’re going to see is constant mobilizations and uprising. People are fed up.”

Will Gustavo Petro, a leftist candidate, become Colombia’s first leftist leader? Young voters could hold the key.

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There are now nearly nine million Colombian voters 28 or younger, the most in history, and they represent a quarter of the electorate. Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

After an improbable rise from clandestine rebel to Bogotá mayor and bullish face of the Colombian opposition, Gustavo Petro could soon become the country’s first leftist president, a watershed moment for one of the most politically conservative societies in Latin America.

And his ascent has, in no small part, been propelled by the biggest, loudest and possibly angriest youth electorate in Colombia’s history, demanding the transformation of a country long cleaved by deep social and racial inequality.

There are now nearly nine million Colombian voters 28 or younger, the most in history, and a quarter of the electorate. They are restive, raised on promises of higher education and good jobs, disillusioned by current prospects, more digitally connected and arguably more empowered than any previous generation.

Today’s younger generation is grappling with 10 percent annual inflation, a 20 percent youth unemployment rate and a 40 percent poverty rate. Many say they feel betrayed by decades of leaders who have promised opportunity but delivered little.

Young people led anti-government protests that filled the streets of Colombia last year, dominating the national conversation for weeks. At least 46 people died — many of them young, unarmed protesters and many at the hands of the police — in what was known as the “national strike.”

In a May poll by the firm Invamer, more than 53 percent of voters ages 18-24 and about 45 percent of voters ages 25-34 said they were planning to vote for Mr. Petro. In both age categories, less than half that number said they would vote for Federico Gutiérrez, the candidate of the conservative establishment, or Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor with a populist, anti-corruption platform.

The election comes at a difficult moment for the country. Polls show widespread dissatisfaction with the government of the current president, Iván Duque, who is backed by the same political coalition as Mr. Gutiérrez, and frustration over chronic poverty, a widening income gap and insecurity, all of which have worsened during the pandemic.

Some analysts expect young people to vote in record numbers, energized not just by Mr. Petro but by his running mate, Francia Márquez, 40, an environmental activist with a gender, race and class-conscious focus who would be the country’s first Black vice president.

“The TikTok generation that is very connected to Francia, that is very connected to Petro, is going to be decisive,” said Fernando Posada, 30, a political analyst.

But many young voters are skeptical of Mr. Petro’s ability to deliver on his promises.

In Fusagasugá, Nina Cruz, 27, a cafe worker, said Mr. Petro would fail Colombia’s struggling families, and she was particularly repulsed by his past as a member of a leftist rebel group.

The country has a long history of violent militias that claim to help the indigent — and end up terrorizing them.

“What he is saying is: ‘I’m going to help the poor,’” she said. “That’s a total lie.”

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Who is Rodolfo Hernández, a right-wing candidate who has surged in the campaign’s closing days?

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Rodolfo Hernández has branded himself as an anti-corruption candidate and has proposed rewarding citizens for reporting corruptionCredit...Luisa Gonzalez/Reuters

Colombian election coverage has largely focused on the leftist front-runner, Gustavo Petro, who polls show leads Federico Gutiérrez, a right-wing establishment candidate. But a relative political newcomer on the right, Rodolfo Hernández, has been surging in closing days of the campaign.

Mr. Hernández, 77, a businessman and former mayor of Bucaramanga, a city in northern Colombia, is currently in third place in the polls, behind Mr. Petro and Mr. Gutiérrez, according to a recent poll from the Colombian media company Semana.

And his projected share of the vote is only growing. Mr. Hernández went from 9.6 percent in April to 19 percent in May, according to the Semana poll, while Mr. Gutiérrez dropped from 25 percent in March to 21 percent in May.

Mr. Hernández has branded himself as an anti-corruption candidate, and has proposed rewarding citizens for reporting corruption, appointing Colombians already living abroad to diplomatic positions, which he says will yield savings on travel and other expenses, and banning unnecessary parties at embassies.

Daniel García-Peña, a political scientist at Colombia’s National University, called Mr. Hernández a wild-card candidate who had connected with frustrated voters by focusing on a single message: ending corruption.

“Rodolfo’s campaign is: Jail the corrupt. Period,” said Mr. García-Peña. “That connected. There’s a lot of anger against the political class.”

But some of Mr. Hernández’s proposals have been criticized as undemocratic.

Specifically, he’s proposed declaring a state of emergency for 90 days and suspending all judicial and administrative functions in order to address corruption, leading to fears that he could shut down Congress or suspend mayors.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Hernández said that declaring a state of emergency would not violate democratic norms, since it would have to be approved first by the Constitutional Court.

“We will do everything by reason and law,” he said. “Nothing by force. Nothing that violates constitutional and legal rights.”

During his tenure as mayor, he was credited with eliminating a budget deficit and investing in infrastructure in poor neighborhoods.

But he resigned from office in 2019 after the attorney general’s office charged him with improper involvement in a failed waste management contract. Mr. Hernández called the charges an “aberrant hoax” and claimed political persecution. Despite the tumult, he left office with an approval rating of 84 percent.

In December 2021, the attorney general opened another investigation into Hernandez for irregularly modifying a government manual while he was mayor.

Over the years, Mr. Hernández has made headlines for his public gaffes and graphic language.

In 2016, he called himself an admirer of the “great German thinker” Adolf Hitler, then apologized last year, saying he had meant to say Albert Einstein. Earlier this year, he appeared not to immediately recognize that Vichada is a department in Colombia. He recently gave an interview to CNN dressed in silky pajamas.

James Bosworth, a Latin America analyst, said in his newsletter that if Mr. Hernández is able to finish second on Sunday, “he gets the jump on Petro who is totally unprepared for that race.”

Francia Márquez — a former housekeeper and activist — could become Colombia’s first Black vice president.

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Francia Márquez, a vice presidential candidate from the mountainous department of Cauca in southwestern Colombia, has become a national phenomenon.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

For the first time in Colombia’s history, a Black woman is close to the top of the executive branch.

Francia Márquez, an environmental activist from the mountainous department of Cauca in southwestern Colombia, has become a national phenomenon, mobilizing decades of voter frustration, and compelling the country’s leading presidential candidate, Gustavo Petro, to name her as his running mate.

Her rise is significant not only because she is Black in a nation where Afro-Colombians are regularly subject to racism and must contend with structural barriers, but because she comes from poverty in a country where economic class so often defines a person’s place in society. Most recent former presidents were educated abroad and are connected to the country’s powerful families and kingmakers.

Despite economic gains in recent decades, Colombia remains starkly unequal, a trend that has worsened during the pandemic, with Black, Indigenous and rural communities falling the farthest behind. Forty percent of the country lives in poverty.

Ms. Márquez, 40, has chosen to run for office, she said, “because our governments have turned their backs on the people, and on justice and on peace.”

She grew up sleeping on a dirt floor in a region battered by violence related to the country’s long internal conflict. She became pregnant at 16, went to work in the local gold mines to support her child, and eventually sought work as a live-in maid.

To a segment of Colombians who are clamoring for change and for more diverse representation, Ms. Márquez is their champion. The question is whether the rest of the country is ready for her.

Some critics have called her divisive, saying she is part of a leftist coalition that seeks to tear apart, instead of build upon, past norms.

She has also never held political office, and Sergio Guzmán, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consulting firm, said that “there are a lot of questions as to whether Francia would be able to be commander in chief, if she would manage economic policy, or foreign policy, in a way that would provide continuity to the country.”

Her more extreme opponents have taken direct aim at her with racist tropes, and criticize her class and political legitimacy.

But on the campaign trail, Ms. Márquez’s persistent, frank and biting analysis of the social disparities in Colombia has cracked open a discussion about race and class in a manner rarely heard in the country’s most public and powerful political circles.

Those themes, “many in our society deny them, or treat them as minor,” said Santiago Arboleda, a professor of Afro-Andean history at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. “Today, they’re on the front page.”

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The specter of last year’s nationwide protests weighs on Colombia’s presidential candidates.

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Clashes last year between protesters and the police during a demonstration in Bogotá.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Last spring, protests rocked Colombia for two months, with thousands of people pouring into the streets of its major cities, demonstrators blocking major roads and the police responding at times with lethal force. At least 46 people, many of them protesters, were killed.

The fuse for the protests was a tax overhaul proposed in late April by President Iván Duque, a conservative, which many Colombians felt would have made it even harder to get by in an economy squeezed by the pandemic.

But the outpouring quickly morphed into a widespread expression of anger over poverty and inequality — which have risen as the virus has spread — and over the violence with which the police confronted the movement.

Demonstrators’ first demanded a repeal of the tax proposal. But those demands grew over time to include calls for the government to guarantee a minimum income, to prevent police violence and to withdraw a health care overhaul that critics say does not do enough to fix systemic problems — all now key issues in this election.

In response to the protests, Mr. Duque rolled out several programs intended to help struggling families, but it did little to quell the anger. And as time passed, the protests further divided an already polarized society — with supporters saying the marches were the only way to get an entrenched political class to listen, and opponents saying that protesters’ messages were eclipsed by the violent acts of some demonstrators.

While the demonstrations subsided by July, many of the problems fueling Colombians’ anger remain and are driving voters to the polls.

The leading candidate going into Sunday’s election, Gustavo Petro, a leftist and a former mayor of Bogotá, has pledged to upend the country’s capitalist economic model and vastly expand social programs, promising to introduce guaranteed work with a basic income, shift the country to a publicly controlled health system and increase access to higher education, in part by raising taxes on the rich.

Federico Gutiérrez, a right-wing candidate, has promised to boost economic growth, fight corruption, tighten security and improve the lives of poor people. Rodolfo Hernández, a relative newcomer on the right, has branded himself an anti-corruption candidate.

Among young voters, there is excitement, but also trepidation.

“What we want are opportunities for everyone,” Lauren Jiménez, a university student, said recently at a recent campaign event in Cartagena.

But “if Petro can’t follow through, I know we will see the same thing that happened with the Duque government: a social explosion,” she warned. “Because we’re tired of staying quiet.”

Francia Márquez in Cauca: ‘Today we are splitting the country’s history in two.’

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Francia Márquez on her way to vote in Suarez, her hometown in Cauca, on Sunday.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Francia Márquez, the environmental activist making a bid to become Colombia’s first Black vice president, could have registered to vote in the country’s capital.

Instead, on Sunday, she chose to travel to the southwestern department of Cauca, where she was raised, to vote alongside her neighbors and former teachers.

Ms. Márquez, 40, who grew up in poverty and went on to study law, has infused the Colombian election with a gender, race and class-conscious focus like few other candidates in the country’s history.

She is running on the same ticket as Gustavo Petro, a former rebel turned politician who is seeking to become the first leftist president in Colombia. The two candidates have raised concerns among more conservative voters leery of moving the country into what would be uncharted waters.

But Ms. Márquez’s popularity has been viewed overwhelmingly as a reflection of a deep desire by many voters — Black, Indigenous, poor, rural — to see themselves in the highest halls of power.

“Today we are splitting the country’s history in two,” she said shortly after casting her ballot. “Today, one of the nobodies, the historically excluded, is standing up to occupy a place in politics. Because the elite that has governed us has never allowed us to live in dignity, in peace, with social justice.”

She continued, “Change is from below, from the periphery, from the root, from the long forgotten regions.”

In the same polling station, Jorge Quinayas, 60, stood with his daughter, Danna, 11.

Mr. Quinayas, a snack vendor, pointed out that Ms. Márquez had worked in gold mines and as a maid to get where she is today.

He called it the “responsibility” of “all of us who have suffered, who have not had the opportunity to study,” to support her.

Because of Ms. Márquez, he said, girls like his daughter see that “they can be someone.”

“That is a tremendous quality,” he went on. “Because the children of today are going to be Francia.”

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Before he was a politician, Gustavo Petro was part of an urban guerrilla group.

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Gustavo Petro arriving with his security team at a campaign event in Cúcuta this month.Credit...Mario Caicedo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Long before Gustavo Petro emerged as a leftist candidate who polls show is the front-runner for president, he was part of the M-19, an urban guerrilla group that sought to seize power through violence in the name of promoting social justice.

For some Colombian voters, his past is a source of concern after decades of armed conflict. For others, it offers a sign of hope for one of most inequitable countries in Latin America.

The M-19 was born in 1970 as a response to alleged fraud in that year’s presidential elections. It was far smaller than the country’s main guerrilla force, 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 urban military group formed by university students, activists and artists who wanted to topple a governing system they believed failed to bridge a chronic divide between the rich and the poor.

“The M-19 was born in arms to build a democracy,” Mr. Petro told The New York Times in an interview.

It originally tried to promote a Robin Hood image, robbing milk from supermarket trucks to distribute in poor neighborhoods and, in a symbolic act of rebellion, stole a sword from a museum that Simón Bolívar used in Colombia’s war for independence.

Mr. Petro, 62, joined the group when he was 17 and an economics student, dismayed by the poverty he witnessed in the town where has living, outside Bogotá, the capital.

While the M-19 was less brutal than other rebel groups, it did orchestrate what is considered one of the bloodiest acts in the country’s recent history: the 1985 siege of Colombia’s national judicial building that led to a battle with the police and the military, leaving 94 people dead.

The group also stole 5,000 weapons from the Colombian military and used kidnapping as a tactic to try to wrest concessions from the government.

Mr. Petro, who spent 10 years in the M-19, largely stockpiled stolen weapons, said Sandra Borda, a political science professor at Universidad de los 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 said. “He didn’t participate in the most important operations of the M-19, the military operations.”

At the time of the justice building takeover, Mr. Petro was in prison for his involvement with the group and he has described being beaten and electrocuted by the authorities.

The group eventually demobilized in 1990, which was considered one of the most successful peace processes in the country’s long history of conflict. It turned into a political party that helped rewrite the country’s constitution to focus more on equality and human rights.

Mr. Petro ran for Senate as a member of the party, launching his political career.

But even though his time as a rebel is long behind him, it has become a centerpiece of attacks by rival candidates.

“While I studied and worked for a better country, you were part of an armed group,” Federico Gutiérrez, a right-wing presidential candidate, wrote in a Twitter post directed at Mr. Petro.

Sofía Villamil and Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Bogotá.

As polls open in Colombia, voters express hope and fear.

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Voters at a polling station on Sunday in Bogotá, the country’s capital.Credit...Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As polls opened in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, one name could be heard over and over in a working-class neighborhood where precariously built brick houses wound up the hills: Gustavo Petro.

Mr. Petro is the rebel-turned-politician who is making a bid to become the first leftist president in Colombia’s history, a victory that would mark a watershed moment for one of the most politically conservative societies in Latin America.

At a polling station in the neighborhood of Egipto, Luis Franco, 61, a maintenance worker, said he had struggled to support his wife and two children with a job that paid minimum wage, and that his problems had only gotten worse during the pandemic.

He was among dozens of people lined up to vote at 8 a.m., as polls opened, despite gray skies and rain.

“We hope that this election benefits, more than anything, all of the poor people and people in rural areas,” he said. “There’s a lot of inequality, and we try to survive with what we have.”

He went on, “We hope that Petro can make the changes Colombia needs.”

To the north, in an upper-class neighborhood called La Cabrera, at a plaza-turned-polling station, many voters were far more skeptical of the changes Mr. Petro has proposed.

Several of his critics voiced the same claim: That Mr. Petro’s policies would lead to an economic crisis like the one in neighboring Venezuela.

Adriana Badillo, 52, standing with her husband, said she would be voting for Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative candidate backed by much of the business community who has proposed more modest changes to the status quo.

“I feel that he is a strong candidate and that he can lead us to a continuity of democracy, not like other candidates who could possibly lead us to something like Venezuela,” she said. “And I prefer my country free, my people free and a better economy for everyone.”

This election, she went on, “there is a fear, a fear that a candidate who can lead us to a communism becomes president.”

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Looming over the election is the rise of armed groups that threaten to once again tear Colombia apart.

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Rebels in Putumayo, Colombia.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times

Colombia’s peace accord, signed in 2016 by the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was supposed to usher in a new era of peace in a nation that had endured more than five decades of war. The deal was that the rebels would lay down their arms, while the government would flood conflict zones with job opportunities, alleviating the poverty and inequality that had started the war.

But in many places, the government never arrived. Instead, many parts of rural Colombia have seen a return to the killings, displacement and violence that, in some regions, is now as bad, or worse, than before the accord.

Massacres and the killings of human rights defenders have soared since 2016, according to the United Nations. And displacement remains startlingly high, with 147,000 people forced to flee their homes last year alone, according to government data.

It’s not because the FARC, as an organized fighting force, is back. Rather, the territorial vacuum left by the old insurgency, and the absence of many promised government reforms, has unleashed a criminal morass as new groups form, and old groups mutate, in a battle to control flourishing illicit economies.

Critics say this new cycle of violence is being fueled in part by the government’s lack of commitment to the programs in the peace deal. And quelling growing insecurity will be among the most important and difficult tasks for the country’s next president.

Colombia’s current president, Iván Duque, has pointed out that a third of the peace deal’s provisions are now fully implemented, putting the country on track to complete the accord within its 15-year mandate. But he will leave office this August following plummeting approval ratings that many say reflect both security concerns and a growing frustration with the ongoing lack of decent-paying jobs.

“This government has wasted the opportunity of the accord,” said Marco Romero, the director of Codhes, a human rights group, calling the current level of violence “scandalous.”

Some security experts warn if the next administration does not take on a greater role in curbing these militias and fulfilling the promises of the accord, the country could be headed toward a state that looks more like Mexico — ravaged by drug gangs vying for territory — than the Colombia of the 2000s.

“It’s a long way to go to get back to 2002,” said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, referring to the casualty counts during one of the worst years of the war. “But we’re on that path right now.”

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