Colombia breaks with its past

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Gustavo Petro has been voted in as Colombia’s first ever leftist president – the former rebel and long-time senator campaigned to radically overhaul Colombia’s economy and bring an end to inequality. Katy Watson reports from Colombia’s capital Bogota on the country’s decisive break from its past. Despite his presidential victory earlier this year, Emmanuel Macron saw his party lose 100 seats in French parliamentary elections . Meanwhile Marine Le Pen's far-right party saw an elevenfold increase in MPs, and the hard-left alliance, under Jean-Luc Melanchon, saw their own support double. As the battle to forge a consensus begins, Lucy Williamson went to meet some of the new arrivals. Congressional hearings in Washington DC concerning the attack on the US Capitol building last year has made for gripping viewing. The committee panel has already heard a raft of Donald Trump’s former allies recount examples of presidential pressure to overturn the 2021 election result. Gabriel Gatehouse says, despite the evidence, the nation remains divided over which narrative to accept. The effort to protect the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas in Uganda is reckoned to be a conservation triumph. But this success has come at a terrible price for the Batwa – or pygmy – people who used to share the forest with the gorillas. Justin Rowlatt met with a Batwa man who still yearns for his former home. Domestic cats have been getting an uncharacteristically bad press recently in Iceland. One town proposed a cat curfew earlier this year – sparking fierce opposition from the newly-formed Cat Party in local elections. Egill Bjarnason has been following the ‘Cat Wars’. Presenter: Kate Adie Producer: Serena Tarling Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Coordinator: Iona Hammond

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts
0:04.9	Today, political tectonic plates are shifting.
0:08.6	Written the National Assembly in France where they're battling to forge a consensus between
0:13.5	widely diverging agendas. Many Americans are glued to the live streaming of the Congressional
0:20.3	hearings into the Capitol Hill attack last year, but how far has it changed the narrative
0:26.1	or what really happened? We're in Uganda, where we meet the indigenous Batwa people cut
0:32.7	off from their ancestral forest home in order to save the mountain gorilla. And finally,
0:39.3	we hear how Reykjavik isn't just the name of the Icelandic capital, it's the name of
0:44.2	a cat with meryl ambitions. First, Gustavo Petro has been voted in as Colombia's first
0:52.5	ever leftist president. The former rebel and longtime senator campaigned to radically
0:58.1	overhaul Colombia's economy and bring an end to inequality. But there are plenty of Colombians
1:04.8	who say he spells disaster for the country. Katie Watson, in Colombia's capital Bogota,
1:11.7	looks at the country's decisive break from its past. As the results came in on Sunday night,
1:18.3	everyone at Petro HQ was holding their breath. Even Gustavo Petro's most ardent supporters
1:24.6	knew it would be a tight race. Just weeks before, populist businessman Rodolfo Hernandez,
1:31.0	also known as Colombia's answer to Donald Trump, had surprised the country by soaring in the polls
1:37.0	and winning enough votes to go to the runoff against Petro. He was a total unknown,
1:42.3	taking the spot from the conservative right. The numbers came in and Petro's victory was confirmed.
1:48.9	Streamers and confetti burst out across the stadium. People were crying, hugging,
1:54.5	unable to believe it had really happened. For five decades, Colombia was consumed by a civil
2:00.7	conflict between left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. More than 250,000 people
2:07.4	died, more than 120,000 are still missing. The largest guerrilla group, the revolutionary armed
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