After runoff elections in Colombia this week, the South American country has a new president.

Gustavo Petro had been a member of the guerrilla group called the 19th of April movement as

a teenager and well into his 20s. His running mate, Francia Marquez, the first Afro Latina to become

Vice President, has spent her adult life battling against extractive industries in rural Colombia.

More recently, Petro served as mayor of Colombia's capital of Bogota.

Petro and the runoff faced the Trump-like Rodolfo Hernandez, dubbed the TikTok King, who had the

full support of the Colombian right. With Petro's upset, he becomes the first left-wing president ever

elected in Colombia's history. It's a country where the left has traditionally been identified

with guerrilla groups like the FARC, the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia, but a peace

deal signed in 2016 created hope that Colombia could move past its decades-long civil war and

kind of channel that ideological conflict into electoral politics, transferring power peacefully

instead. In the final days of the election, the US government made it abundantly clear that

they were strongly opposed to Petro, but Colombian voters shrugged off us gringos and elected him anyway.

He made a such as Garzoli as the Andes director at the Washington office on Latin America known as

Wola, where she is the leading Colombia human rights advocate. She was on the ground in Colombia to

observe the recent elections and joins us from there now to discuss. He made a welcome to deconstruct it.

Thank you for having me. So first of all, can you talk a little bit about

election day itself? You were down there in Colombia. We were just talking earlier. You were

down there observing some of the elections. What is an election like in Colombia and what was the

aftermath? Well, at the beginning of election day, really, there was no sense of what could happen

on the one hand that it could have turned out into a situation of complete chaos and social

protest or a huge celebration. I think there was tremendous tension and expectation. The second

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