Gustavo Petro could soon become Colombia’s first leftist president. He is in the lead for this Sunday’s elections, which will likely pass to a second round in June to determine an ultimate winner.

Polls put Petro in the lead, with 39 percent, followed by Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, with 25 percent, and Rodolfo Hernández with 20 percent, according to La Silla Vacía’s poll aggregator. (See Tuesday’s post.)

The election was initially viewed as a polarized choice between leftist Petro and conservative Gutiérrez. But populist Hernández — who has been compared to Bolsonaro and Trump — has gained rapidly in recent polls and casts uncertainty over the results. (See Tuesday’s post.)

“The election is the most important in Colombia’s recent history. The country’s institutions are at stake, as are its investor-friendly economic model and the future of the peace deal signed in 2016, which ended a 50-year civil war,” according to the Economist.

It is a watershed moment for one of the most politically conservative societies in Latin America, reports the New York Times, which ascribes Petro’s ascent to “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.”

Some analysts predict a record number of youth voters, many energized by Petro’s running-mate Francia Márquez, a Black environmental activist with a gender, race and class-conscious focus.

Analysts and electoral watchdogs also have expressed concern about electoral turmoil and violence. The immediate threat is that violence breaks out in the election’s aftermath, particularly if any of the candidates questions the legitimacy of close results. (Al Jazeera and see Tuesday’s post.)

Last week, Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office, a human rights watchdog, sent out an alert warning that nearly 300 municipalities in the country are at high or extreme risk of human rights violations and electoral violence, reports Al Jazeera.

More Colombia

• Americas Quarterly has profiles of the main candidates in Sunday’s election.
  
• La Silla Vacía reviews their campaign platforms and most salient proposals. Petro wants to outline an energy transition path for the next 15 years, while Gutiérrez has focused on security.
  
• A Petro victory could shakeup Colombia’s approach to drugs — the candidate has been very critical of the U.S.-led war on drugs, which he called a failure, and questioned the extradition this month of the accused leader of the Clan del Golfo cartel, reports Reuters. Petro points out that despite billions of dollars in security spending and decades of U.S. pressure to reduce drug production, Colombia remains a top global supplier of cocaine and the site of bloody drug violence.
  
• In addition to the war on drugs, a Petro victory could challenge the current model of U.S.-Colombian cooperation, reports the Miami Herald. Petro said he wants to renegotiate the free trade agreement with the United States that has been in place since 2012. Petro also promised to restore relations with Venezuela’s strongman Nicolás Maduro and reopen the borders with that nation.
  
• Markets are jumpy that Petro might dismantle Colombia’s economic model, a combination of fiscal discipline and a heavy dose of free markets, reports Bloomberg.

News Briefs

Migration

• Migration demographics, routes, and destination countries have changed significantly in recent years. Darién Gap crossings have increased significantly, migration to Latin American countries from within and outside the continent has increased, and the people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are no longer predominantly single adults from Mexico and Central America, according to a new WOLA analysis with guiding principles for a regional framework on migration and protection in the Americas.
  
• Darién Gap crossings between South and Central America were relatively low in the past decade, due to the extreme danger of the passage, but last year there were 133,726 crossings—a sharp increase from previous years. From January to April 2022 a total of 19,092 people crossed the Darién Gap; more than 3,000 were children. (WOLA)
  
• A Human Rights Watch team documented significant abuses of migrants on a mission to Darién. “Protection and access to justice are scarce,” writes investigator Juan Pappier in a Twitter thread.

Cuba

• Artists Maykel Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara are set to stand trial in Cuba on Monday, said Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in a call for their release. They have been in pretrial detention for nearly a year, and a prosecutor has requested that they be sentenced to seven and ten years in prison, respectively, on a range of charges related to their participation in a peaceful demonstration and an artistic performance, and their criticism of President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

El Salvador

• El Salvador’s police reported over 34,000 arrests during the state of exception, which lawmakers extended for a third month. (See yesterday’s briefs.)
  
• “Pushed by the failure of his security plan, which was nothing more than a criminal pact, Bukele decreed a state of exception and ordered mass detentions,” writes El Faro’s editorial board. “​​If, before, low homicide figures provided a veneer of efficiency in public security, now Bukele needs arrest numbers, at any cost, to show off his iron fist.”
  
• A Salvadoran Supreme Court magistrate appointed by the ruling party was years ago the attorney of “Diablo de Hollywood,” the head of the Mara Salvatrucha, reports El Faro. The detail was revealed when the judge recused himself from ruling on the gang leader’s pending extradition to the United States. 

Guatemala

• “Guatemala’s democracy appears to be in its death throes – full of desperate people eager to risk their lives at the hands of a human-trafficking coyotes,” writes Ricardo Barrientos at the AULA blog, where he criticizes the U.S.’s “passive, laissez faire stand” towards the Giammattei administration.

Regional Relations

• The U.S. Biden administration’s new policy toward Indo-Pacific countries —which proposes cooperation toward goals including green investment, strengthening labor and environmental standards, and enacting anti-bribery regimes — offers clues as to how it might navigate calls for increased investment in Latin America, writes Catherine Osborn in the Latin America Brief. Similar pledges toward Latin America could be forthcoming at the upcoming Summit of the Americas.

Chile

• Chilean Constitutional Convention delegates will vote on the Harmonization Commission’s proposals to organize the 499 constitutional articles tomorrow. (La Bot Constituyente, see today’s Constitutional Convention Updates)
  
• The convention will release its final draft to the public by early July. Polling shows the top reasons cited to approve the constitution include wanting to guarantee rights to health care and housing and to have a magna carta that was conceived during democracy. But, many voters are undecided on whether to approve the new draft, with estimates running as high as 27%, reports Bloomberg. (See today’s Constitutional Convention Updates)
  
• Chile’s constitutional convention adopted a series of “fundamental rights” into the text of the proposed constitution on April 19. These social rights include, among others, the right to health care and social security, the right to unionize, strike and collectively bargain and the right to a dignified and adequate home. “The vote marks the first time positive social rights will be included in the Chilean constitution, writes Nicholas C. Scott in a Washington Post opinion piece. (See today’s Constitutional Convention Updates)
  
• The proposed constitution’s progressive content and often chaotic drafting process “have fueled anxieties on the right. A minority in the convention, right-wing groups have struggled to influence the drafting process, resorting to tactics from the illiberal playbook: fearmongering, spreading disinformation and demonizing the opposition,” write  Jennifer Piscopo and Peter Siavelis in Foreign Policy. (See today’s Constitutional Convention Updates)
  
• The Chilean state has apologized to a woman who was forcibly sterilized by doctors in 2002 because she was HIV positive. (Guardian)

Haiti

• Haitian prisons have suffered lack of food and water scarcity for at least three weeks, but shortages have worsened in recent days, reports the Miami Herald. The shortages, along with the reduction in prison visits and recreation activities, is a recipe for a prison revolt or a prison break, the latter of which has been a threat for months, according to Pierre Esperance, who heads the National Human Rights Defense Network.

Brazil

• The police killing of a mentally ill Black man on the side of the road has caused outrage in Brazil. A widely viewed video shows two officers in helmets holding down the car trunk door on Genivaldo de Jesus Santos’ thrashing legs, after releasing a gas grenade inside the vehicle. An autopsy report confirmed that Santos had died of asphyxiation. (Guardian, Washington Post)
  
• Lethal police violence is commonplace (see Wednesday’s post) and disproportionately affects the country’s Black population, reports the Guardian. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, police killed 6,416 people in Brazil in 2020. Almost 80% of the victims were Black.
  
• A push to turn the Paraguay River into a waterway for soybean-laden barges threatens to alter the natural flows of the iconic Pantanal tropical wetland ecosystem. (Yale Environment 360)
  
• An award-winning Brazilian podcast that details the life of Bolsonaro in serialized form—Retrato Narrado, from Piauí magazine and Spotify—just published Spanish and English versions. The story is narrated by the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson and features its original Brazilian reporter, Carol Pires. (Latin America Brief)
  
  
  
  

Jordana Timerman/Latin America Daily Briefing

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