Andrew Sage

He is known for starting his career as a guerrilla with a minor anti-government guerrilla movement called the M-19 movement.

Now, this is the movement which...

I don't know, maybe Western audiences are familiar with from the Netflix series Narcos for having participated, carried out the Palace of Justice siege at the Colombian Supreme Court, which was a major disaster in which the Colombian military went in guns blazing to rescue hostages, Supreme Court justices and other people just employed.

in the Palace of Justice, and most everyone died in a fire as a result.

Petra was not involved in that operation.

As far as anyone knows, he was not involved in any violent confrontations.

And this organization, unlike the FARC and the ELN, never really got on the cocaine money train.

And therefore, it didn't last as long as those other organizations did.

They did demobilize.

They did turn to peaceful politics.

And Petro began his political career at the local level in Bogota and then eventually reached the presidency.

So he is someone with a long political career and does have a constituency, does have a base.

And he is the first president.

truly left-wing leader of Colombia, a country that has been famously both ruled by the right and also very closely allied to the U.S.

It's really the U.S.

's top ally in Latin America, well, in South America at least, specifically on security, given Plan Colombia and a long history of the U.S.

giving as much as $10 billion over time to beef up Colombia's counterinsurgency and counter-narcotics fights on our behalf.

To accuse the president of being a drug trafficker is fairly ludicrous.

He's been, even in his time as a senator, I think he was chairing some investigations or committees that looked at drug smuggling, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, and so I would say Petro has been very critical of the war on drugs approach generally, but he does still inherit this long-standing deep relationship with the United States.