It was just another day in the presidency of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro. After clashing with Donald Trump—and grandstanding on the merits of Noam Chomsky and Washington DC’s black neighborhoods—he briefly became the toast of the American left on X. Riding high on his viral fame, the Colombian leader then made the fateful decision to televise a Feb. 4 cabinet meeting, which quickly devolved into infighting over his appointment of the scandal-ridden Armando Benedetti as chief of staff.
“Colombia’s first leftist leader has failed to rise to the occasion.”
“As a feminist, I cannot sit alongside Armando Benedetti,” declared former environment minister Susana Muhamad to the live broadcast audience, alluding to the accusations of domestic abuse leveled against her colleague. In a veiled defense of Benedetti’s cocaine use, Petro sounded an anti-imperialist note. “Cocaine is illegal because it’s made in Latin America, not because it’s worse than whisky,” mused the philosopher-president. The debacle led Petro to purge nearly all of his cabinet, though he pointedly spared Benedetti. The made-for-TV drama marked yet another low point for Colombia’s first leftist president, a former member of the M19 guerrilla who entered office in 2022. His presidency showcases a familiar set of lessons for populist and progressive governance across the region.
Benedetti, whose appointment drew the ire of the rest of Petro’s cabinet, is a scion of Colombia’s political establishment and headed the president’s 2022 campaign, in the course of which he allegedly solicited donations from underworld figures. In 2023, a leaked phone call seemingly showed Benedetti blackmailing then Chief of Staff Laura Sarabia—now foreign minister—in exchange for his continued discretion regarding the 2022 campaign. At the time, Sarabia was under scrutiny for wiretapping a housemaid over the disappearance of $4,000-$30,000 in cash from her home. Both Benedetti and Sarabia were subsequently dismissed, shuffling through various roles before returning to the cabinet in 2025. Petro has evidently resolved to keep his shadiest allies close lest additional skeletons slip out of his closet.
The Colombian leader, like other populists, has faced a campaign of lawfare and leaks by a hostile legal and security establishment. The country’s national security apparatus has played a role in the deaths of countless anti-establishment political figures, making the former guerrilla justifiably paranoid of a perpetual “enemy from within.” As mayor of Bogotá, he was removed from office on spurious grounds, a practice selectively used against leftists and other political outsiders including Petro’s 2022 opponent, Rodolfo Hernández. (The elderly Hernández then died under house arrest following a dubious corruption conviction in 2024.)
As during Trump’s first term, it’s probable that deep state elements have been the source of various internal leaks. At the same time, it’s obvious that the self-interest—and corruption—of Petro and his confidants has undermined the administration; Sarabia’s housemaid, for instance, was previously employed by Benedetti. “It’s a circus. Every day there’s a new intrigue in the Petro telenova,” as a cab driver remarked to me on a recent visit to Bogotá.
Petro’s agenda bears some resemblance to the more successful political project of former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s all the more disappointing, therefore, that the pitfalls of the Colombian left mirror those of the US Democratic Party. Whether due to corruption, incompetence, ideological incoherence, or a combination of these factors, the administration has failed to deliver on workers’ material concerns during a time of significant hardship. In Bogotá’s historic Plaza de Bolívar, a street vendor told me that Petro’s government had been the biggest disappointment of her lifetime.
Initially, Petro enjoyed high approval ratings and relative goodwill in Congress. The Colombian legislature is dominated by “centrist” crime syndicates, similar to Brazil’s Centrão, keen on extracting graft from incumbents. These parties—from which Benedetti made his career—joined the ruling coalition in 2022, giving the government huge majorities. Further, opposition from right-wing former president Álvaro Uribe has been surprisingly muted, likely due to ongoing investigations of his links to paramilitary death squads.
Petro, however, wasted much of his early political capital on a contentious healthcare overhaul. To be sure, his government had an urgent critique of denials of coverage by increasingly bankrupt private insurers. But because Petro refused to compromise on eliminating private insurers altogether, the grand coalition subsequently collapsed, leaving the administration unable to offer any improvement on the existing system. That said, a year later Petro succeeded in passing a pension overhaul, which stands to benefit millions of impoverished, elderly Colombians—though it also runs the risk of being struck down over procedural flaws.
Petro also deserves praise for reducing deforestation to a 23-year low. But unfortunately, his view of conservation and the energy transition is seemingly zero-sum, with dire consequences for Colombian workers and state assets. Whereas Mexico’s AMLO undertook the herculean task of rescuing the state oil giant Pemex and boosting oil production, Petro has worked tirelessly to destroy Colombia’s Ecopetrol, halting new exploration and staffing the firm’s board with inexperienced climate activists. All of this despite the fact that Colombia produces negligible carbon emissions, and the state firm accounts for half of government revenues.
Petro also cut gas subsidies during his first year in office, causing prices at the pump to double, leading to a similar increase in transit fares. As a bus driver in Bogotá remarked to me: “They don’t understand that when the price of gas goes up, everything else does.” As if the recent cabinet debacle wasn’t enough, in the same meeting, in early February Petro ordered the sale of one of Ecopetrol’s most profitable US ventures for the unspeakable crime of fracking. Declining government revenues have now led to budget cuts affecting social services amid low growth and high inflation.
Impressive GDP growth of 8 percent in 2022 likely contributed to a delayed 12 percent peak in inflation in 2023. Add to this Petro’s energy sabotage and Colombia’s high reliance on imports and the result has been more than two years of crippling stagflation; since 2023, growth has averaged 1 percent and inflation 6 percent. To its credit, the administration has raised the minimum wage at around 13 percent a year since assuming office. Yet for most workers, this hasn’t offset spiraling costs; for perspective, minimum-wage hikes in Mexico during the same period averaged 20 percent, with lower annual inflation. In Bogotá, one office worker expressed frustration over Petro’s failure to pass a proposed labor overhaul, explaining how the reform’s easing of restrictions on overtime would help pay for groceries.
Identity politics in the form of gender-neutral language and policies have also helped further erode the president’s dwindling support. In 2024, the government vetoed legislation expanding maternal benefits for excluding “trans men and nonbinary gestating people.” One Petro voter I spoke to, Francisco, was so alienated by progressive pieties that he expressed approval towards Trump’s 2024 victory.
Still another fiasco is the creative but poorly executed “total peace” initiative geared towards extracting peace deals and terms of surrender with armed groups. Sadly, mixed signals and various legal ambiguities have allowed groups such as the Venezuelan-aligned ELN to exploit the policy to their advantage. Having refused to recognize Nicolás Maduro’s fraudulent 2024 election, Petro has accused the dictator of sponsoring the ELN’s brutal insurgency in the coca-rich border province of Norte de Santander.
With some exceptions, then, the president’s policies have either alienated, failed to meaningfully benefit, or led to worse immediate outcomes for the Colombian working class it claims to represent. Given this, it is surprising that Petro’s approval ratings remain between 30-40 percent. Grassroots opposition towards Petro is palpable, and a substantial share of Colombians I spoke with believe the ex-guerrilla is hell-bent on “turning the country into Venezuela.” The reality is that Petro is term-limited and lacks the popular and institutional support needed to install a hippie variant of the Chavez-Maduro regime. When asked, Francisco floated sitting out the next election expressing disgust with the whole of Colombia’s political class.
Mired by competing scandals, congressional gridlock, armed conflict, and stagflation, Colombia’s first leftist leader has failed to rise to the occasion. The most committed Petro supporters I spoke with relished the president’s disposition towards fighting the media and “the establishment.” Yet, like his populist counterparts elsewhere, Petro has proven incapable of garnering resounding popular support or enacting meaningful change. In all likelihood, the most Petro can do at this point to follow in AMLO’s example is to respect the Colombian constitution and leave office in 2026. Until then, the former guerrilla will remain trapped within a labyrinth largely of his own making.