Longtime U.S.-partner Colombia has become the latest Latin American nation to pivot hard toward the left with Sunday’s election of Gustavo Petro, a former Marxist guerrilla fighter turned socialist mayor of Bogota, as its next president.
Mr. Petro’s victory Sunday sets the stage for a potentially major shift in U.S.-Colombia relations and signals an increasingly socialist tilt across the region, where leftists and populists have taken power in Argentina, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Honduras and Mexico in recent years.
The leaders of all those nations are cheering the Petro victory in Colombia. There has also been jubilation from the authoritarian regime of Nicolas Maduro in neighboring Venezuela.