A Socialist Takeover Of Colombia Would Devastate Its Economy

A Socialist Takeover Of Colombia Would Devastate Its Economy

Share to Linkedin France's Emmanuel Macron comfortably won another five-year term as president this past weekend against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, but the election investors should be keeping their eye on is happening next month in Colombia. On May 29, the South American country could elect its very first leftist president should Gustavo Petro receive a majority of the vote. (A runoff election could determine the final winner.) The former congressman and mayor of the capital city of Bogotá, Petro is an unabashed admirer of U. S. senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed "democratic socialist," and Hugo Chávez, the hardline socialist president of Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, when he died of cancer. The two South American leaders were close friends, in fact, and Petro reportedly attended Chávez's funeral. But the alarming similarities don't end there. Before entering politics, both Chávez and Petro were members of militant rebel groups. As a candidate, Chávez vowed to end the expansion of Venezuela's oil sector, despite it sitting on the world's largest proven reserves. Petro, 61, similarly has promised to take an adversarial stance against the mining industry, saying in 2018 that companies involved in oil and gas "will not find a friendly