The Economist June 4th 2022 Leaders 11C
hucking outincumbents and everything they stand for is
all the rage in Latin America. Peru did it in June last year.
Chile did it in December. Brazil is likely to do it in October. May
29th was Colombia’s turn, when voters plumped for the two
presidential candidates who most clearly represent change.
Gustavo Petro, pictured left, is a former guerrilla who got more
than 40% of votes (around 8.5m). Rodolfo Hernández, pictured
right, is a millionaire who was little-known a few months ago
but has fired up devotees with his rants on TikTok. He won 28%.
The run-off is on June 19th (see Americas section).
Colombia has long been something of an anomaly in Latin
America, a continent where many voters still have a soft spot for
caudillos. With the exception of a brief period of
strongman rule under Álvaro Uribe Velez, who
was president from 2002 to 2010, its politics
tend to be moderate. For decades, left-wing ex-
tremism has been unpopular, as Colombians
have related it with the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (farc), a Marxist guerrilla
group. Governments have favoured strong ties
with America. Investors flocked to Colombia.
Growth has been robust in recent years: income per head rose
from $4,000 in 2000 to $6,400 before the pandemic. However,
inequality is extreme. Few Colombians pay taxes. Discontent fu-
elled violent protests in 2019 and 2021. Largely thanks to co-
vid-19, an additional 2.8m Colombians (out of a population of
51m) fell below a $38-a-month poverty threshold in 2020. Since
then, Colombia’s economy has rebounded more quickly than
those of other countries in Latin America, with gdpgrowing by
10% last year. But a peace deal with the farcin 2016 was poorly
implemented by Iván Duque, the outgoing president, and parts
of the country are still violent.
Neither Mr Petro nor Mr Hernández looks capable of tacklingthese complex issues. Both were unimpressive mayors. When
Mr Petro ran Bogotá, the capital, he had a reputation for falling
out with his staff. He was briefly suspended after mismanaging
the municipal takeover of a private rubbish-collection service.
Mr Hernández’s record is worse. As mayor of Bucaramanga, a
medium-sized city, from 2016 to 2019 he was suspended three
times: after slapping a colleague; calling an official corrupt with-
out evidence; and for violating election laws by campaigning for
his chosen successor. An engineer by training, he promised to
build 20,000 homes for the poor. None materialised.
Mr Petro has moderated his tone of late, but his policies re-
main radical. He wants to increase tariffs, renegotiate trade
deals and guarantee public-sector jobs for all of
the unemployed (around 11% of the labour
force). He also wants to end new oil and gas ex-
ploration, despite extractive industries ac-
counting for over half of exports.
Mr Hernández is also big on promises and
poor on realism. His proposals, often relayed
over social media, include such edifying lines
as “Fuck fracking”. He, too, has a protectionist
streak. He talks often about corruption, and says he would want
to have a daily press conference in which he names and shames
allegedly dirty politicians. As it happens, he is due to be tried for
corruption in July. He denies wrongdoing.
Colombia is taking a step into the unknown. Either candidate
could destabilise a country that was on track for at least modest
success. Colombians need not look far to see the harm that
demagoguery can do. The right-wing sort has marred Brazil
since 2019; the left-wing sort has wrecked Venezuela. If elected,
Mr Petro may be slightly more likely than Mr Hernández to ac-
cept checks and balances. But whoever wins, Colombia’s institu-
tions will have to brace themselves. A presidential run-off between an ex-guerrilla and a TikTok populist puts a stable country at riskInto the unknown
ColombiaH
uman beingshave been altering habitats—sometimes de-
liberately and sometimes accidentally—at least since the
end of the last Ice Age. Now, though, that change is happening on
a grand scale. The plough and the chainsaw bear much of the
blame, but global warming is a growing factor, too. Fortunately,
the human ingenuity that is destroying nature can also be
brought to bear on trying to save it.
Some interventions to save ecosystems are mind-boggling
long-shots. Consider a scheme to reintroduce, by gene-editing
Asian elephants, something resembling a mammoth to Siberia.
Their feeding habits could restore the grassland habitat that was
around before mammoths were exterminated, increasing the
sunlight reflected into space and helping keep carbon com-pounds trapped in the soil. But other projects have a bigger
chance of making an impact quickly. As we report (see Science &
technology section), one example involves coral reefs.
These are the rainforests of the ocean. They exist on vast
scales: half a trillion corals line the Pacific from Indonesia to
French Polynesia, roughly the same as the number of trees that
fill the Amazon. They are equally important havens of biodiver-
sity. Rainforests cover 18% of the land’s surface and offer a home
to more than half its vertebrate species. Reefs occupy 0.1% of the
oceans and host a quarter of marine species.
And corals are useful to people, too. Without the protection
which reefs afford from crashing waves, low-lying islands such
as the Maldives would have flooded long ago, and a billion peo-To save some ecosystems, humans must intervene more, not lessSurmounting great barriers
Climate change and coral reefs