Humane Colombia (Spanish: Colombia Humana), formerly known as the Progressive Movement (Spanish: Movimiento Progresistas), is a Colombian left-wing[5] political movement and party founded in 2011 and led by President Gustavo Petro. The youth wing of the party is known as Juventud Humana (Humane Youth).
History
The movement has its origin in the Bogotá local election of 2011, in which a group of citizens led by Gustavo Petro collected around 300,000 signatures to register the candidacies to the Local Administrative Board, 60,000 to register a list to the City Council headed by Carlos Vicente de Roux, and 120,000 signatures to register Petro's candidacy for the mayorship of Bogotá.
After leaving the mayor's office, Petro decided to run for the presidency of the Republic for the 2018 elections through the mechanism of collecting signatures.[6] Under the promoter committee called Colombia Humana which uses a similar symbology and colours to the movement that the former mayor created to reach the mayoralty and likewise to the slogan of his administration Bogotá Humana, he set about the task of collecting signatures for the sake of registering his candidacy. On 11 December 2017, the last day according to the electoral calendar for registering signatures to endorse presidential candidacies, Petro collected 850,000 signatures.[7]
In August 2018, he was denied legal status by the CNE. This ruling is based on the fact that it was the DECENTES coalition as a whole that obtained the required percentage of votes and not only Colombia Humana, which would not meet the minimum number of votes required. They also argue that the percentage of votes obtained by Petro in the presidential elections are not considered because, according to the constitution, only parties, movements and significant groups of citizens that exceed a percentage of more than 3% of the votes at the national level in the parliamentary elections can be given legal status.
The party is regularly targeted by threats from paramilitary organizations, particularly the Aguilas Negras. Known figures of the party, such as Gustavo Petro, Gustavo Bolivar and Hollman Morris are frequently threatened with death. Nearly a dozen activists from Humane Colombia have been assassinated for political reasons during the year 2020.[8]
In June 2022, Gustavo Petro was elected as president, making him Colombia’s first leftist head of state. He won 50.47% of the vote in a runoff election.[9]
Founders
Logo of the Progressive Movement
Several of the movement's founders had, like Petro, joined after resigning from the Alternative Democratic Pole party on 2 August 2010 following a meeting of that party's National Executive Committee. Petro claimed to assume the presidency of the Pole using the 1.3 million votes obtained in the 2010 presidential elections; however, by decision of the majority of the board, Clara López was ratified as president of the party.[10] López achieved the backing of over 25 members of the Committee, while Petro only achieved the backing of 7 so he decided to create his own movement.
Seats
With the endorsement of the movement, in the 2011 regional elections Petro was elected mayor of Bogotá with more than 700,000 votes;[11] 8 councillors were also elected in Bogotá, 1 in Mosquera (Cundinamarca), and some other councillors in the Atlantic Coast region. Following Colombia's 2015 regional elections, journalist and activist Hollman Morris was elected councillor for the movement with one of the highest votes,[12] while the movement's mayoral candidate, María Mercedes Maldonado, withdrew her candidacy to run in coalition with the Polo Democrático candidate, Clara López.[13]
After the presidential elections, Colombia Humana, which obtained more than eight million votes and came second in the elections, obtained a seat in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, according to the opposition's Statutory Law 1909 of 2008, article 24: "The candidates who follow in votes those who the electoral authority declares elected President and vice-president of the Republic, will have the personal right to occupy, in their order, a seat in the Senate of the Republic and another in the House of Representatives."
Alliances
For the 2014 legislative elections it made a programmatic agreement with the Green Party, a coalition that was renamed Alianza Verde, and under whose legal status it ran several candidates for Congress, with Antonio Navarro being elected as senator and Inti Asprilla and Angélica Lozano as representatives to the Chamber.
On 13 December 2017, party leaders (Gustavo Petro, Aída Avella and Jesús Chávez) agreed to create the so-called List of Decency coalition comprising the Unión Patriótica, the Movimiento Alternativo Indígena y Social, the Alianza Social Independiente and Colombia Humana parties with other sectors of the left to compete in the 2018 legislative and presidential elections.[14]
