Petro respalda a Cepeda con mensaje poético; oposición acusa interferencia electoral

On Sunday, May 24th, President Gustavo Petro posted a video to X showing hundreds of people gathered at Iván Cepeda's campaign closing rally in Barranquilla. The image itself was straightforward—a crowd, a candidate, the machinery of electoral politics in motion. But the words Petro chose to accompany it were anything but.

He wrote of peoples becoming rivers, crying out for freedom. He invoked Emiliano Zapata's distinction between those willing to be worms, trampled underfoot, and those who choose to be soaring eagles. Then he pivoted to a fable: black mice seeking protection from a cat by electing a white mouse to defend them. The cat, he suggested, would keep hunting regardless. "The free ones will fly," Petro concluded. "Long live libertarian Caribe."

The message was dense with metaphor and historical reference—the kind of thing a president might post at three in the morning, or after careful deliberation. Either way, it landed like a stone in still water. Senator Jota Pe Hernández of the Green Alliance read it as a direct intervention in the presidential race, a violation of the constitutional neutrality a sitting president is supposed to maintain. Hernández's response was sharp and personal. He reminded Petro that the president had won his own election by warning voters that his opponent would disregard the law. Now, Hernández said, Petro himself was doing exactly that—acting as he had when he was a guerrilla fighter and criminal, trampling the law underfoot. "I hope someday you pay for all of this," Hernández added.

Meanwhile, at the rally itself in Barranquilla, Cepeda was making his own case. Speaking at the par vial on Carrera 50, he declared that his campaign would win in the first round, no matter what skeptics said. The harder people tried to convince him otherwise, he argued, the more fear they revealed. He was already planning ahead—announcing that starting June 1st, the day after the election, his team would begin the formal transition process with Petro's government. The first act, he said, would be a tribute to Petro for having kept his promises to the Colombian people.

Cepeda's closing message to his supporters was tactical and sweeping. He asked them to leave no wall without their murals, no corner of the country unvisited, no door untouched in these final days. He wanted the streets and neighborhoods to pulse with what he called the "serene force" of the Historic Pact's progressive wave. On governance itself, he promised clean hands. Corruption, he said, was not merely a crime but a betrayal of the people. His government would have no untouchables, no figures beyond the reach of accountability.

What remained unclear was whether Petro's poetic intervention would help or hurt. The president had made his sympathies unmistakable. Whether that crossed a constitutional line, or simply reflected the reality that sitting presidents always influence their successors' races, was now a matter of sharp dispute.