BOGOTA: Philosopher-turned-politician Ivan Cepeda, who made his first public appearance following his father’s assassination by paramilitaries, is decades later running for president of Colombia — one of two candidates in this weekend’s runoff election.
Losing his parent, a communist senator, proved life-changing politically as well as personally for Cepeda, who was in his thirties at the time of the killing.
Standing in front of a bullet-riddled truck in 1994, his call for justice was televised.
“Let this crime not go unpunished,” Cepeda told reporters in a measured tone, during a period of persecution that saw more than 5,700 leftist leaders killed.
His political mentor and then-presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa was also assassinated.
Cepeda went on to become a human rights defender and was elected to the Colombian Senate for the first time in 2014.
The 63-year-old’s opponents label him a communist — a description he refutes, preferring to be called a “progressive” who advocates a “diverse” form of capitalism which would provide equal opportunities to Colombia’s rural and Indigenous communities.
Cepeda garnered 41 percent of the vote against hard-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella’s more than 43 percent in the first round presidential election in May.
Now the pair face each other in Sunday’s run-off.
“I have survived genocide, stigmatization and relentless persecution. And here I am, still standing,” he said during the campaign.
- Exile -
Threats to his father’s life pushed the family into exile in the former Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Cuba and France during Cepeda’s childhood.
Returning to Colombia, he advocated for victims of armed conflict and played a key role in the historic 2016 peace accord, which led to the disarmament of the rebel army FARC — formerly the country’s largest armed group.
The senator’s adversaries accuse him of having ties to FARC and reproach him for having devised outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” plan.
In an interview with AFP, Cepeda said he would “take stock” of the contentious peace strategy and “make the necessary changes.”
He is considered a calmer communicator than his ally Petro, whose sometimes vitriolic discourse provokes exasperation among the public.
Nevertheless, the duo have worked side by side on congressional debates during which they have exposed ties between paramilitarism and powerful politicians.
Petro “is the strongman, the disruptor who picks fights every day,” whereas Cepeda is “a more strategic person who is thinking in the long term,” Leon Valencia, director of the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, told AFP.
- Leftist icon -
Cepeda led the investigation into former president Alvaro Uribe’s ties to paramilitaries before the case went to court, where Uribe last year became the first Colombian leader to be convicted of a crime.
Although a judge later overturned the ruling, the incident established Cepeda as the right-wing leader’s main political enemy and an icon of the left.
If elected, he has vowed to continue the Petro government’s social reforms, which he describes as “revolutions.”
“We have come to deepen the reforms and speed up the social transformations that the country urgently cries out for, so as to make them irreversible,” he told a crowded rally.
Having gone through chemotherapy to overcome colon and liver cancer, Cepeda said he was “afraid of dying” in 2022, but now says he is in good health.
He is not baptized and has a reputation as a skeptic.
The former philosophy professor has written books about Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault and holds India’s Mahatma Gandhi and Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci in high regard.
Typically wearing a traditional Caribbean shirt, the presidential hopeful forgoes a tie, which he considers a symbol of oligarchy.
He does not have children, and lives with his wife and three pet dogs.
