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One word can summarize the political career of Rodolfo Hernández, who would fight for the presidency of Colombia against Gustavo Petro after taking second place in the first round of the election: controversy.
Hernández, a businessman-turned-politician who rose to fame with an anti-corruption speech, had swept the polls in the weeks before the first round and topped the second round as a second-round opponent, despite the distrust of some regions. Were. Opponents are better known as ‘Fico’ Gutierrez.
The former mayor of Bucaramanga’s trajectory has been filled with controversial statements and facts, but above all things that reveal his vision of a country marked by a history of violence, corruption and inequality. Here, a review of some of the most important since 2016, when he became mayor of the eastern city until the campaign.
2022: The poor are “the best business in the world”
Hailing from a working-class family, Hernandez entered the business of building affordable housing for the poorest families in the 1990s, when Colombia was going through a construction crisis.
At that time, “in the face of a potential bankruptcy to pay off the acquired credit,” their website says, they created Plan 100, in which families could buy a house in 100 monthly installments that they paid directly to them. Hernandez’s company was at the same time a construction company and a bank, earning interest on its own financing.
His vision of the place of the “poor” and “entrepreneurs” in Colombia, one of Latin America’s most unequal countries, has also generated deep controversy.
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