Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor who leads the opposition to Petro

Enrique Penalosa has made more headlines in recent months than when he was campaigning to be a presidential candidate at the beginning of the year. The former mayor of Bogota has insisted on being a voice in opposition to Gustavo Petro, his old political enemy, and his criticism of the new government has, for the moment, been effective in staying current in the public debate. Penalosa, who barely achieved just over 200,000 votes, was the worst result in the inter-party consultation in which the right was looking for a rival for Petro in the July presidential elections, but today he is one of its most visible opponents. Both were leaders of the capital, with enormous differences in their ways of governing and in their way of conceiving the city.

The model of how the Bogota metro should be has been one of its many disagreements. It was when Penalosa succeeded Petro as head of the city, in 2016, and decided to change the plans left by the now president, an underground metro, and wanted it to be elevated. Penalosa redid the project and in 2019 signed the contract. The construction works of the first section, which is just beginning, has reminded Petro of an old fight, which he wanted to fight again. “In 2015, the Bogota underground metro, up to 127th Street, cost 14 billion pesos, today that same section costs 35 billion pesos. That is the cost of political pettiness,” Petro wrote in a tweet without directly mentioning Penalosa, who replied: “Your underground metro was so expensive that you never even came close to bidding for it. With your smallness you now want to modify it, spending billions that you take from poor regions of Colombia. human pettiness.” Penalosa says that building an underground metro is also very expensive to operate. “It consumes more energy due to the ventilation systems and the water pumps,” he said recently in an interview in the newspaper El Tiempo, in which he assured that since Petro became president the issue of the subway had become even more politicized.

There is nothing about which Enrique Penalosa (Washington, 68 years old) speaks with as much confidence as transportation. His great legacy, he says, has been the Transmilenio bus system, which he promised would do the same as a train system, but 22 years after its creation it has proven to be insufficient. His opponents hold him responsible for the fact that Bogota still does not have a metro line and for Colombia’s backwardness by having its main city, with nine million inhabitants, still using buses.

Rodrigo Lara, former senator and columnist for the magazine ChangeHe thinks of Penalosa and says that he can only remember him as the mayor who has done “the worst damage” to Bogota. According to Lara, Transmilenio is responsible for the city collapsing. “He managed to sell the idea, here and in other parts of the world, that it was not worth building subways, if integrated bus systems could be achieved for less money. For 20 years he sold the same speech and there were cities that believed him, they committed an urban disaster and in the end they had to build metro systems, ”says Lara. “Bogota has been like Enrique Penalosa’s laboratory guinea pig,” she points out.

Penalosa has managed to make his opinions on Twitter, where he is very active, become headlines, and his name has already begun to sound ahead of next year’s local elections, although his last time in a vote was a total failure. Lara believes that the narrative that made Penalosa famous in the 1990s, when he saw himself as a progressive and visionary politician, no longer works. “He did very badly in the last elections, he suffered a whole electoral catastrophe. He is no longer recognized as a prestigious visionary, nor an urban planner. Bogota is experiencing one of its deepest crises and he bears responsibility, ”says Lara, who managed to file a popular action to stop Penalosa from trying to make Transmilenio through Carrera Septima. “It is a transport where people travel in subhuman conditions. Bogota is the only large city in Latin America that does not have a metro because the idea that Transmilenio could do the same was bought into,” says Lara.

At the other end of the ex-councilman are those who find it sensible for Penalosa to remain active in the political discussion. Daniel Mejia, his former Secretary of Security, says that his opinions are “useful” in the national debate, especially now that the opposition, with an Uribista majority, has not had a strong voice against the government. “It is a country without a serious opposition, or with a poor opposition, the reappearance of Penalosa speaking about specific issues is useful, in addition, the main opponent in his political career has been Petro,” says Mejia, who stands out among the political alliances that have emerged after the presidential elections, the independence of Penalosa, who confronts the Government alone and on Twitter, without having a political position. Cristina Velez, who was his secretary for Women, celebrates that the former mayor is present in current politics. “He is filling a void in the opposition. He is an urban planner who knows Bogota very well and who knows the president well, ”says Velez.

Carlos Carrillo, a Bogota councilor for the left-wing Polo Democratico party and a critic of Penalosa, acknowledges that the controversies he is leading on the networks have worked for him to remain in force. “We are in pre-campaign. Penalosa have everything to be an important player now that the president is Petro. If something goes wrong in the government, Penalosa represents hard anti-petrism”, says Carillo. “If the Petro government wears out, without being an Uribista, Penalosa is capable of picking up the right, and, of course, the center,” acknowledges the councilor.

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