Forrest Hylton

Despite the rain, a massive street party to celebrate democracy started in Colombia on Sunday evening and lasted through the night. Though the hangover is likely to be severe, cities erupted with joy and relief. Most final polls, taken a week before yesterday’s election, showed Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández more or less even, but Petro won by 50.44 to 47.3, with 11.28 million votes, nearly three million more than he got in the first round on 29 May. Hernández, who got 10.57 million votes, over five million more than in the first round, conceded immediately and quietly, from his home in Bucaramanga, Santander. President Iván Duque announced he would begin to work with Petro’s team to handover power on 7 August. Petro invited the Colombian people to celebrate their victory.

The first round of Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday was followed by several moderate earthquakes in Antioquia and Santander. The former is home to the right-wing candidate Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez, and the only department that he won; the latter to Rodolfo Hernández, ‘the little old guy on TikTok’, who ran as an anti-corruption ‘outsider’ candidate, like Trump, Bolsonaro or Alberto Fujimori. Boosted by former president Álvaro Uribe’s supporters, Fico performed more or less as expected, picking up 23.9 per cent of the vote, while Hernández, a 77-year-old businessman and former mayor of Bucaramanga, took 28.2 per cent, to everyone’s surprise, even though polls registered his surge in the final weeks of campaigning. The frontrunner, Gustavo Petro, took 40.3 per cent, an improvement on his performance in 2018 – and the first time a candidate from the left has ever won the first round – but not enough, it would seem, to defeat the right in the second round of voting on 19 June.

Bolsonaro shares Putin’s loathing of communism and the USSR, and tries to associate Lula and the PT with both. That didn’t stop him, during his recent junket to Moscow, paying tribute to the Red Army’s victory over the Nazis in the Second World War; a position all the more incoherent because neo-Nazis have occupied prominent places in Bolsonaro’s administration.

When the coup that overthrew Evo Morales in 2019 brought an unknown senator and political newcomer, Jeanine Áñez, to the Bolivian presidency, the Brazilian government was the first to offer official recognition. In the run up to the coup, one of the leading plotters, Fernando ‘Macho’ Camacho, currently the governor of Santa Cruz, met with Brazil’s foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo.

The holiday season hit Brazil like a tsunami: on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, after five years of record drought, two dams burst, as record rains and flooding put at least 116 communities underwater, killed 21 people, displaced at least 50,000, affected more than 417,000, and destroyed infrastructure (and vaccines) throughout southern Bahia; a flu epidemic broke out nationwide at the moment that Omicron arrived. The unseasonal rains led to an increase in mosquitos: though Zika and dengue fever numbers are still down, Chikungunya is way up.