The mayor’s office in Bogotá, a city of 7.1 million people, is considered the second most important elected office in the country after the president. Bogotá is not only the capital of Colombia, but also concentrates the highest population density in the country. In addition, it is the epicenter of national public powers and the municipality has the largest public budget in Colombia, 24.6 trillion pesos (7.2 billion dollars). Bogotá is the third city in Latin America to receive the most foreign investment.
Claudia López Hernández, 49, won this position in the the regional elections on October 27th. She is the first woman and member of the LGBTI+ community in history to do so. She is the first person with an openly diverse sexual orientation to win the mayor’s office of a Latin American capital. In Colombia, LGBTI+ rights are not yet fully guaranteed.
“Bogotá not only voted for the city to change in the next four years but for this generation to change our entire society. They voted so that through citizen culture, quality education and equality we defeat, overcome and unlearn machismo, racism, classism, homophobia and xenophobia,” López said in her victory speech.
This electoral result, in which López wonwith the ecologist party Alianza Verde and the center-left party Polo Democrático, also marks a milestone in Colombia, because López is not an heiress to the country’s political tradition and militancy. “This breaks the paradigm of most successful women in Colombian politics,” writes Juan Esteban Lewin in La Silla Vacía.
“She has made a brief and fulminant political career, barely five years old, leveraged in her criticisms of the political class and corruption, in high media visibility and an ability to give and win fights, according to her own criteria,” Lewin adds.
Claudia López won with 1.1 million votes (about 35%) and overtook Carlos Galán, the independent candidate most polls gave as the winner, by 2.7 points.
In fact, in 2014 López began her most outstanding political life as a candidate for the Senate, when she obtained the highest vote of her environmental party Alianza Verde. In 2018, she joined Sergio Fajardo’s presidential candidacy as Colombia’s vice presidential candidate.
López is known as “incorruptible,” according to analysts. Santiago Torrado writes in El País that she exploited this reputation during the campaign.
Bogotá faces great challenges. El Espectador reports that they are not only challenges about transportation and mobility, but also about infrastructure and security. They add that López comes with the promise to “unite sectors that had deep differences during the current administration, like environmentalists and other activist groups.”
Lopez’s electoral proposal is, among several things, to promote alternative methods of mobility in the city and to extend the first line of Bogota’s elevated subway – a capital without underground transportation–, as well as to promote a safest city, specially for women and girls.
Juan Esteban Lewin writes in La Silla Vacía that the new mayor will have the challenge of being an administrator, because so far she has been more of an “analyst and critic”
Claudia López’s public face is known for not having a filter when it comes to speaking.
An AFP dispatch recalls that she “called ignorant a journalist’s question about her possible support for ‘Maduro’s regime’, asked her main rival not to become a victim like a ‘Neymar of politics’ and, during a debate on paramilitarism, she accused former president Álvaro Uribe of running ‘like a leech down a sewer’.”
Lewin writes that López threw “darts that she after throws back,” which for a mayor “can become an Achilles heel in the ability to have bridges and alliances of all kinds. From the private sector, with which she hopes to better focus higher education, to the politicians she probably needs to convince to move forward with projects in the Council.”
However, López delivered a conciliatory speech after her victory, different from the tone the used in the campaign. She addressed her three contenders and their voters: “We are going to be a government for everyone, not just for those who trusted us,” she said.
Her story
In 2005, Claudia López’s name became famous because she led the investigation of parapolitics in Colombia, which found links between congressmen and paramilitaries. More than 50 politicians have been sentenced to prison for this investigation.
The Mayor-elect of Bogotá lived most of her life in the center of the city. She is the eldest of six siblings. She began pursuing a medical career at the university and quit and to study Finance, Government and International Relations instead, at the Universidad Externado de Colombia. She paid her tuition with a credit. Then she went on to study a master’s degree in Public Administration and Urban Politics at Columbia University in New York, on a scholarship.
In the 1990s, she did politics at a small scale. She participated in the student movement La Séptima Papeleta, which promoted the Constituent Assembly of 1991. And she worked on the campaigns of Enrique Peñalosa, the now outgoing mayor of Bogotá, as recalled by Olga Lucía Lozano in a profile about López. The two are now distanced. When Peñalosa won the elections, in the second campaign, López worked in the district administration. On her return from New York, she worked at the Ministry of Environment, Housing and Development. She then worked briefly with Peñalosa on the campaign for his independent presidential candidacy. She distanced herself from him when Peñalosa chose to add his candidacy to the liberal party.
Because of this rupture, Claudia López began her career as a columnist. In La Silla Vacía she wrote an article that spoke of Peñalosa’s “betrayal” of his political ideals. Since then she has also been a columnist for El Tiempo and Hora 20 on Radio Caracol.