Iván Duque

Iván Duque (born August 1, 1976, Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian centre-right politician, lawyer, and author who became president of Colombia in 2018. He succeeded Juan Manuel Santos, his first political patron, as president but was an acolyte of another former president, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who had handpicked Duque as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Centre (Centro Democrático; CD), the political party Uribe founded in 2014.

Duque was born into a politically prominent family. His mother was a political scientist, and his father, a lawyer, served as governor of Antioquia state (1981–82), Colombia’s minister of mines and energy (1985–86), and national registrar (1998–2002). From an early age Duque showed an interest in politics. As a boy, he memorized political speeches, debated with politicians who passed through his home, and indicated a desire to grow up to be president. His early education was at bilingual schools in Bogotá—St. George’s and Rochester. As a teenager, Duque was a fan of the band Led Zeppelin and was a singer in the rock band called Pig Nose.

Duque studied law at Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá, but even before he earned his degree (2000) he worked as a consultant in the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and as an adviser to Santos, who was then serving as minister of the treasury and public finance in the administration of Andrés Pastrana Arango. Beginning in 2001, Duque worked in Washington, D.C., for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), first as an adviser on Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador and then as chief of the organization’s Culture, Creativity, and Solidarity Division. At the IDB he negotiated some $8.5 billion in credit for Colombia and about $4 billion each for Peru and Ecuador.

During his tenure in Washington, Duque also earned a master’s degree in international legal studies from American University and a master’s degree in finance and public administration from Georgetown University. Arguably, the most important development for Duque during this period, however, was the beginning of his relationship with Uribe, who was then serving as Colombia’s president (2002–10) and who would become Duque’s mentor. In 2011 Duque became Uribe’s assistant on the four-member panel that was tasked by the United Nations with investigating Israel’s attack of the flotilla that attempted to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip at the end of May 2010.

A prolific writer, Duque contributed columns to several newspapers, including El Tiempo, Portafolio, and El Colombiano. He also authored or coauthored a number of books. The Orange Economy: An Infinite Opportunity (2013), written with Felipe Buitrago Restrepo, is a manual for a creative economy that advises readers to “squeeze all the juice” from it. Among Duque’s other books are Maquiavelo en Colombia (2007; “Machiavelli in Colombia)” and El futuro está en el centro (2018; “The Future Is at the Centre”).

Uribe was prohibited by the constitution from serving again as president, but in 2014 he formed the CD party and was elected to the Senate, as was Duque, who had joined the “Urbista” party. In the Senate, Duque served next to Uribe at an adjacent desk. There Duque was a vocal critic of former ally Santos’s National Development Plan. Nevertheless, he was considered to be a moderate by CD standards and characterized himself as “an extreme centrist.” Still, Duque joined Uribe in condemning the peace agreement that Santos had negotiated with the FARC, which stood to end that Marxist guerrilla organization’s long war with the Colombian government. Although the agreement was rejected by Colombian voters in a referendum in October 2016, a revised version of it was pushed through the House of Representatives and the Senate (both of which were dominated by Santos’s ruling coalition) in November.

By early 2017 the terms of the agreement were being implemented as FARC guerrillas began turning over their weapons to United Nations monitors, and on August 15, 2017, the Colombian government declared an official end to the conflict. Duque, like Uribe, remained deeply disenchanted with the agreement, which they saw as too lenient in its treatment of the former guerrillas. That criticism was central to Duque’s candidacy after Uribe had anointed him as the CD’s standard-bearer for the 2018 presidential election.

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In May 2018 Duque emerged from a welter of candidates to take the top spot in the first round of voting with 39 percent, significantly ahead of the 25 percent registered by the second-place finisher, former Bogotá mayor Gustavo Petro, but well short of the 50 percent necessary to preclude a runoff. The presence of Petro, a onetime leftist guerrilla, in the runoff with Duque marked a significant change in the attitude of Colombian voters, who had long been leery of candidates from the left as a result of the prolonged conflict with the FARC. Notwithstanding the suspicions of some political pundits that he would prove to be a puppet for Uribe, Duque swept to a commanding victory in the runoff, capturing some 54 percent of the vote, compared with about 42 percent for Petro, to become the second youngest individual to serve as Colombia’s president when he took office in August at age 42.

Once Duque was in office, his objections to the peace agreement were manifested by what his opponents characterized as his half-hearted efforts to implement the agreement. Critics argued that Duque had failed to protect not only former FARC rebels (more than 200 of whom became murder victims) but also politicians and political activists (a number of whom were also killed). Moreover, his administration was accused of inadequately reintegrating the former rebels into society, failing to oversee sufficient agricultural reform, and allowing the departure of FARC to create dangerous vacuums of power in rural regions.

Duque struggled to deliver on his promises to enact tax reform, modernize the economy, and attract foreign investment. His administration was also beset with accusations of corruption. Most notably, it was alleged that his presidential campaign had been partly funded by contributions from drug traffickers, and the investigation of these charges by Attorney General Francisco Barbosa also drew fire, because of Barbosa’s closeness with the president. In November 2019 Colombians took to the streets en masse to demand action on a raft of issues, ranging from education and health care reform to protection for activist leaders.

The government appeared willing to address these issues, but the outbreak of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic of 2020 brought the government’s efforts to a halt, along with the Colombian economy. The country’s mayors took the lead in implementing lockdown and social-distancing measures aimed at slowing the spread of the virus and COVID-19, the often deadly disease caused by it, but Duque won praise for his science-based approach to combating the public health emergency. Cases of COVID-19 in Colombia began climbing in June 2020 and generally remained on the rise for the next year, reaching a cumulative total of nearly 3.8 million by June 2021, with more than 95,000 deaths related to the disease. At the end of April 2021, even as the virus raged, and in violation of pandemic lockdown orders, Colombians, angered by Duque’s plan for tax reform that would squeeze the middle and working classes, once again took to the streets in protest. Over the following weeks, the demonstrations expanded to include demands for the provision of a guaranteed minimum income, an overhaul of the health care system, and an end to police violence. Demonstrators created roadblocks that interfered with the transport of food and supplies, causing shortages in some parts of the country, and violence erupted, resulting in dozens of deaths.