Photo:Andrea Puentes - Presidency

"Today we must raise the tricolor flag, half of which was made by the slaves of Haiti, the flag against slavery": President Petro

Santiago de Cali (Valle del Cauca), June 19, 2026

After the promotion of 17 thousand patrol boats, I want to talk about some topics and present a general balance to this crowd that accompanies us, two days before the change, based on the decision of the people of Colombia, since my mandate ends on August 6.

There are many Fake News and lies paid for by Netanyahu, Milei and the drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, who try to brutalize the popular conscience, to plunge it into darkness, because only in darkness can these types of people control humanity. It can't be under the sun's rays, because they belong to a species called Homo Vampirus, addicted to blood. You have seen, Netanyahu is pouring money into Colombia, he has systematically murdered 22,000 babies through genocide and the missile in Gaza.

Someone in Colombia has dared to say that they are willing for worse things to happen than what happened in Gaza. That is, he is threatening the people of Colombia with missiles. I ask all mothers throughout Colombia, no matter the age of their children or how many, to examine that phrase carefully. Perhaps our press does not correctly inform us about what happened in Gaza, there in Palestine where Palestinian Jesus was born, who was also a baby in a crib. We must tell every mother in Colombia that on that land where Jesus was born, thousands of missiles have fallen to gut an entire town, leaving 22,000 babies crushed in their homes as a result, due to the explosion of missiles that the developed countries sent over Gaza.

To say now that something similar is going to happen in Colombia, from someone who has sworn allegiance to a flag different from ours, is something that is worrying. That would mean a genocide on our childhood and on the people of Colombia, because a missile does not stop to detect who is blue, who is red, who is black or who is white. A missile kills everyone equally, and we cannot allow a single missile to fall on Colombian territory, attacking our nationality.

So the current president cannot remain silent when they say that worse things are going to happen to Colombia than to Gaza. I was the first president in the world to say that there was a genocide in Gaza. And I will not allow, nor will the people of Colombia, that a genocide break out in Colombia, as has happened before in our history. It is nothing more than looking at our history, from when Santander tried to assassinate Bolívar, when we moved to the Patria Boba, which we cannot repeat, because since April 9, 1948, 700 thousand people have been murdered, some at first for ideological reasons and now simply for greed. And it is the greedy who want to take power, it is something that cannot go unnoticed.

A serious and responsible democratic president has to tell all the people of Colombia to reflect, I did not come here to say who to vote for but to recommend reflection, because they have said that they are going to eviscerate us, the president and my ministers, who have already put them all on extermination lists, as well as journalists and activists who are ordered to be detained, with torture included in the United States of America. Or they are pursued and through a hacker of Venezuelan origin whose name we already have. They block and tear down their pages, which are ways of expressing themselves freely, so that they are not heard, so that they are not heard.

This is what happened with the boys from La Ventana, this is what happened with Beto Coral, this is what is happening with the threats and profiling of Daniel Coronel and other figures, who are already being silenced in their words by a censorship that is established through logarithms that run through the networks, so that only one voice is heard, the voice of the Führer who does not want a different thought. And we cannot allow this. What does gutting mean? What does that violent language mean? I tell Álvaro Uribe, please join this platform and we give each other a hug and we go together to declare before the JEP the truths that the people need to know. I don't dare insult him, much less dare I say that a part of society should be gutted.

Do they want to throw us again to the crocodiles of the man who is delivering money to Cesar, to see if he returns to power? Do they want to return us to paramilitary governance again, so that 90,000 Colombians are once again dismembered in mass graves? I told Uribe in my office, my government is not going to persecute you or your family, or your property or your honor. If justice calls him, it is not for us, it is for him. And yet I told him that as president I will never allow an international court or a foreign country to extradite him as a war criminal or for crimes against humanity. It is the Colombian justice system that must decide.

After four years we have been gentlemen in politics, they have not brought us news about 3,000 young people put in prison, nor that 60 young people had their eyes removed or were tortured with tear gas, or were left in the streets in the middle of a pool of blood. We have not touched anyone here who has expressed opposition. We have shown that a government in Colombia can be democratic and that life and freedom can radiate. But now they announce the opposite to us, they tell us to look at each other as if we were enemies, to hit each other in the streets, to kneel before slavery and indignity.

The hatred that cannot return to Colombia, this is the reflection that must be made, Colombia was flooded with hatred after the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, they left us with 300,000 corpses of peasants. We cannot return to that hatred, the people do not have to kill each other. Nobody who wants to be president of Colombia can tell the people of Colombia that we should kill each other or that they are going to gut us, because then there would be no country or flag left. There would be no love or freedom left, that would lead us down the path of slavery, of denying rights to other voters.

Whoever approaches a ballot box next Sunday must be reflective, so that their vote is not filled with future blood, but rather filled with excitement, filled with hope. No citizen who has defended this government that made me should attack anyone on Sunday. We will look at the other with love, at the one who insults, at the one who attacks. Sunday's task is to take care of the vote of those we lift out of monetary poverty, three million eight hundred thousand people until December 2025. On August 6 of this year, with the living wage already acting, those 3,800,000 people will become at least five million people who will leave monetary poverty and extreme poverty.

We have removed 1,800,000 people in these four years from the most undignified condition and there is still much more to go. And I am sure that, by August 6, thanks to the multiplier effect so that more people earn the decreed living wage, another two and a half million people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. I will leave that cold palace in Nariño, I don't know if happy or sad, but I will leave with the pride of knowing that my government managed to lift seven and a half million Colombians out of the conditions of poverty. People I hug and thank, and tell them to continue, because life is wide and beautiful, and they don't deserve to be told that they are going to be gutted. The answer is with love and flowers, be careful, we are not going to fall into the trap of sinking again into fratricidal violence.

Colombia is only one, it is not two. The Colombian homeland is respected in its true flag, it is respected in its true people. Here no genocide is going to come and launch missiles at us, no president is going to condemn us, as already happened in Argentina, to being one of the poorest countries in the world, nor will he make us eat donkey meat. I ask the entire salaried population that has benefited from the labor reform, not to stay at home and go out and vote. To the women of Colombia, all without thinking about economic condition or region, let them go out, because what must be defended in Colombia is the possibility of a better life for themselves and their children. The moment is Sunday, it is the place, and the place where they gathered us, and especially the women of this country, to vote for life and freedom. To the youth of Colombia, let us not stay at home or in the patch. The time came, like four years ago, when they bled youth from the streets.

I invite you to go out and take care of all the hours of election day, becoming digital witnesses from your home if you are not physical witnesses at the tables. I invite you to vote, to vote for life and for freedom, for Valle del Cauca. Do you know how many children, compared to the last year of Mr. Duque's government, we were able to save in Valle del Cauca? Five thousand five hundred and thirty-two boys and girls, thanks to 100 thousand nurses and doctors from the basic teams, and 927 teams touring the houses. And in the Pacific Sea we launched a ship that created the first free Palenque in America, 5,352 boys and girls born babies in these four years, who would have died if they had followed the 2022 statistics of Duque and Restrepo. And that cost 1.3 billion pesos from the national budget, not from the mayor of Cali.

Also from the national budget we have primary health care very present: 1.3 billion in 151 health posts and hospitals, 88 ambulances for the entire Valle del Cauca. That left us with a balance in terms of life, which is what matters to us. We would have to compare figures: how many boys and girls in all indicators of perinatal mortality under one year or under 5, have we saved throughout the republic of Colombia. If we compare with the last year that the Duque and Restrepo government left in death statistics. While in Gaza they murdered 22,000 babies with missiles, in Colombia in the government of life we ​​saved the lives of 15,000 babies. Life or death is the basic contradiction on this planet, in this country with so many years of history. So I ask you to choose the light of life, let's not go into the darkness.

Another statistic shows us education in Valle del Cauca: we invest 1.3 billion in health, in education we have invested 739 billion, in higher education infrastructure, university campuses in Cali, Jamundí, Buenaventura, Candelaria, Palmira, Tuluá El Dovio. All of this has given us 18,000 new places, added to those that already existed, and has made us go from 51,000 students who were at the university to 78,000 young people who today study for free.

That a young man or woman from working families without resources, even from the middle class, can enter a free public university, that is what it is about. And more is needed, because it has to be everyone. I asked the Minister of Education to present a bill on July 20 - it will depend on the government that exists - where free education is no longer focused on at the university, but rather that every young person, regardless of their economic condition, can study by right, for free. The law is not focused, it is not for one and no for others. Whatever the criteria for drawing that border, it should be so in health, in life, in education.

Now let's move on to other topics, social policy. I already said that we had lifted millions of people out of poverty. As of December 31st, approximately 5 million people. By August 6, thanks to the living wage, we will have 7 and a half million. And it has been the product of policies that must be taken care of, I am talking about three in particular. First, the living and family salary. Be careful, Caleños, Caleñas, hard-working Colombians! If they make hourly hiring a law of the Republic, the minimum living wage is not obtained, the struggle of these four years ends in a negative way.

If they put hourly wages, hourly contracts, working people become slaves. And Bolívar already helped, and even the Liberal Party at its birth, to end slavery in Colombia. Hopefully the Afro-descendant population will not be chained again, and they even deserve collective compensation in Colombia and in the world, because they are descendants of one of the worst crimes against humanity, which was bringing that population forcibly from Africa to put them to work in perpetuity, for the simple greed of some white men who came from Spain and left their descendants, it seems, with the same mentality.

We cannot, Afro people, Colombian people of all colors, country of the rainbow, of all skin tones, we cannot return slavery to Colombia again. To stop this trick they call hourly hiring, there is the living and family wage, which can lift all of poor Colombia out of poverty, if we maintain that policy, if we deepen it. But we also did something that cannot end either, they cannot end the pension reform, nor the pension bonus for our grandparents.

There is no forgiveness for a society that is not capable of caring for its elderly. We found three million people without a pension when we came to government, some with a handout of eighty thousand pesos a month. Who eats with eighty thousand pesos a month, I wonder? And we said that our old men and women should at least have a bowl of hot soup and can sleep on a comfortable mattress and sleep with a smile.

And we achieved it: three million old men and women today have 235,000 pesos a month to be able to have a bowl of soup and be able to sleep on a comfortable mattress, to have a smile in their hearts.

Are we going to take away the food, the spoonful of soup from his mouth? Are we going to take away one of the great achievements of the government of life, to lift their old men and women out of extreme poverty? We cannot go back on what has been advanced in terms of social equality, in terms of getting out of poverty, of hope for youth, in terms of dignity for the working class, to which the majority belong.

And I conclude, last piece of information: how many old men and women in the Valle del Cauca do we remove from that extreme poverty, who did not even have a pension? In Valle del Cauca we went from 176 thousand beneficiaries of the pension bonus, who received 80 thousand pesos, to 272 thousand grandfathers and grandmothers who today receive 230 thousand pesos. It is from these policies, it is not a gift.

And now they come to say that we waste. How can you be wasteful if you spend it on children, if you spend it on old people who can't work? As some cheap intellectual said, poverty decreased in Colombia because we got into a lot of debt and that is a luxury that cannot be maintained. That's what Restrepo said. So many lies, Duque's government left Colombia with 1 million 100 thousand poor people more than what this government received.

The only government of this century that increased poverty was that of Duque y Restrepo, its Minister of Finance. And none of those governments reduced poverty as much in number of people, or in percentages, as the Government of Life did, which is about to end.

A young woman with children will do anything, including damaging the dignity of her sacred body, to be able to support her children. And we decided that child malnutrition would fall if the State helped these women and became their companion at least so that the boys and girls born could grow up without malnutrition, because malnutrition eats away at the human brain between 0 and 7 years old, because its damage is irreversible. We couldn't leave those women alone, so we established a transfer of half a million pesos per month, knowing that this woman would spend first on the nutrition of her children. How much has child malnutrition decreased in Colombia? Listen to this figure, to date we have reduced child malnutrition in Colombia to a quarter of what Mr. Duque and his Minister of Finance, Restrepo, left it.

It is not easy for any government to carry out tasks like that, but we did it with some money, which is not a waste. It is the priority expense that is needed to sustain life, and in this we were helped by hundreds of thousands, one and a half million young women who, thanks to that support, managed to ensure that their boys and girls in these four years did not have the irreversibility of death in the brain, by substantially reducing malnutrition. The government of life reduced child malnutrition by a quarter, all social sectors of Colombia have seen their family income increase in these four years, refrigerators have been filled, there is more food in the homes, hunger has decreased in Colombia.

But there are circles of greedy powerful people, who all they think about is getting oil with Fracking and leaving the country in three years when the water runs out. People who think about destroying the rivers, taking the gold by the hand. And take the oil and gold for the United States and leave us without water, without a country, without wealth. When with the support of the money of Mr. Milei, of the drug trafficker who was president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, with the money of Netanyahu. This is how they pardoned prisoners in the United States, while they put us on the ripper lists, of those who want to confront us among Colombians, we have the list.

I am not going to say who made it, but it was an official entity, and we delivered it yesterday to the Attorney General of the Nation. And I'm going to read it for the record, two paragraphs from that investigation, which is called Operation Ajax Cleaner. They believe that they are changing our skin color with this operation, they intend to exterminate our ideas and our strength.

The financial intelligence and forensic audit analysis confirms the existence of an alleged transnational criminal network that operates behind a web portal on the Internet. And they use it as an instrument of reputational war, to undermine the dignity of human beings, generating destabilization. And it is directed directly against the current government and its political party, which half of the Colombian population elected. And I hope I leave on August 6 with the support of the vast majority of the Colombian population.

The network is coordinated through a network of parent companies located in Medellín, with mirror corporations in the United States: they found a company in Medellín and created a similar one in the United States, both designed to triangulate resources and manage these virtual platforms of massive disinformation, through Artificial Intelligence and with money that comes from parent companies in Medellín.

This criminal scheme systematically receives capital flows from its own interconnected corporate network, that is, from companies in Medellín, and from a political party in Colombia. And it is proven through which line they sent the money, from what account and to what account abroad, a party whose name I will not mention yet, but which is dedicated to diverting public money, money that has been stolen by the State to discredit the President of the Republic, evading the control of the DIAN and the traceability of the UIAF.

These organizations implement sophisticated maneuvers of patrimonial confusion and take refuge within non-governmental organizations, using them as a front to damage reputational seals, to provide apparent institutional legality with certain income of money, of illicit origin. With its robust operational capacity, this organization mobilizes cross-border capital flows and currencies, through compensation operations outside the formal exchange system, channeling the money through Florida accounts and jurisdictions of fiscal opacity, known as tax havens.

These economic resources are injected in a coordinated manner to strengthen the digital infrastructure of the platform and finance systematic attacks against the legitimacy of government institutions. Due to the severity of the triangulation of these capitals of mixed origin, public, corporate, political and criminal, they resort to the systematic reporting of non-existent liabilities with allied subsidiaries to empty liquidity, to falsify the billing of costs, to nullify the tax base. This operation criminalizes in an indicative manner the alleged crimes of money laundering, conspiracy to commit a crime, aggravated tax evasion and crimes against institutional order.

Tomorrow we will mention some names of mirror companies that act from the platform where the resources of the operation, already detected, are focused. They are dedicated exclusively to discrediting the President of the Republic, members of the government, and some campaigns that were in the last electoral contest. With illicit criminal money they are carrying out a campaign of brutalization and generalized misinformation, which must be stopped, pointing out its authors by name, with their money transfer accounts, the places from where they transfer the money, the companies that in the United States are carrying out this crime with money that is partly public from Colombia, and partly private from companies in Medellín, and from international drug trafficking. And I leave that first complaint to end with other words.

I think that the moment for reflection has arrived today, tonight, tomorrow, before going to vote: vote early, that is what the president of Colombia asks of you. It is not about promoting, as in 1948 or 1992, a new orgy of blood in Colombia, a division of the country based on death and hatred. It is not about voting because of spilled blood.

It is not about gutting a single Colombian man or woman. It is not about summoning the specters of death, the forces of darkness. It is about summoning the forces of light and life, if we do not want them to make us slaves again.

Today we must raise the tricolor flag, half of which was made by the slaves of Haiti, the flag of the first revolution for freedom and against slavery, in all of humanity. It is the flag of freedom that Bolívar and Miranda wanted to have a yellow stripe because it is the color of the sun in the Caribbean. This flag means freedom and not death.

That is why on Sunday I invite you to reflect, to vote for life and freedom. Always, always, always, for life and freedom.

Gustavo Petro spoke to them and I was his president, with a lot of love.