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News > Latin America

Colombia's Petro Has New Campaign Logo: Superhero Worker Bee

  • Colombia's Petro Has New Campaign Logo: Superhero Worker Bee
Published 11 June 2018
Opinion

Petro's supporters create a new logo for their candidate after former president Alvaro Uribe accuses him of staging a bee attack on a Duque rally.

Colombia’s leftist presidential candidate Gustavo Petro has a new logo - a superhero worker bee for the "resistance."

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The new image, spreading widely over social media, is a spin-off of Saturday’s incident when former right president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010) pleaded over twitter to have adrenaline and medications urgently delivered to the Loma Hospital in the small hamlet of El Paso, Colombia.

The medications were needed to treat several Ivan Duque supporters who were attacked by killer bees at a Uribe-organized rally for the presidential candidate on Saturday morning. Duque is facing Petro in an electoral run-off to be held June 16.

"Please here in the Loma Hospital hydrocortisone, adrenaline and tavejil (sic) vials are needed for people stung by Africanized bees.”

Uribe and his entourage had arrived in El Paso in two helicopters in order to campaign for the conservative Duque who was not present at the rally. Just as the former president began to speak to crowds gathered at the Loma community center the crowd was taken over by agitated bees that left at least 15 people in need of medical treatment.

One of Uribe's supporters, Senator Fernando Araujo, immediately began to blame Petro and his followers for staging a "bioterrorist" attack against the former president. Petro quipped in a tweet, "So, it turns out that african bees are ‘petristas.’ Could it be because they are workers?"

The New Symbol of Resistance in Colombia, Photo: Pacocal 

Petro and others found irony in Uribe’s requests for medications being that his neoliberal “law 100” essentially gutted the state healthcare system, privatizing it by the mid-2000s.

"Why doesn’t @AlvaroUribeVel author of the law 100 that condemned healthcare in Colombia ask why in La Loma, from where carbon is exported to the world, aren’t there medications even for bee stings? He (Uribe) is living the failures of his own policies," tweeted Petro.

"Look at the result of law 100 asking for medications that should be in the hospital," wrote @Ps2480Ps.

According to Colombia Reports the bees are native to the region. The commander in chief of Cesar police, Coronel Mauricio Rodriguez told reporters that the "Uribe’s helicopter knocked over the beehive," inciting the insects to sting.  

As the story spread Petro supporters began designing the images of bees for his campaign that read, "new symbol of resistance in Colombia."

Uribe has been highly critical of the current government’s accords with the FARC, arguing that it grants "impunity" to the former guerrillas. Uribe himself is under investigation for organizing death squads that allegedly killed at least 4,000 people in his home department of Antioquia.

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