Who is Rodolfo Hernández?

Rodolfo Hernández was the the surprise of the first round of the Colombian presidential elections, winning 28.15% of the vote and qualifying for the runoff, in which he is considered the early favourite. Yet he is an enigma, and a lot of people are wondering who he is.

Is he the Colombian Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi? Is he a ‘business magnate’ or ‘real estate tycoon’? Is he a right-wing populist? Is he a dangerous demagogue who would threaten the institutions and democracy? There’s no easy way to describe him or his politics. This post is a profile of him, an attempt to understand who he is.

Rodolfo Hernández is a 77-year-old civil engineer, real estate businessman and former Mayor of Bucaramanga (2016–2019). He is a self-confident, eccentric, whimsical and hot-tempered man who enjoys controversy and confrontation. He has become famous (and popular) because of his controversies and scandals — like the time he slapped a city councillor in the face. This is the profile of a unique man, with a surprising and interesting life story, who currently stands a very good chance of becoming the next President of Colombia.

The engineer and businessman

Rodolfo Hernández was born in March 1945 in Piedecuesta, Santander (now part of the Bucaramanga metropolitan area), which was a small and distant village which lived from tobacco and panela at the time. His father was the tailor and his mother owned a tobacco factory. His Liberal family briefly fled the partisan violence of the late 1950s, and upon returning to Piedecuesta her mother bought a 40-hectare farm and set up a sugar mill. To appear as a humble man of the people, Rodolfo Hernández refers to himself as a campesino (peasant) or the son of campesinos.

He studied civil engineering at the National University in Bogotá, graduating in 1970. Rodolfo Hernández doesn’t like Bogotá and doesn’t want to live there, even if he’s elected president: he can’t stand the cold and doesn’t like the rushed lifestyle of the capital.

Upon returning to Bucaramanga, like many of his classmates he went to work in the public sector. A friend or a relative recommended him for a job in the soils laboratory of the public works secretariat of the departmental administration (Gobernación). Shortly afterwards, the governor nominated him for the position of director of the Fondo Nacional de Caminos Vecinales in Santander, a position appointed by the president. However, he only lasted a year in that job. Already headstrong, he refused a political order to transfer machinery to a sector where the new governor had sympathizers and leave another site half-finished. The new governor wanted him gone, and Rodolfo was unceremoniously fired.

Rodolfo Hernández now says that his short stint in the public sector disgusted him from politicians and motivated him to become a businessman in the private sector.

In 1972, he founded a construction company with two other men, HG Constructora. One of them left very shortly afterwards following a dispute with Rodolfo, and the other business partner passed away a few years later.

Rodolfo Hernández’s company basically built half of Piedecuesta. He specialized in building well-designed, quality houses at affordable prices to sell them to the poor. Rodolfo Hernández says that he’s always followed his grandmother’s advice: “work with the poor and you will become rich”.

HG Constructora built new developments and residential properties, targeted at lower-income families, across the country, notably in Bucaramanga. Today, the company has built over 18,000 housing units, most of them low-income or social housing. The company, currently run by his wife Socorro Oliveros, also offers mortgage loans and has a real estate agency.

Rodolfo Hernández’s fortunes swelled during a real estate boom in the early 1990s, but ran into hard times during a housing crisis which began in the mid 1990s. His company was not selling any houses and he was swamped with bank loans. However, he had a genius idea which saved his business: he came up with a self-financed plan where people would buy a house in 100 installments, without the intermediation of banks. To market and advertise his plan, he hired two Argentine strategists, Hugo Vásquez and Guillermo Meque. They had him buy full page ads in the Sunday edition of the Vanguardia, the local newspaper, for 55 weeks. The ads were simple and didn’t explain his idea in detail, but they were a huge success: he says that at the time they were building a house every working hour, between 1,500 and 2,000 houses a year! His ‘plan 100’ not only helped him dodged the housing crisis of the 1990s but put him in the housing financing business, making him even wealthier.

A strange relationship with politics

Like any good Colombian businessman, Hernández kept an eye on politics and was close to most local politicians in Santander.

Although he never mentions it today, he briefly served two stints as a municipal councillor in Piedecuesta, in the 1970s and in the 1990s. In the 1970s, because of his family’s stature in the town, he was asked to run for council by the local Liberal Party, and he won. However, at the time he wanted to make money and he didn’t care as much about politics.

He was elected a second time in 1990, but he never showed up and his seat was held by an alternate (suplente), although he only resigned his seat near the end of the term, in 1992. Nevertheless, he was re-elected in 1992, but still didn’t serve.

However, while still holding office as councillor, in December 1991, the city council passed an ordinance allowing construction companies to pay local taxes in the form of public works projects. Days later, Hernández’s company signed a deal with the municipality, allowing it to pay future taxes in the form of local public works projects over two years. The ordinance was passed exclusively to favour the interests of Piedecuesta’s biggest construction company, HG Constructora.

Because councillors cannot sign contracts with the municipality while they hold office, in 1994 Hernández was removed from office by the Procuraduría, a decision upheld on appeal.

Hernández felt that deliberative/legislative bodies were useless and a waste of time. In his businessman mentality, the one who decides is the executive and the formalities of ‘asking permission’ for things which strike him as logical or common sense are a waste of time.

In Santander, he knew most local politicians and enjoyed good relations with them. Even today, even though he’s since declared war on most of them, he is still friends with a few old traditional politicians in Santander — like former governor Mario Camacho (convicted of corruption) and outgoing Liberal representative Edgar ‘el Pote’ Gómez. Of course, he doesn’t mention that…

He had a business relationship with Fredy Anaya, a controversial and unsavoury corrupt politician-entrepreneur. They were both shareholders and business partners in Entorno Verde, a company which sought to operate Bucaramanga’s new landfill in 2012. Hernández is now at war with Anaya, considering him a corrupt politician, and says that working with him in the past was a mistake.

In the 2011 local elections in Bucaramanga, Hernández financed and actively supported Lucho Bohórquez’s victorious campaign. Bohórquez returned the favour by appointing his sister-in-law to his cabinet and by trying to remove the obstacles to the Entorno Verde landfill project Hernández was involved with. Hernández attended some meetings and accompanied them mayor to the inauguration of a convention centre and on a walk around the city. However, Bohórquez ignored a list of projects that Hernández had in mind, so Hernández broke with the mayor.

The quixotic mayoral campaign

In 2013, Rodolfo decided that he’d run for mayor two years later.

According to him, he got the idea while complaining about politics with his friends, and his brother Gabriel suggested that he should run for mayor. He agreed and immediately went to the mayor’s office to meet Bohórquez. He told him that he would run for mayor and that he wanted the ‘fucking’ 100 million pesos he gave him for his campaign back. According to Bohórquez, Rodolfo came to ask him for his support to be his successor. Bohórquez refused and Rodolfo got upset.

Hernández started his own quixotic, self-funded, barebones mayoral campaign with a strident anti-corruption and anti-politics discourse. The campaign was run out of an apartment in the building he lived in, located in a wealthy neighbourhood of Bucaramanga. It is where he organized lunches with people from all sectors of society, where he’d listen to them and then present his ideas for a few hours.

The ideologue of his campaign was his brother Gabriel, a civil engineer turned Kantian philosopher and semiotician. According to Gabriel, he agreed to support Rodolfo’s campaign under two conditions: that he not seek the support of political ‘barons’ and that he not buy votes. He convinced him to run his very atypical campaign. In a 2013 interview with La Silla Vacía, Gabriel said that Rodolfo is a rich man who stopped thinking only about himself. He tried to convince his brother that a mayor needed to help improve the quality of life of the poor rather than build mega-projects and highways. Gabriel Hernández left his brother’s entourage shortly after the election, disenchanted with his brother’s style.

His political movement was named ‘Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics’, its logo was the Pi symbol and its ideological foundation was Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.

From his two old Argentine strategists, he got the idea to present himself as an engineer, not as a politician or as ‘doctor’ (as a lot of Colombian politicians are referred to, even if they don’t have doctorates). The idea was that, as an engineer, Rodolfo would rebuild what corruption had destroyed. That strategy stuck: Rodolfo Hernández refers to himself as ingeniero (engineer), his supporters call him el ingeniero (the engineer) and his campaign materials all read ‘Ing. Rodolfo Hernández’.

He campaigned without the support of any political structure. He did get the outside backing of both Álvaro Uribe on the right and, informally, the Greens and Polo, on the centre-left.

The campaign mixed Kantian philosophy, anti-politics rhetoric with classic populist tricks. Most controversially, in its final days the campaign distributed 40,000 notarized letters to low-income households in which he guaranteed them participation in a program of 20,000 ‘happy houses’ and a paid part-time job for young people. Obviously, that promise was not fulfilled (his administration changed the promise to low-cost lots), and critics accused him of deceiving or misleading voters to win votes, which is (technically) a crime. Hernández now justifies not keeping that silly promise by saying that the previous administration had stolen everything and left him with nothing in the bank.

He started at 4% and never did well in the polls, even at the very end. A poll in October 2015 right before the election had him in fourth with 11%, way behind the favourite, who had 41%.

Yet, Hernández unexpectedly won with 28.8% and a margin of just 4,400 votes, narrowly defeating the candidate of the ruling and hitherto dominant Liberal Party (and its machines) and other candidates backed by powerful political bosses. However, the Liberals won a majority in the city council, setting the stage for a tumultuous and confrontational relation between the new mayor and the council.

Hernández wasn’t even in Bucaramanga when he won. After voting, he flew to New York City, and stayed there for a few weeks. He felt there was no need for him to stay in Bucaramanga for the results. He doesn’t much care for lavish victory parties in hotels.

The mayor

Unlike a lot of politicians, Hernández didn’t change his message once in office. He doubled down on his anti-corruption creed, repeatedly attacking the previous administration for ‘stealing’ and ruining the city (leaving behind nearly 300 billion pesos in debt), attacking Bohórquez (saying the only thing he didn’t steal was the desk) and fighting with traditional politicians (who he called corrupt, rats, bandits etc.). He said he wasn’t interested in building a relationship with the council because what they wanted was contracts and bureaucratic appointments (which is the typical way to govern in Colombia).

Rodolfo Hernández did kind of keep his main promise, to fight waste and corruption. He improved transparency and competition for public contracts, cut unnecessary spending, abolished clientelist patronage and reduced (perhaps too much) the proliferation of contract employees in the government. His administration eliminated the 236 billion peso deficit it had inherited. Under his administration, the average number of bidders on public contracts increased from 1.4 to 40 in 2017, indicating that there was greater competition for public contracts and they were not rigged to favour a cartel of politically-connected businessmen.

His overly ambitious promises to turn Bucaramanga into the ‘Barcelona of Colombia’ amounted to little. However, he did invest most of the city’s budget in healthcare and education and his administration built new sports amenities, community halls (‘agoras’) in low-income neighbourhoods, renovated the central library and theatre, and provided high-quality school supplies to the most vulnerable sectors. His campaign website still lists the main public works projects accomplished by his administration.

One of his weak points was security, as perceptions of insecurity increased during his term. He focused on prevention rather than repression and prioritized social programs rather than relations with the police. Under his administration, poverty also increased in the city.

As mayor, Hernández repeatedly fought with the city council, public employees’ trade unions and other people. The city council was controlled by the opposition and they elected an old Liberal politician as the city comptroller to pester him. He reclassified the contractual status of some local employees and reduced their labour benefits without just cause, causing fights with the unions. Even his relations with businessmen weren’t always good.

He was embroiled in innumerable controversies, made more than a few gaffes and mistakes and sometimes even made enemies with national-level politicians (something very few local politicians ever do in Colombia, given their financial dependence on the national government). For example, he once said that then-vice president Germán Vargas Lleras “humiliated the poor” and took advantage of them by giving them houses. At the time, Vargas Lleras was seen as the favourite to win the presidency in 2018.

Obviously, picking fights with city council and civil servants isn’t conducive to getting much stuff done, but Hernández enjoyed these fights — because he almost always comes out stronger.

Despite bursts of public discontent over specific issues (traffic, security), his popularity remained quite high (generally above 60%). People credited him for ‘cleaning up’ city finances and corruption and enjoyed his impudent attacks on the corrupt political class.

As mayor, he continued to behave more as a candidate than a mayor. Advised by his Argentine strategists, he had weekly Facebook livestreams where he read newspaper stories about corruption or unfinished infrastructure projects, complained at length about the administrative mismanagement of his predecessor and received people’s complaints. Oftentimes he’s used his online livestreams to accuse his rivals of crimes, without evidence, and has been forced to rectify or apologize. For example, just days before the first round, a local judge ordered him to pay a fine for disobeying a court order (for failing to retract a comment calling a politician ‘corrupt’).

His constant anti-corruption rhetoric served to reinforce his Teflon popularity, and he’s always used it — plus attacks on ‘the mafia’, politicians/politicking and other ‘thieves’ — to deflect blame or questions about his own record.

Even today, one of the main criticisms against Hernández is his lack of knowledge (and disinterest) of certain policy issues. As mayor, he had a hard time adjusting to the different timelines and workstyles in the public sector, coming from his experience as an executive in the private sector. He was frustrated by the slow-moving pace of government and the necessary procedures to do things, which he considers unnecessary and a waste of time, and he dislikes the formal protocol of politics. He was a demanding boss and didn’t hesitate to reprimand employees, not unlike Álvaro Uribe in his days, which helped form an image of the mayor as a ‘representative of the people to his government’. In 2017, he published a video of him scolding the local transit cops, which went viral and was very popular. He sometimes was rude and vulgar with subordinates — one time he used very vulgar language while berating the transit director during a livestream.

However, when he didn’t know or care about an issue, he delegated it to advisors and experts who know about the topic. He mostly governed with experts, technocrats and friends (but many without experience in public administration), rather than with the cuotas of political allies. Manuel Azuero, a business administrator and former journalist, served as his chief of staff and a sort of ‘deputy mayor’, and helped run cabinet meetings and talked to the media about the administration’s policies. His cabinet had turnover and some officials were forced to resign for controversies. In 2018 the council adopted a motion of no-confidence against the finance secretary (accused of collecting taxes without council’s authorization and trying to cover up information), although Hernández defied them by later appointing her to another job.

Living for controversy

Hernández is known for his brash, coarse and vulgar style — and a long list of controversial statements. He called firefighters ‘fat potbellies’ who slept on the job collecting overtime, and whose snores would wake the dead. He referred to Venezuelan migrant women as ‘factories’ making poor kids. In 2016 he said that he was a follower of a “great German thinker, Adolf Hitler”, which he now says was a lapsus. He didn’t inaugurate new projects because “congratulating a politician for doing public works is like applauding an ATM for giving you money”. He said that a mayoral candidate in 2019 who had been been in many political parties had been “felt up more than a prostitute from Puerto Wilches”. He seems to particularly enjoy calling people and things ‘prostitutes’: in this campaign he has often said that political parties and the other candidates are “the same prostitutes from different brothels”.

His most famous incident, however, came in November 2018, when, in a fit of rage, he slapped a city councillor, Jhon Claro, who had challenged him over the Entorno Verde business. He slapped him and yelled “miente, hijueputa” (you’re lying, son of a bitch).

For the slap, the Procuraduría provisionally suspended Hernández for three months (the suspension was cancelled by an administrative court, revived by the Council of State and then cancelled again).

Unlike Germán Vargas Lleras’ infamous smack — which destroyed his image and may have prematurely doomed his campaign — Hernández’s slap had no impact on his popularity, and his followers largely forgave him. In fact, it’s since become a point of pride for Rodolfo, who says that Claro deserved it because he was “a saboteur”. For his supporters, it just cemented his image as a no-nonsense, straightforward guy who doesn’t let himself be fooled or scammed by politicians.

This happened in the middle of an election year when Hernández was forming his own political movement (the Liga de Gobernantes Anticorrupción) and seeking out a successor in Bucaramanga. Hernández took advantage of the disciplinary sanctions to appear as a victim of the system, saying they were attacking the mayor who is attacking corruption.

In September 2019, he was suspended for a second time by the Procuraduría, this time for political participation, for saying in a radio interview that he asked people to vote for “a mayor of the citizens”… which just happened to be the slogan of Juan Carlos Cárdenas, a little-known businessman and political outsider who was imitating Hernández’s 2015 campaign. Hernández, who had just three months left in his term, chose to resign from office to openly campaigned for Cárdenas, to prevent traditional politicians (like Fredy Anaya) from reclaiming power.

With Hernández’s explicit support, Cárdenas won decisively with 48.4%, while Hernández’s Liga placed first in the election to city council and the departmental assembly in Bucaramanga.

The honeymoon between Hernández and Cárdenas, however, didn’t last. Cárdenas’ political style is much more typical (calmer, conciliatory, friendlier with politicians), and Hernández says he was betrayed by his successor.

The trash scandal

The black mark on his record is a trash scandal, for which he faces disciplinary and corruption charges.

Hernández came to power promising a solution to a garbage problem in the city (the old landfill was filled and needed to close) by finding a strategic partner for the municipal waste management company (Emab) to install an environmentally friendly solid waste treatment plant. This was a 30-year contract valued at $250 million, with the bidders responsible for all the investment (the municipality wouldn’t put one cent).

The tender requirements were so difficult that only two proposals were submitted, and the strongest bid came from Vitalogic, which proposed to build a plant that would transform garbage into energy.

However, the Emab disqualified Vitalogic because it didn’t present an insurance policy (only a bond), but Hernández controversially directly awarded the contract to Vitalogic — a decision criticized by anti-corruption watchdogs, for going against all that he preached about transparency. Only after the Procuraduría intervened did Hernández backtrack and cancel the deal.

The scandal has two parts and involves both Rodolfo and his son, Luis Carlos.

In December 2017, a local online media revealed that Luis Carlos had been paid to lobby for Vitalogic. According to a notarized lobbying contract with Vitalogic signed, among others, by Luis Carlos Hernández, Rodolfo’s son was to receive 28% of the main lobbyist’s commission or about $100 million. Rodolfo didn’t deny it, and shamefully admitted that corruption had knocked at his door, but he called his son “stupid and ingenuous” for believing that he’d get the money like that.

In August 2019, the Procuraduría charged Hernández for presumed irregularities in the Vitalogic contract, in part because of his son’s lobbying deal.

Rodolfo Hernández also faces questions over two meetings he held with Vitalogic’s representatives, before the tender specifications were drawn up. The first meeting took place in April 2016 in his apartment, and was attended the three main shareholders in Vitalogic as well as the future main lobbyist, and organized by his son. The second meeting took place at a hotel in Bogotá in June 2016. Hernández’s defence claims that nothing illegal took place in those meetings and that the mayor met with 14 other interested parties. The Procuraduría alleges that he shared information that was not public knowledge at the time with private parties.

The other main part of the scandal, which directly involves Rodolfo Hernández, has to do with Jorge Hernán Alarcón, a consultant hired by Emab to design the technical, economic and legal specifications for the the trash contract. The contract with Alarcón was very expensive, costing Emab 350 million pesos over 5 months, and his work was of shoddy quality, forcing Emab to postpone the public tendering process. Different Emab employees denounced the terms of the contracts and alleged that Hernández had pressured them to hire Alarcón.

In February 2020, the Fiscalía charged Hernández for pressuring Emab to hire Alarcón. Five Emab functionaries and Alarcón also face charges, and one of the co-accused, the former manager of Emab, is collaborating with prosecutors. In May 2021, the Fiscalía formally accused Hernández of irregularities in this consulting contract, sending him and others to trial.

Rodolfo Hernández continues to assert his innocence, saying that all the accusations are pure lies and that he never stole any public money. In April 2022, La Silla Vacía revealed some of the evidence incriminating Hernández. The evidence includes:

• An audio recording from 2016 in which Hernández admits he gave the order to hire Alarcón and takes responsibility for it. The then-manager of Emab told the Fiscalía that, in a meeting in Rodolfo’s apartment, the then-mayor explicitly told him that he wanted Alarcón.
• Hernández’s private secretary sent Alarcón’s CV to the manager of Emab, by instruction of the mayor. She had received the CV from Luis Carlos Hernández, who had himself gotten it through his lobbying partner, Carlos Gutiérrez. Incidentally, Alarcón sent his CV on the same day that Hernández was meeting with Vitalogic’s reps in Bogotá, in June 2016. According to a whistleblower, at this meeting, Hernández and the Vitalogic business partners agreed to hire a consultant to ‘tie up’ the deal in Vitalogic’s favour. Alarcón’s name appeared in the initial lobbying contract, in August 2016, where he was promised a cut of the commission.
• Rodolfo Hernández followed up on the hiring process for Alarcón every morning. The hiring process was designed to favour Alarcón, and Alarcón even asked the Emab to modify the terms of the job description. The two other applications were determined to be false.
• When Alarcón did a bad job and messed up the first technical specs, forcing Emab to take them down and try again, Hernández prevented Emab from firing him.

In short, Hernández is accused of having directly and unduly intervened to order Emab to hire a consultant who would draw up technical specs for the contract, which would seal the deal in Vitalogic’s favour. His son would receive a commission for his lobbying work for Vitalogic.

The trial is set for July, after the second round. If elected, his case would be sent to the accusations commission of the House of Representatives — a parliamentary commission which investigates and decides on the fate of accusations against senior officials with constitutional protection (aforados). It is most commonly known as the absolutions or acquittals commission…

The politician

In office, Hernández also became more interested in politics for the long run, with the intention to lay the foundations for his own political movement and ambitions for higher office. He realized that his message was popular and sparking debate.

Hernández’s presidential ambitions have been public since 2019 and since late 2021 he has become a viral but enigmatic phenomenon.

Presenting himself as an engineer and the candidate of the people, he capitalizes on indignation with corruption and corrupt traditional politicians/‘politiquería’ and his entire campaign is almost entirely based around fighting corruption and the simplistic premise that everything (notably poverty, his other main focus) will be fixed by ‘collecting the checkbooks’ from politicians and ‘stopping the stealing’.

Like in 2015, his campaign is unusual. He is self-funded, only has a small campaign team, didn’t do large public events until the very end and instead relied on Facebook and TikTok (where he’s become quite popular and viral with his funny videos — 460k followers). He spent far less money, even on social media ads, than Fico Gutiérrez or Gustavo Petro. He doesn’t like travelling and his campaign headquarters is an old mansion in Bucaramanga, which he has called Casa de Nariño (the same name as the presidential palace).

His support is therefore the result of a genuine, grassroots base of rodolfistas across the country. Many of them likely heard of him through Facebook, and have become very passionate supporters of el ingeniero or el viejito as they call him.

Left, right, centre?

What is Rodolfo Hernández’s ideology? Some believe he is closer to Gustavo Petro — he has generally not attacked him directly, and in 2021 even said he’d vote for Petro in the runoff if he didn’t make it, although another time he said that Petro was the worst administrator in the country.

Others think that he is closer to Álvaro Uribe, pointing out that Uribe endorsed him in 2015 and that Hernández said that he owes him a debt of gratitude for his support. Hernández is not an uribista and has never been particularly close to uribismo, but his rhetoric — against politiquería and wasteful government spending (el estado derrochón as Uribe would say), for an austere and efficient government — is very similar to Álvaro Uribe in 2002.

Rodolfo Hernández said that he voted No in the 2016 plebiscite on the peace agreement with the FARC. He was one of the few big-city mayors in Colombia in 2016 who didn’t campaign for the Yes, and practically the only one who openly said that he voted No (after the vote). He criticized the peace agreement for “excluding half the country”. More recently, he seems to have claimed that he voted Yes in 2016, so either he’s lying now or he was lying in 2016. He also says that he would implement the peace agreement with the FARC, and supports a peace process with the ELN — but says that all that’s needed is an addendum to the 2016 peace agreement adding the ELN to it, because he doesn’t want to waste time and money on peace negotiations.

Rodolfo Hernández is, like millions, a victim of the conflict. His father was held hostage for 135 days by the FARC. Tragically, his daughter was kidnapped by the ELN and he has never seen her again. He refused to pay the ransom and the guerrilla likely killed her. He began to mourn his daughter in 2021, accepting that she is probably dead, and began the judicial process to declare her a victim of forced disappearance.

On some issues, Hernández is surprisingly progressive. In 2016, as mayor, he raised the LGBT rainbow flag, in reaction to the homophobic comments of a departmental assemblywoman, Ángela Hernández. He has said that the only solution to the drug problem is legalization and his platform supports supervised injection sites for drug addicts. Now, he also says that he supports abortion rights under the current conditions (which would mean decriminalized until the 24th week).

At the same time, he’s also been accused of being misogynistic. In a recent interview he said that women should support their husband from home and that people don’t like women involved in government. He later said his comments were taken out of context and that he was talking about his wife’s role as potential first lady, criticizing the benefits and budget allocated to the first lady’s office. But he has also said that, ideally, women should focus on raising children and an undated video of him (ignorantly) criticizing the law on femicides has circulated online. He retorts by pointing out that 70% of his cabinet in Bucaramanga was made up of women and he says that women are more hard-working and responsible than men.

On other issues, he’s flip-flopped. He now opposes fracking after saying he supported ‘controlled’ fracking. He also opposes aerial aspersion with glyphosate now, whereas in March he was more open to it.

He has a private sector businessman’s mentality. He is a capitalist, but he says that there is no capitalism in Colombia because of the levels of poverty and corruption — the problem, in his mind, is that Colombia never developed a competitive capitalist system. Rodolfo Hernández does not support the sort of radical changes to Colombia’s socioeconomic system that Petro supports, and advocates instead for more modest, piecemeal reforms to education, healthcare, agriculture and pensions. Although he has criticized neoliberal policies and tentatively supports a vague form of basic income, at least for poor families, to replace and unify the current subsidies.

As mayor, his main achievement, as noted, was improving Bucaramanga’s fiscal health and reining in spending. He promises an austere government, just like Álvaro Uribe in 2002, eliminating ‘waste’ and unnecessary bureaucracy. He wants to close many embassies and consulates, merge ministries (something Uribe did) and abolish advisory bodies in the presidency, for example.

His real estate background is also obvious in his politics. His campaign website still lists, with pictures, all the public works and infrastructure projects he completed as mayor of Bucaramanga, just like house listings on a real estate website. His website also offers a 360 virtual tour of houses he would build (?) for rural families in the countryside, a detailed render of a large multifunctional event space and a glossy presentation of Ciudad Justicia, a ‘jail city’ in the remote Vichada department (the department which he didn’t know existed) where prisoners would work in the fields or industry. Petro has criticized his idea to promote Mediterranean-style tourism and hotel developments in a new coastal free trade zone between Santa Marta and Riohacha. This area is part of Tayrona National Park, one of the most beautiful places in Colombia.

El País recently wrote that for Rodolfo, Colombia is like a real estate project and a country that needs to be torn down and rebuilt, to his style.

The real estate background, the anti-establishment rhetoric, the brash self-confidence, the controversies, the insults… All that just begs the comparisons to Donald Trump. Rodolfo himself has never really talked about Trump, though. I feel that the ‘Colombian Donald Trump’ references are a bit simplistic and don’t really do a good job at explaining how Rodolfo Hernández is a very unique, special candidate in the Colombian context (or the roots of his support).

According to Rodolfo, his international role models are Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the President of Mexico since 2018, and Nayib Bukele, the ‘millennial’ President of El Salvador since 2019. Like AMLO, Rodolfo considers previous Mexican presidents since the 1980s to have been “thieves and robbers” and admires AMLO’s Fourth Transformation and his focus on corruption. He promises to hold daily press conferences like AMLO’s famous morning press conferences. He admires Nayib Bukele’s rhetoric against corruption and politiqueros, and celebrated Bukele’s landslide victory in the 2021 legislative elections in El Salvador. What is more unclear, however, is whether Rodolfo Hernández shares Bukele’s authoritarian disdain for the rule of law, constitutional norms, separation of powers and civil liberties.

In sum, Rodolfo Hernández has no clear ideology and no interest in political philosophies. He has a fairly conservative mindset, in tune with the average Colombian voter, but sometimes mixed with surprisingly progressive stances.

In any case, he is a unique candidate — his success represents a sea change in Colombian politics, a break from the past decades of politics and elections.