Andrés Pastrana Arango

In October 2021, his name was mentioned in the Pandora Papers as the owner of a company located in Panama, a country considered a tax haven, through which he makes investments in Colombia.

He is a signatory of the Madrid Charter launched in 2020 by the Spanish party Vox to unite the radical right in Spain and Latin America against "narco-communism, the left and organized crime."

He campaigns in 2016 against the peace agreements signed between the Colombian government and the guerrilla.

Pastrana is a board member in the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, and the honorary president of the Union of Latin American Parties (UPLA). He is also a member of the Fondation Chirac's honour committee, and of the Club de Madrid, a group of more than 80 former leaders of democratic countries, which works to strengthen democratic leadership worldwide. Pastrana also serves on the board of advisors for the Global Panel Foundation, and as a counsellor for the One Young World Dublin summit in 2014, along with four other former presidents from Latin American countries.

In 2013, Pastrana was awarded the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award jointly by the Prague Society for International Cooperation and Global Panel Foundation.

In July 2006, a few days after Uribe had appointed former President Ernesto Samper as Colombian ambassador to France, Pastrana told Uribe that he was "morally impeded" from participating in a government along with ex-President Samper. Pastrana resigned and returned to Colombia, and Samper rejected his own appointment. However, that move was not well received by the Conservative Party, which was committed to Uribe, who had won the presidency as an independent, and left Pastrana alone.

In 2005 President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who had been a critic of Pastrana's peace process with the FARC and had received criticisms from Pastrana regarding his negotiations with Colombian paramilitary groups, surprisingly offered the former president the post of Ambassador to the United States in Washington, DC. After consulting his family and his political supporters, Pastrana accepted.

In 1999, he and U.S. President Bill Clinton launched Plan Colombia to fight the communist guerrillas with the payment by the United States of $1.6 billion over three years to the Colombian army. An amendment quickly emphasized the plan's second function: to encourage foreign investment by "insisting that the Colombian government complete the urgent reforms designed to open its economy completely to foreign investment and trade."

While the accusation underwent a parliamentary investigation, Pastrana retired into his private life. In 1998, Pastrana announced his intention to run for president. This time, he won that year's presidential election.

In 1994, he stood for the presidency against the Liberal candidate, Ernesto Samper, and lost by only 2% in the second round. Pastrana immediately accused Samper of using drug money to finance his campaign and provided audio recordings to the authorities that subsequently attracted much media attention and eventually led to a scandal known as 8.000 Process (Proceso 8.000).

He was kidnapped on January 18, 1988 in Antioquia by the Medellín Cartel, which was pressuring the Colombian government into preventing the extradition of Pablo Escobar and other drug lords to the United States. He was found by the National Police a week later, and in March, he was elected Mayor of Bogotá, a position that he held until 1990.

In 1982, he formally began his political career by gaining a seat on the local Bogotá council. He also specialized in press articles on the production and trafficking of cocaine for which he gained many journalistic awards. In 1991, he was elected Senator.

During his father's presidency, he was a high school student at Colegio San Carlos where he served as president of the student council and graduated in 1973. He later acquired a degree in law at the Our Lady of the Rosary University in 1977, and attended Harvard University as a 1978 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Fellow. He founded the magazine Guión and a programadora known as Datos y Mensajes, whose flagship program was the newscast Noticiero TV Hoy. As a regular news anchor he became a nationally known figure.

Andrés Pastrana Arango (born 17 August 1954) is a Colombian politician who was the 30th President of Colombia from 1998 to 2002, following in the footsteps of his father, Misael Pastrana Borrero, who was president from 1970 to 1974.

Patrana was born on 17 August 1954 in Bogotá to Misael Pastrana Borrero, who later served as the 23rd President of Colombia, and María Cristina Arango Vega, the former First Lady of Colombia.