Over the past few months, Colombian pop star Shakira’s newest song, “El Jefe,” has taken off throughout Latin America, highlighting the intense economic inequality and exploitation in the region. Perhaps surprisingly, the song has a fan in the upper echelons of power — Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president.

First on Twitter/X and later at a rally in Bogotá’s Plaza Bolivar, President Petro expressed that Shakira’s “El Jefe” captures the unequal situation that his government seeks to end in one of its most ambitious projects, an overhaul of Colombia’s labor laws through comprehensive reform. “That is why labor reform is needed,” he tweeted, along with the song’s music video.

Petro was swept to power by a wave of social upheaval — social movements driven largely by Colombia’s dispossessed working class. His labor reform would reintroduce long-lost labor rights, giving workers protections and unions breathing room in a climate dominated for decades by elite and reactionary interests. Unsurprisingly, those conservative and pro-business forces — Colombia’s real-life “Jefes” — are intent on stopping the reform in its tracks.