Bogotá, Colombia— A car horn pierces the twilight hanging over the city. A young man stands in a silver SUV racing through the streets, half his body hanging out of the sunroof, as the Colombian flag flutters over his shoulders.
“Stand firm for the homeland!” he shouts. His cry is echoed: some drivers jeer, others honk their horns in approval.
Hours earlier, polling stations closed in the second round of Colombia’s presidential election. The country was choosing between Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right lawyer whose clients have included paramilitary leaders and drug traffickers, and left-wing senator Iván Cepeda, the heir to the incumbent Gustavo Petro government.
As the young man in the car raised his arms to the sky, the initial count pointed to a victory for De la Espriella, with 49.6% of the vote, compared to 48.7% for Cepeda. The margin was razor-thin, coming down to just 246,000 votes in a country with a population of around 54 million.
Cepeda’s campaign contested the initial results from 33,000 of the 122,000 polling stations, and the final count is ongoing. But the overall result is unlikely to change – the verified recount of last month’s first-round vote differed only marginally from the initial count – and the leftwinger officially conceded defeat on 24 June.
Abelardo De la Espriella will take office as president of Colombia on 7 August, joining a wave of right-wing populists already in power across Latin America – in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras – all of whom have the backing of Donald Trump in the US. He has promised tax cuts, rollbacks in environmental protections, and tough security measures, including scrapping President Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ approach to ending the armed violence that has plagued the country for decades, which sought to disarm criminal groups through negotiations.
In a packed auditorium in Bogotá on the night of the election some of Cepeda’s supporters clung to the hope that the final count might overturn the result. Others were in tears, aware of the challenging future they face under a new right-wing government.
“We will not allow – and we say this clearly – by drawing on the power of democracy, mobilisation and political action, the social gains we have built up over recent years in Colombia to be rolled back,” said Cepeda, addressing the crowd.
Some of his supporters were less hopeful, though.
“Well, we’re almost certainly going to return to a form of authoritarianism that we thought we were leaving behind,” Luis Carlos Pulgarín, a 58-year-old supporter of Cepeda, told openDemocracy.
Colombia spent much of the 20th century embroiled in armed conflict. The ten-year civil war between Conservatives and Liberals – a period known as ‘La Violencia’ – ended in 1958, and was followed by the rise of left-wing guerrillas in the 1960s, before the 1990s saw the emergence of far-right paramilitary militias, who allied with security forces to combat the guerrillas. Drug trafficking became the driving force behind all the armed groups.
Pulgarín was displaced from the northern region of Urabá due to the killings of the 1990s, and fears that De la Espriella will trigger a return to violence.
“During the last right-wing – let’s say, fascist – government… there were, in a sense, extremely serious human rights violations,” said Pulgarín, referring to former President Álvaro Uribe, who governed between 2002 and 2010.
Uribe, who supported De la Espriella in the second round, and his family have been accused of multiple crimes, including collusion with drug trafficking and paramilitarism. As president, Uribe denied that there was an armed conflict in his country and labelled the guerrillas as terrorist organisations. During his administration, there was a peak in “false positives” – the term used to describe the more than 6,000 murders of civilians presented by the army as guerrilla casualties in combat.
Toby Miller
In 2016, after nearly four years of negotiations, Uribe’s succesor Juan Manuel Santos and Latin America’s largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), signed a peace agreement. Under the next president, Iván Duque, the state failed to honour the agreement, leading to the murder of demobilised guerrillas, the regrouping of smaller guerrilla groups and the emergence of new criminal organisations.
Petro came to power in 2022 and attempted, through his Total Peace policy, to resume negotiations with the second-largest left-wing guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and other armed groups. But the talks failed, with frequent breaches of the ceasefire by the armed groups.
Yet Petro’s government achieved successes that explain the left’s strong showing at the polls: a labour reform that granted essential rights to workers, a 23% increase in the minimum wage, and a reduction in monetary poverty, which last year affected 28% of the population – the lowest level in the country’s history.
Pedro Rossi
The self-styled El Tigre
De la Espriella has only recently burst onto the Colombian political scene.
The businessman and former lawyer previously lived in the United States for 10 years, obtaining citizenship in 2023, before moving to Italy in 2024. He returned to Colombia last year to stand as a presidential candidate.
Throughout his career, he has represented figures with alleged links to the criminal underworld. These include Alex Saab, who is widely seen as the ‘bag man’ for former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and was last month extradited to the US to face charged of moneylaundering, and Jorge Visbal Martelo, a former senator and rancher who is serving a nine-year prison sentence for aggravated conspiracy to commit a crime over his alleged ties to paramilitary groups, especially the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.
Having once defended such figures, De la Espriella now wants a return to Uribe’s confrontational approach and a zero-tolerance policy towards criminal groups and drug traffickers. “For those who have sown violence, terror, drug trafficking and corruption,” said De la Espriella in a speech after his victory, “their time is up.”
The new president – nicknamed ‘El Tigre’ by his supporters, a name he said he chose for himself because it suggests strength, courage and power – has promised to destroy 330,000 hectares of coca crops (the raw material for cocaine) and launch a direct military offensive to defeat narco-terrorism. This, he says, will restore territorial control in just 90 days.
“[Security] is the most important thing,” said 60-year-old Enrique Mejía as he stood with other De la Espriella supporters outside the president-elect’s headquarters in Bogotá. Like many of De la Espriella’s voters, Mejía is concerned about the alleged resurgence of armed groups, after some studies found that their memberships soared while Petro was in office. He supports the president-elect’s desire to end the ‘Total Peace’ policy of negotiations.
“We have to be fair because he did try to level the playing field in society, and that’s fine,” Mejía acknowledged of Petro. “But he went about it the wrong way, [by] entering into a peace process with drug traffickers.”
Wrapping a flag that bore an image of De la Espriella giving a military salute around his shoulders, Mejía added: “[The armed groups] have grown considerably, causing a great deal of harm.”
But analysts fear that abandoning the negotiations could worsen the situation.
“In the case of candidate De la Espriella, I do believe there is a very limited understanding of what the Colombian armed conflict entails,” said Juan Pablo Aranguren Romero, an associate professor at the University of the Andes who has researched the impacts of the armed conflict in Colombia.
Aranguren highlighted the risk that key aspects of the peace process with the FARC, such as land restitution and the search for missing persons, could stall under De la Espriella’s presidency, as he has announced his intention to dismantle the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), a transitional justice tribunal established under the 2016 peace agreement.
“Dismantling the JEP is something that would truly go against the constitution and the law,” Aranguren told openDemocracy.
Among the communities most affected by violence, many oppose De la Espriella’s security proposals: Caquetá, Chocó and Valle del Cauca – three of the Colombian regions that suffered most during the conflict – voted overwhelmingly in favour of Cepeda, who promised to continue negotiations with armed groups.
De la Espriella’s proposal to withdraw the country from the UN and the Inter-American Human Rights System is another cause for concern. “They’re just a bunch of bureaucrats, and we’re spending money we don’t have. We need to put a stop to that,” he said to Semana magazine in November last year. The incoming president also wants to build 10 mega-prisons, a controversial proposal that follows in the footsteps of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s far-right president. Bukele has opened Latin America’s largest prison, the CECOT, ordered mass raids that have imprisoned more than 90,000 people, and imposed a four-year state of emergency that has suspended fundamental rights.
Euan Wallace
Colombian activists fear similar human rights abuses to those seen in El Salvador could become commonplace in their own country.
“I believe that what could be done under a state of emergency in a potential De la Espriella government could be far more serious,” Alejandro Lanz, co-director of the Colombian human rights NGO Temblores, told openDemocracy.
Mass incarceration is not a viable solution to Colombia’s security problems, said Lanz, whose organisation works within prisons and with former inmates. “There has been a mistaken and fictitious link drawn between the construction [of mega-prisons] and the mass incarceration of people allegedly belonging to gangs, and the idea that this effectively translates into public safety.”
US celebration and domestic opposition
De la Espriella’s victory came after he received open backing from Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei.
“He Won, BIG!” wrote Trump on Truth Social, hours after the polls closed. Later the US president posted again: “I look forward to working together to build a powerful relationship between Colombia and the United States of America, which will bring new levels of Greatness for both of our Countries!”
Last week, in the days before the second-round vote, 11 US congresspeople signed a letter denouncing Trump and other senior US officials’ “direct interference” in Colombia’s elections. They cited the US president’s suggestion “if Mr. De la Espriella loses, Colombia may lose the support of the United States, its most important trade and security partner”. Twenty members of the US Congress also released a statement branding the election interference an “insult to [Colombian people’s] sovereignty and integrity”.
“All the right-wing Latin American governments and the US government have been involved in these Colombian elections,” said Alejandro Lanz. “This candidate has shown that he has sold out the country’s sovereignty.”
But following Petro’s strained relationship with Trump, De la Espriella’s supporters are delighted to be forging closer ties with Washington.
“We need to restore such important relations with our main partner, which is the United States, and likewise with the people of Israel,” said 38-year-old Andrés Santamaría at the entrance to a ticketed event celebrating the right-wing candidate’s victory. He was wearing the yellow shirt of the Colombian national football team, which has become the de facto uniform of De la Espriella’s supporters.
“I know that Abelardo, apart from also being an American citizen, is going to strengthen those relations,” he said.
Within his own country, De la Espriella will face determined opposition. On Sunday night, as the initial results were announced, dozens of Cepeda’s supporters took to the streets of the capital, waving banners proclaiming: “Abelardo de la Espriella is not my president”.
De la Espriella’s government will also have to deal with a Congress in which Petro’s Pacto Histórico party holds the largest parliamentary group. The right-wing coalition lacks sufficient strength to push through reforms alone, meaning its ability to govern will depend on the alliances it can negotiate, particularly with the centrist parties.
Still, for now, De la Espriella seems empowered. On Sunday night, he took to the stage to declare his victory before a crowd in the coastal city of Barranquilla. Sheltered in a bulletproof booth and surrounded by the glow of coloured spotlights, he addressed his rival Cepeda: “You know how hard the tiger bites, and let me tell you something: the tiger can still bite even harder than it has today at the ballot box.”
