Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer and businessman with no prior political experience, has won Colombia’s presidential runoff election with approximately 49.7 percent of the vote against leftist Iván Cepeda’s 48.7 percent, based on more than 99 percent of ballots counted. The margin — roughly one percentage point in a country of 52 million people — is the thinnest in modern Colombian electoral history. Donald Trump, who had publicly endorsed de la Espriella, declared on Truth Social that “He Won, BIG!” — a characterisation that did not survive contact with the actual vote count. De la Espriella, known by the nickname “El Tigre,” is a US citizen who lived and worked in Miami for years and whose legal career included representing Alex Saab, a Maduro ally charged with money laundering in the United States, and David Murcia Guzmán, a convicted Colombian fraudster. He replaces the left-wing President Gustavo Petro, whose four-year “total peace” strategy of negotiating with armed groups is widely credited with having allowed those groups to expand their territorial control. Outgoing Petro has refused to concede, alleging — without providing evidence — that voting software and some polling stations were “compromised,” while clashes were reported in Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city.
The received wisdom
The progressive case for alarm about de la Espriella’s victory is coherent and deserves to be heard. Colombia has the world’s most complex and dangerous internal security environment outside active war zones: the FARC dissident groups, the ELN, and the Clan del Golfo have collectively seen their membership roughly double over five years, cocaine production remains at record highs, and a brutal offensive along the Colombian-Venezuelan border displaced tens of thousands of civilians in recent months. Into this environment steps a man who has never held elected office, whose legal career involved defending figures at the intersection of narcotrafficking and political power, who won by less than a percentage point, and whose principal security policy proposal is building mega-prisons in Colombia’s jungle — a solution that has negligible empirical support as a strategy for reducing organised crime, as El Salvador’s experiment under Bukele, which de la Espriella explicitly emulates, has shown to produce security improvements in the short term at the cost of systematic due process violations and international isolation. A country this fractured and this deeply enmeshed in illicit economies does not obviously benefit from a political newcomer armed with maximalist rhetoric.
A different read
That reading is sobering. But it has two significant blind spots. The first is a selective accounting of what Petro’s “total peace” produced. Petro’s model — negotiating ceasefires with multiple armed groups simultaneously — proceeded from the progressive premise that Colombia’s security crisis was primarily political and economic in origin, amenable to dialogue and social investment. The result was a period in which armed groups used ceasefire periods to expand territory and consolidate power, while Petro’s administration grew increasingly erratic, his economic management deteriorated, and his approval ratings collapsed. Petro’s refusal to accept the vote count — alleging fraud without evidence — is itself the behaviour of a leader who has confused his political project with democratic legitimacy. Cepeda, his chosen successor, has not conceded either. The people celebrating in the streets of Barranquilla wearing “Make Colombia Great Again” hats are not hallucinating a security crisis; they are expressing exhaustion with a political class that spent four years telling them that dialogue with the groups terrorising their communities was the sophisticated response.
The second blind spot is the broader regional pattern. De la Espriella’s victory is not an isolated Colombian phenomenon. It is the latest iteration of a rightward tide that has swept Javier Milei to the presidency of Argentina — where his shock-therapy economics are producing their first tangible results in falling inflation — strengthened José Antonio Kast in Chile, brought Nayib Bukele an unprecedented second term in El Salvador on a security platform, and enabled right-of-centre coalitions to consolidate in several smaller Central American states. This wave is not primarily about Trump’s endorsements, which in most cases followed rather than created the political momentum. It reflects a genuine and broadly distributed frustration with the institutional left’s inability to deliver on security, economic stability, and institutional credibility. Latin America’s left governed extensively in the 2000s and 2010s, and in country after country — Venezuela catastrophically, Brazil problematically, Colombia chaotically — the governing left is associated with corruption, populist spending, and an unwillingness to confront organised crime directly.
De la Espriella’s background presents legitimate questions that should be pressed in office rather than used as a reason to reject an electoral result. His legal clients were his clients in private life, before he ran for president; they do not, in themselves, demonstrate he is corrupt, any more than a defence lawyer’s clients define the lawyer’s values. More pertinent is whether he has the institutional knowledge to govern a country whose civil service, judicial system, and military are complex, partly captured, and historically resistant to rapid change from above. His pledge to scrape peace negotiations with armed groups and pursue a military crackdown will encounter the same operational limitations that have constrained every Colombian government that has tried pure hard-power approaches — the country’s geography and the scale of its illicit economy impose constraints that mega-prisons and tough rhetoric alone cannot overcome.
But the alternative — a second consecutive term of Petro’s approach under Cepeda — offered no solution to those constraints either. Colombia’s voters made a choice between two imperfect options and chose the one that did not come with four more years of the same trajectory. That choice deserves respect, even from those who would have preferred a different outcome.
What to watch
Watch whether Petro’s fraud allegations — currently unsupported by evidence — translate into a formal legal challenge that delays the transfer of power and creates a constitutional crisis. Watch how de la Espriella constructs his Cabinet: a government of competent technocrats would partially offset concerns about his inexperience, while a government dominated by political allies and personal loyalists would validate them. Watch the armed groups’ immediate response — they will test de la Espriella’s resolve early, and his administration’s handling of the first major security incident will set the tone for his entire term. And watch whether the US-Colombia relationship, strained under Petro over migration and tariffs, actually delivers the “total support and strength” Trump promised — or whether, as with many Trump endorsements, it proves more rhetorical than substantive.
— J