Right-wing Colombian Aberaldo de la Espriella on Sunday pulled ahead in Colombia’s race for the presidency in the first round of elections, capitalizing on a growing appetite for heavy-handed crackdowns on criminal groups across Latin America.
However, the second-place finisher, progressive Senator Ivan Cepeda, and his ally, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, questioned the results of the election on Sunday night, without providing evidence.
De la Espriella rapidly gained traction in the lead-up to Sunday’s election, winning nearly 44 percent of the vote, and surpassing Cepeda, who had consistently led polling throughout the campaign and won less than 41 percent of the vote.
Photo: Reuters
The two are slated to continue to a runoff election on June 21, where De la Espriella is expected to scoop up additional votes from Colombians who supported other conservative candidates in the first round.
Cepeda will face an uphill battle in the runoff, political analyst Sergio Guzman said.
“Abelardo de la Espriella won the first round. In other words, that’s a shift in public opinion that is very difficult to overcome. So now Abelardo is emerging as the likely favorite to win,” he said.
Photo: Bloomberg
De la Espriella, known as “El Tigre” or “The Tiger,” has never held office in Colombia and prided himself on living a luxurious life in Italy before becoming deciding to run for president. He pitched himself as an outsider who would cozy up to US President Donald Trump and follow Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs, which has driven down homicide rates, but fueled accusations of human rights abuses.
"I will wipe out narcoterrorism and those who I’ve declared a military target like cockroaches, like rats. I will unleash upon them the wrath of God never seen before,” De la Espriella said in an interview with The Associated Press in the final stretch of the campaign, where he promised to open 10 mega-prisons to fight crime.
He joins a growing number of leaders across Latin America — from Chile to Honduras — seeking to latch onto the “Bukele model,” as voters across Latin America are increasingly ditching leaders that pitched progressive policies aimed at addressing the root issues of conflict, such as lack of opportunities for young people and corruption.
De la Espriella’s rise as a presidential candidate spells trouble for Cepeda, a progressive senator who has promised to carry on Petro’s fraught plan to achieve “total peace” by negotiating peace pacts with guerrillas and criminal gangs.
Their political movement was born from a fierce rejection by many Colombians of a militarized offensive by former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe in decades past used to beat back the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which ended in thousands of civilians being killed by Colombian forces in a scandal known as “false positives.”
De la Espriella “represents a return to the paramilitary politics and drug-trafficking — a mafia-run, plutocratic and corrupt past that the country experienced during Alvaro Uribe’s two administrations,” Cepeda said on Sunday.
Petro, a former rebel, won Colombia’s presidency in 2022 in a historic election that ended decades of right-wing domination by leaders from Uribe’s political movement. He gained massive support from rural-dwelling, indigenous and poorer Colombians who felt they had never been directly spoken to by Colombian leaders.
Now, that movement is backed into a corner.
“This is De la Espriella’s election to lose,” wrote Renata Segura, director of International Crisis Group’s Latin America and the Caribbean Program. “Cepeda thought he could win appealing squarely to the left, and that proved to be a massive mistake. How he pivots in the next month will determine if he has any chance to win.”
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