Normally, a presidential election in South America wouldn’t raise eyebrows in Washington’s corridors of power. Last weekend’s election in Colombia, however, was no ordinary contest. Although it would be too dramatic to say that the historic relationship between the United States and Colombia will come down to which candidate wins the runoff later this month, the result could either add a further wrinkle in ties or bolster them at a time when combating drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere remains one of the Trump administration’s principal objectives.
Over the weekend, around a dozen contenders competed to succeed Gustavo Petro, who under the Colombian constitution is limited to one term. If no candidate received 50% of the vote, the two leading contenders head to a second round. Sure enough, that’s precisely what occurred. Iván Cepeda, the leftist who is endorsed by Petro to continue his political project, received 40.9%. Abelardo de la Espriella, the far-right candidate, got slightly more than 43%.
Millions of Colombians will therefore cast their ballots yet again, this time choosing between two candidates who couldn’t be more different in their ideologies, policies and personalities. Cepeda, a senator who participated in the Colombian government’s peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) about a decade earlier, is bookish, scripted and a bit uninspiring during campaign rallies. He’s a more buttoned-down version of Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president who, while controversial in Colombia, enjoys a solid base of political support from the marginalized constituencies that have been historically overlooked by the Bogotá political establishment.
De la Espriella is, in contrast, very much the Colombian-version of President Donald Trump: brash, wealthy and unapologetic. He’s also a political outsider, has never held elected office and before embarking on a presidential campaign was most known for being a lead counsel to Alex Saab, the notorious financier of former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro (Saab was extradited to the United States last month and is currently awaiting trial for a litany of financial crimes). De la Espriella also fancies himself a populist and is a big fan of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s authoritarian president whose solution to gang violence is locking up 90,000 or so young men on the most frivolous of evidence.
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