Paper Tiger: Colombia's New President- MAGA Styled fascist Abelardo de la Espriella
S. E. Anderson
Paper Tiger
For years, Colombia’s electoral map has been polarised: the left-leaning regions that voted for Gustavo Petro in 2018 and 2022 voted for Iván Cepeda, Petro’s chosen successor, in the first and second rounds this year. With a historically high turnout in Sunday’s run-off, Cepeda got 12.7 million votes: 1.4 million more than Petro won with in 2022, but still 250,000 shy of his Trump-backed opponent, Abelardo de la Espriella. It was a lot tighter than opinion polls predicted, and the closest race in modern Colombian history: as in Honduras last November and Peru earlier this month, the right-wing candidate won by less than a percentage point.
Espriella took some departments easily: in Antioquia, long a hotbed of capitalist accumulation and paramilitary politics, he got more than two million votes, nearly double Cepeda’s tally. The former president Álvaro Uribe, a native of Antioquia, ran his own candidate in the first round but endorsed de la Espriella in the second.
Bogotá, the only department more populous than Antioquia and a petrista stronghold, didn’t deliver for Cepeda on the same scale. He got 2.24 million votes there, slightly fewer than Petro in 2022, while de la Espriella took 1.93 million, 450,000 more than Petro’s opponent, Rodolfo Hernández, four years ago.
With help from Alejandro Char, the mayor of Barranquilla and a scion of the Caribbean’s most powerful political family, de la Espriella also made gains in Atlántico, getting 40 per cent of the vote compared to Hernández’s 31.4 per cent. Of the 180,000 voters living in the US, more than 80 per cent went for de la Espriella.
Cepeda, who was described by Trump as a ‘Marxist of the radical left’, won most of the less populous Caribbean, Pacific and Amazonian lowland departments handily, while de la Espriella took the Andean heartlands and four departments in the Amazon-Orinoco basins.
De la Espriella, who likes to be known as ‘El Tigre’, is an admirer of Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Given the tight margin of victory, and Cepeda’s plan to file suit over 57,000 reported irregularities in 33,000 polling stations (US congressional Republicans have threatened sanctions if he doesn’t accept the results), it remains to be seen whether de la Espriella will have the legitimacy to ‘stamp out the left’ – by which he means progressives, many of whom are centrists – as promised in his campaign. His pledge to ‘refound the country’, meanwhile, is the same promise that AUC paramilitaries made in 2001, in de la Espriella’s home department of Córdoba, to help elect Uribe, who adopted it as his own. Despite being a career politician in the Liberal Party – he was a senator for eight years before becoming governor of Antioquía in 1995 – Uribe ran in 2002 as an ‘outsider’ who would co-operate with the US to defeat the FARC.
When members of the AUC began to confess their ties to leading businessmen and politicians, Uribe got them extradited to the US on drug-trafficking charges. De la Espriella’s career as a criminal lawyer began in 2004 while he was still a student, advocating for political status for the AUC, which supported rather than fought the Colombian military, so as to forestall extradition. This demand for political recognition had first been voiced by Pablo Escobar in the 1980s.
Colombia's vice-president Francia Marquez (first Black woman VP) and President Gustavo Petro.
After declaring his candidacy for the presidency last year, de la Espriella ran a campaign that played on voters’ emotions – mainly fear, rage and hatred – claiming he would usher in a ‘country of miracles’ whereas Cepeda would install a communist dictatorship modelled on Venezuela.
Wearing a football jersey and waving the national flag, he trotted out the quasi-fascist trinity from the days of Operation Condor, ‘Dios, patria y familia’, promising to end gay marriage and abortion, introduce megaprisons on the Bukele model, cut government spending by 40 per cent by eliminating ministries and privatising state enterprises, and slash whatever taxes and regulations remain on trade, production and commerce to attract US capital. Trump would ‘co-pilot’ his government, he said. Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator for Ohio, said Colombia will be at the centre of the Shield of the Americas.
Despite running as as an independent and styling himself an outsider, de la Espriella enlisted the help of Uribe’s party, Centro Democrático, and another far-right party, Cambio Radical. To pass legislation, he will also need the backing of the establishment parties – Liberal, Conservative, Union – against which he was ostensibly running. Cepeda’s Pacto Histórico and its allies have more seats in both houses of Congress than the Centro Democrático and Cambio Radical: to block legislation, they will need the help of only fourteen senators from the other parties. Unlike Trump, de la Espriella will not be able to do an end run around Congress.
If de la Espriella stands for anything, it is uribismo reloaded, a merger of narco-paramilitarism with the state: that is what ‘refounding the country’ means in the far-right lexicon. Times have changed, however. Efforts to return Colombia to the period before the massive social mobilisation of 2018-21, which led to Petro’s victory in 2022, are likely to backfire. The opposition is resilient and ineradicable: not even narco-paramilitarism destroyed it.
On Sunday night, thousands of young people gathered in Plaza de Bolívar to protest at de la Espriella’s victory, their numbers growing as they marched down one of Bogotá’s main avenues into the early hours of the morning. The struggle for social democratic citizenship continues. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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