BUENOS AIRES (CN) – Abelardo de la Espriella, a staunch far-right businessman and lawyer who goes by the nickname “The Tiger”, led Colombia’s general election on Sunday with 43% of the vote, setting Colombia on the path to a sharp political shift to the right.
He will face left-wing senator Iván Cepeda, who received 40%, on June 21.
Cepeda and President Gustavo Petro questioned the results, alleging irregularities without presenting substantial evidence. Their accusations gained little traction among electoral authorities and key political actors.
De la Espriella, who ran his campaign promising a dramatic overhaul of the country’s security policies, gave a rousing speech late Sunday night from Barranquilla, a port city on the Colombian Atlantic.
“You’re out,” he said, addressing Cepeda and Petro, whose party, Pacto Histórico, became Colombia’s first progressive government four years ago.
A political outsider in the vein of Argentina’s Javier Milei or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, de la Espriella has focused his presidential campaign on a hardline agenda of security and government reform.
“This result shows the will of freedom and progress by the Colombian people,” Milei wrote in a post on X congratulating de la Espriella. “And the will to say enough to the failed socialist model that has so badly damaged our region.”
De la Espriella has pledged to reduce the size of the public sector by 40%, retake territories controlled by criminal and guerrilla groups within his first 90 days in office, and strengthen the military through greater use of drones and artificial intelligence. His proposals also include building 10 privately operated maximum security prisons modeled on El Salvador’s anti-crime approach and resuming the aerial fumigation of illegal coca crops as part of a broader strategy to fight organized crime and restore state authority.
“I came to rock the boat, politically,” he said in a recent interview. “This is the real transformation Colombia needs.”
Laura Bonilla, a manager at the Pares Foundation, a human rights and peace watchdog, was not surprised by the result. “People in Colombia have been looking for a foreigner for a long time,” she said. “A populist government promising tough policy.”
Security, Bonilla said, was the central issue in Sunday’s vote. The Petro administration’s failure to significantly reduce the influence of armed groups turned voters to calls for armed state intervention, a political promise often made by right-wing candidates.
Paloma Valencia, a more traditional conservative candidate who came third in the election, won 6% of the vote and has said she will support de la Espriella to fight Cepeda’s progressivism.
For more than six decades, Colombia has been shaped by a conflict involving left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, drug-trafficking organizations and state security forces.
A landmark peace deal signed in 2016 with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, led to the demobilization of thousands of fighters and helped reduce violence in many parts of the country. But the agreement did not end the final conflict. Dissident factions, the National Liberation Army or ELN, and criminal groups continue to compete for control of territory and illicit economies in some regions.
While the peace deal is widely credited with ending a chapter of the country’s war, many Colombians remain frustrated by continued insecurity and the government’s limited ability to establish stable state control in some rural areas.
And although de la Espriella promises to destroy the armed groups within 90 days, Bonilla remains skeptical.
“It is unrealistic – he will bring back the policy of confrontation with civil groups, which will again lead to human rights violations,” she said. With such an entrenched crime dynamic in Colombia, forced recruitment has become a standard reality throughout the country, making citizens prone to criminalization rather than being seen as victims. “We’ve seen this before,” she added.
Bonilla pointed to the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, whose signature “Democratic Security” policy drastically reduced kidnappings and weakened guerrilla groups in the early 2000s. Over time, his militarized approach faced harsh criticism for human rights abuses. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace, or JEP, has said that at least 6,402 civilians were killed and falsely presented as combatants by members of the military during the armed conflict, in what has become known as the “false positive” scandal.
Uribe, who was supporting Valencia, has asked his voters to vote for de la Espriella in the runoff.
De la Espriella has repeatedly cited President Donald Trump as a political influence, praising his opposition to “wokism” and calling for closer ties to Washington. De la Espriella’s affinity for Trump has fueled speculation among some political analysts and observers whether the US president could weigh in on the runoff.
Relations between Bogota and Washington have become increasingly strained during Petro’s presidency, particularly over security cooperation, Venezuela and the war in Gaza.
Although Petro and Trump they met again in February as tensions over Venezuela escalated, diplomatic relations remain delicate – a factor that could profoundly affect Colombia in the years to come.
De la Espriella has said that he expects closer cooperation with Washington on security issues. Analysts say greater US support could strengthen Colombia’s capacity to fight armed groups, but some human rights advocates warn that a more militarized strategy could also increase risks to civilians in conflict-affected regions.
“I will defend Colombia as if I were its best fighter,” de la Espriella said during his speech on Sunday.
Cepeda, his opponent, also used a metaphor for fighting.
“Our lives have been plagued with battles, which we have fought in the worst possible conditions,” Cepeda said. “But we’ve overcome them.”
Lucía Cholakian Herrera is a Courthouse News correspondent based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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