Colombia’s Runoff Election Set to Transform Decades-Long Armed Conflict

Colombians head to the polls on Sunday in a runoff election that is expected to dramatically shift the course of the nation’s decades-long armed conflict, now at its most violent since the historic 2016 peace accord between the government and the majority of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Polls show far-right lawyer and Trump-admiring millionaire businessman Abelardo de la Espriella in the lead. He has pledged to scrap President Gustavo Petro’s ‘total peace’ plan—which aimed to disarm all criminal organizations—and instead return to a full-scale military confrontation with armed groups.

De la Espriella’s opponent in the vote is Petro’s chosen successor and the chief architect of ‘total peace,’ left-wing Senator Iván Cepeda, who advocates continuing the plan with ‘necessary adjustments.’

Cepeda led in polls for most of the campaign but fell short in the first round three weeks ago and has since struggled to attract centrist voters.

The election, in which more than 41 million Colombians are eligible to vote, is expected to deliver another victory for a far-right candidate favoring a tough-on-crime approach, following examples from Keiko Fujimori, who is leading the count in Peru, and José Antonio Kast, who won in Chile last year.

Amid a new wave of far-right victories across Latin America, a De la Espriella presidency would leave only Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, and Guatemala under left-wing governments.

Sandra Borda Guzmán, an associate professor of political science at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, said De la Espriella has successfully tapped into two trends shaping recent elections worldwide: presenting himself as an ‘outsider’ against the establishment and promising quick fixes to violence.

He even vowed that, if elected, he would restore state control over territories dominated by criminal groups within 90 days—though he later appeared to backtrack, telling Caracol radio: ‘I never said I would solve the security problem in 90 days.’

De la Espriella, a lawyer who began his legal career defending leaders of far-right paramilitary groups, maintains that his goal in the first three months of his administration would be to ‘capture or kill’ 10 major drug-terrorist and organized crime leaders.

‘Between the international trend favoring candidates who present themselves as anti-political figures and Colombia’s domestic security situation, that combination has helped him a lot,’ Guzmán noted.

Although violence remains far below the extreme levels recorded in the decades before the peace deal with the FARC, the past year has been the most violent since the 2016 accord.

Miguel Bermúdez, a 40-year-old business administrator from the coastal city of Cartagena, said he would vote for De la Espriella largely because he is an ‘outsider’ despite his long history as a lawyer for the rich and powerful.

‘I’ve been looking for something new for a long time. I’m tired of that old political story,’ Bermúdez said.

Kátia Outten, a 57-year-old dentist from San Andrés island, said she would vote for Cepeda because ‘he understands the needs of ordinary people.’

During his presidency, Petro’s supporter Cepeda expanded social programs and raised the minimum wage. Poverty rates have fallen to their lowest since records began in 2012.

Outten also decided against voting for De la Espriella because of what she called his sexist views, including a radio interview in which he claimed he had won female voters over because of the size of his genitals.

‘Women make up more than 50% of the population. If we go to the polls with a sense of female empowerment, we can prove that all that rhetoric is baseless,’ she said.