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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.
This month's runoff will also come at a time when Colombia is experiencing a significant rise in drug-infused violence. While the Colombia of 2026 is nowhere near as deadly as the Colombia of the 1990s, when the FARC was ruling over swaths of the country, the South American nation is nevertheless regressing in terms of security. Petro's landmark " Total Peace" initiative, which encompassed negotiating with multiple armed groups simultaneously to cease the violence and demobilize them into the formal structures of the Colombian state, has had a lackluster track record. The early ceasefires forged with some of the biggest Colombian rebel factions have largely broken down — and even when those ceasefires were in place, the criminal organizations exploited the pause in hostilities to go after each other in the hope of capturing more territory and resources.
According to the Colombian intelligence community, the number of people participating in armed groups rose by 45%, to nearly 22,000, from the beginning of Petro's term. The International Committee of the Red Cross reports a 100% increase in the number of displaced persons between 2024 and 2025, a result of criminal groups duking it out over turf.
Even Petro has had to admit that his peace plans haven't met expectations. The clearest sign of this was the resumption of airstrikes against some of the groups, a few of which have inadvertently killed children. The Trump administration has been highly vocal about its disappointment as well. It was only a few months ago when the Trump administration sanctioned Petro and his family, took away their visas and blasted the Colombian leftist as a certified drug-dealer who was not only turning a blind eye to cocaine production but somehow involved in the drug trade.
"We love the Colombian people … but their new leader is a troublemaker, and he better watch it," Trump said of Petro during a White House event last December. And although the two leaders have since made up after Petro visited the White House this February, it's abundantly clear to anyone with a pulse that Washington remains highly unimpressed with how the Colombian government is prosecuting the fight against the cartels.
Regardless of who wins in June, Trump has high demands of Bogotá. In Trump's eyes, job No. 1, 2 and 3 for Cepeda or de la Espriella is reducing cocaine shipments to the United States to an extraordinary level. And to be fair, Trump's concerns on this front are justified; the Drug Enforcement Administration assesses that as much as 90% of the cocaine seized and analyzed by U.S. authorities can be traced back to Colombia.
How the Colombians do it is not nearly as important as whether the job gets done. Colombia's top two presidential candidates, however, have markedly divergent approaches. Notwithstanding the poor results, Cepeda continues to be an avid believer in Petro's "Total Peace" scheme and is intent on maintaining dialogue with criminal groups that are least willing to sit at the table, even if he has also suggested tweaking how the policy is implemented.
De la Espriella's solution is to return Colombia to a state of war against any rebel faction that doesn't submit. This includes providing the Colombian military more leeway in the field, signing a new security agreement with Washington and building 10 mega-prisons that mimic Bukele's network of penitentiaries in El Salvador. "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," the lawyer-turned-politician screamed a day after the first-round balloting.
Expect Trump to endorse the far-right populist any day now.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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(COMMENT, BELOW)
Daniel DePetris
Chicago Tribune/(TNS)