The numbers come first: kidnappings more than doubled last year, forced displacement hit its highest level in nearly two decades, and political violence has reached its highest level in ten years. Colombians vote for a president on Sunday with an internal armed conflict back at the center of national life, and with three very different answers on offer.
President Gustavo Petro, constitutionally barred from a second term, leaves office after four years punctuated by car bombings, attacks by explosive drone and the killing of a presidential candidate: the right-wing senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, shot at a campaign event last year, later dead. Yet unemployment has fallen, the minimum wage has risen, and Petro’s approval ratings remain high for a departing leader. “I give him my vote because my life changed under this government,” said Natalia Rojas, a 23-year-old design student in Bogota. “This election is marked by class struggle,” political scientist Alvaro Forero told AFP, calling it the government side’s main electoral ammunition.
Three Candidates, Three Wars
The front-runner is Petro’s ally, Senator Ivan Cepeda, 63, son of a communist senator assassinated by paramilitaries in 1994 and the architect of the government’s total peace effort to sign disarmament deals with every armed group. Security experts widely judge the plan a failure, since factions exploited temporary ceasefires to expand; Cepeda wants to continue it anyway. “I have survived genocide, stigmatisation and relentless persecution. And here I am, still standing,” he said during the campaign.
The alternative is war. Abelardo de la Espriella, 47, a millionaire criminal lawyer nicknamed the Tiger who campaigns in a bulletproof vest, promises a military pact with both the United States and Israel, 10 Bukele-style mega-prisons, and, he told AFP, American backing for 90 days of airstrikes and the fumigation of coca crops. “Any criminal who does not surrender will be taken down as the law allows,” he said. Senator Paloma Valencia, granddaughter of a former president and protegee of ex-president Alvaro Uribe, is running close behind him. “We are going to put an end to ‘total peace’ in order to impose total security,” she declared in March. Analyst Sandra Borda Guzman of Universidad de los Andes places Espriella in a new wave: “He also carries some elements of this new counterculture against political correctness, in the style of [Argentina’s president] Javier Milei and Donald Trump.”
The War That Never Ended
The violence behind the vote has a face. Mateo Perez Rueda, a 24-year-old journalism student who sold fruit salads to fund his independent magazine, traveled to Briceno, Antioquia, on May 4 to report on the conflict; the next day he vanished, and a humanitarian mission later confirmed he had been kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Farc dissident 36th Front. “Here in Antioquia, the war never ended,” said his cousin and godfather Jorge Rueda. “Here, the war is over micro-trafficking and another over the goldmines,” he added. On Monday, clashes between two Farc dissident groups in Guaviare killed more than 50 people, many of them children and teenagers forcibly recruited. Researcher Alejandro Chala notes the homicide rate now sits around 26 per 100,000, far from a pre-2016-peace-deal peak near 80, but the killing is concentrated where the drug routes and mines are.
Whoever wins inherits a fiscal deficit of seven percent of GDP and a country still the world’s biggest cocaine producer. If no candidate passes half the vote, a runoff follows on June 21.
Sources
- Colombia vote tests leftist rule as violence surges | Buenos Aires Times
- Colombia prepares to go to polls in election shadowed by resurgence of political violence | Colombia | The Guardian
