By Monday morning, Colombia’s presidential runoff had come down to 250,830 votes. With 99.99% of ballots counted in the preliminary tally, Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right millionaire lawyer, held 12.96m votes, or 49.66%. The leftist senator Iván Cepeda had 12.7m, or 48.7%. Another 1.6% of ballots were left blank.
The gap was tighter than in the first round three weeks earlier, when De la Espriella led Cepeda by 673,000 votes.
Cepeda did not concede. He said his team would challenge results from 33,000 polling stations. “We will not allow democracy to be violated,” he said. At a press conference on Monday morning he asked his supporters to stay “calm and behave exemplarily” during the recount. No recount has ever overturned a presidential result in Colombia.
Not everyone stayed calm. In Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, protesters burned US flags and clashed with police. In Bogotá, hundreds gathered outside Corferias, the country’s largest polling station.
A speech behind bulletproof glass
De la Espriella spoke in Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast, where his law firm and campaign headquarters are based. He stood behind bulletproof glass, as he had all through the campaign. “I want to speak especially to those who did not vote for me,” he said. “Your rights, even if you did not vote for me, will be respected. Your opinions will be heard. You will never have to fear thinking differently.”
The words sat awkwardly beside his campaign. He had said he would “disembowel” the left, a remark he later called a figure of speech. He also asked Petro and Cepeda to “Refrain from unleashing social unrest.”
President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first and only leftwing president, was barred from seeking re-election and had backed Cepeda. Petro posted that he saw irregularities in the preliminary count and would accept only the official scrutiny, expected to take about two more days. He made a similar fraud claim after the first round without presenting evidence. The final first-round tally differed from the preliminary count by less than 0.1%.
Security at the center
The campaign was dominated by violence. The past year has been the most violent since the 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. De la Espriella, who calls himself “El Tigre” and has never held public office, promised an iron fist. He wants to build 10 maximum-security “mega-prisons” and has said he would kill criminals “like rats and cockroaches.”
He has vowed to scrap Petro’s “total peace” plan of negotiating the dismantling of criminal groups. That plan managed to disarm its first group only on Thursday, one with 99 members. Experts estimate that more than 27,000 people belong to Colombia’s criminal organisations. De la Espriella says he will seek US support for airstrikes against coca plantations.
He made his name as a criminal lawyer for leaders of the paramilitaries, the private armies created by drug traffickers and rightwing landowners to fight guerrillas.
Washington and the region
Donald Trump endorsed him only after the first round. His post on the result read: “He Won, BIG!” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had called De la Espriella and wrote that “Colombia’s best days are ahead.” Leaders including Argentina’s Javier Milei, Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, Chile’s José Antonio Kast and Paraguay’s Peña also sent congratulations.
De la Espriella said Colombia needs “a very close alliance with the US.” His vice-president will be the economist José Manuel Restrepo, a finance minister under Iván Duque, who is to carry out a plan to shrink the state by 40%. The pair take office on 7 August with a minority in congress.
Sources
- Far-right millionaire wins Colombia’s razor-tight presidential election
- Far-Right Candidate De la Espriella Wins Colombia Presidency by Slim Margin
