By Prof.Dr. Fernando Esteche
The results of the first round of the Colombian presidential election on May 31st are no surprise to those of us who have maintained, ever since Trump designated Petro as “next” after the operation against Maduro, that Colombia would lose these elections due to the lethal combination of pressure from Washington, its own governmental decline, and a popular front incapable of coalescing beyond mere intentions. What the numbers confirm is the collapse of a political cycle that likely arrived prematurely in the region and with a leadership that failed to rise to the challenge of the historical moment that summoned it.
Abelardo de la Espriella obtained 43.74% of the vote, a result that consistently surpassed all the polls that placed him second behind the government candidate, Iván Cepeda. The difference of almost three percentage points between the two candidates, more than 673,000 votes in absolute terms, sets up a runoff scenario where political momentum, the media landscape, and regional geopolitical dynamics clearly favor the candidate of the new post-Uribe right. Cepeda, despite having exceeded 40% of the vote, enters the June 21st runoff in the position of someone who appears to have reached his peak.
The electoral geography speaks volumes. De la Espriella dominated the country’s productive interior: Antioquia, Santander, Meta, Huila, Casanare, Risaralda, Quindío, Tolima, and Boyacá. Cepeda won in peripheral territories, in areas with a high presence of historically excluded communities such as Putumayo, Chocó, and Vaupés, and on the Caribbean Coast, although without the decisive victory that Petro’s movement needed to achieve its goal of winning the election in a single round.
It would be limiting to attribute the result solely to endogenous factors in Colombian politics or management, because that wouldn’t account for the multidimensional redeployment that imperialism is carrying out in the region. Washington has the capacity to contest meanings through control of the dominant narrative, the media conglomerate, and the discretionary administration of social media algorithms. The architecture of X as an amplifier of right-wing narratives, the operation of international networks of conservative influence well-documented in the cases of Brazil with Bolsonaro, Argentina with Milei, and Ecuador with Noboa, find their most complete expression in Colombia. But there is one element that should not be overlooked: the control of the hardline electoral machinery, the unregulated and uncontrolled vote-counting software, the captured electoral authority, and the mechanisms for legalizing and legitimizing the results. When this is understood, it becomes clear that it is of little consequence how many ballots marked for one candidate or another are in a cardboard box. What matters is the result, legalized and legitimized by an electoral authority controlled by the right wing and imperialism, using privately owned vote-counting software and operating without any oversight. It is the death of liberal democracy.
Noboa’s public call to De la Espriella in the final stretch of the campaign, announcing a tariff reduction as a gesture of support among regional allies, was an act of interference in the Colombian electoral process. Cepeda denounced it as vulgar, blatant, and shameless, although his denunciation came too late and lacked the necessary force to reverse its impact on undecided voters. The formation of a new Latin American far-right front, with De la Espriella integrated into the Milei-Noboa-Bukele-Kast network, is not alarmism; it is a description of a regional reconfiguration process we are witnessing in real time.
Petro’s claim about the infamous 800,000 voter ID cards added to the counting software just days before the election may or may not be verifiable. It’s likely true, but improbable; or rather, the truth faces a political system indifferent to it. To win under these conditions would trigger an undeniable avalanche both at the ballot box and in the streets, neither of which currently possess that level of strength.
But it cannot be ignored that Colombia’s non-certification in the fight against drugs, the inclusion of Petro’s name on the Clinton List for alleged links to drug trafficking, and the constant threat of OFAC sanctions on the Colombian economy constituted the atmosphere of external pressure in which the entire campaign unfolded. This atmosphere is not neutral. It favors those favored by Washington and undermines those Washington identifies as adversaries.
Gustavo Petro’s government came to power in August 2022 with a transformative program that was unprecedented in many aspects of Colombian history. It was the first progressive government in a country that had been a laboratory for paramilitarism, counterinsurgency violence, and subservience to Washington for decades—a country that had served as the territorial aircraft carrier for the Fourth Fleet’s operations. The programmatic vision was ambitious: genuine agrarian reform, universal healthcare reform, energy transition, total peace with all armed actors, and a sovereign foreign policy. The expectations it raised among the popular sectors were commensurate with that ambition.
Four years later, the assessment is that of an administration that made progress on some partial reforms, failed in its central initiatives, and lost its geopolitical standing under pressure it neither knew how nor could withstand. Among the achievements that deserve recognition are the labor reform approved in 2025, which reduced the workweek from 48 to 42 hours and extended paternity leave; the 2024 pension reform, which extended coverage for senior citizens; the growth of the health budget by more than 51%, from 48.5 to 73.5 trillion pesos; the reduction of multidimensional poverty to single digits for the first time in the country’s history; and the formalization of more than two million hectares for farmers. None of this is insignificant in terms of social public policy and explains the high level of popular support that Petro’s movement managed to maintain.
However, the implementation of the National Development Plan did not reach 60% by the end of 2025. Agrarian reform was bogged down in bureaucratic delays that hindered its consolidation as an effective redistributive policy. Health reform was blocked in Congress twice. Reforms to the justice system, education, and the controversial political reform also failed to gain traction. The Great National Agreement that Petro proposed upon taking office to bring together political parties, business leaders, and social sectors failed to achieve political consensus and remained an unfulfilled promise. Informal employment, which in the first year decreased slightly from 58.1% to 55.8%, stagnated and even rebounded in 2024. The 2026 budget was left unfunded, dragging the country toward the risk of another tax reform or increased public debt.
The picture is one of a government that achieved partial and genuine social gains but failed to transform the power structure in Colombia. It did not challenge the interests of large extractive capital. It did not dismantle the paramilitary and narco-power network that permeates the state. It did not build a political hegemony that would allow it to protect its reforms. In its eagerness to build its own political power, it undermined alliances that weakened the popular front at the worst possible moment. The limitations of all the progressive governments that preceded it in neighboring countries, and even the flaws of contemporary progressive movements, were all expressed, and exaggerated, in Colombia.
From sovereignist rhetoric to treacherous capitulation
The most serious element of Petro ‘s legacy is not the eventual electoral defeat itself, but the political trajectory that explains it. In January 2016, when Trump announced that Colombia would be the next target of US pressure following the operation against Maduro, Petro staged one of the most dramatic episodes of verbal confrontation with Washington in recent memory in the region. Threats to take up arms for the homeland, calls for mass demonstrations in defense of sovereignty, and statements that suggested Colombia was about to become a new front of resistance against interventionism. It lasted exactly six days. The 55-minute phone call between Trump and Petro brought the chapter to a close. Petro admitted shortly afterward that his future depended on President Trump—a pathetic display of sincerity—and acknowledged that Washington’s position on Venezuela was not so far removed from his own.
Twenty-four hours before Petro took his seat in the White House in an atmosphere the media described as relaxed and brimming with optimism, Colombian forces were bombing ELN positions in Catatumbo. The Minister of Defense spoke of a new era of genuine cooperation with the United States. “New era” is exactly the same thing those who celebrated Petro’s victory in 2022 said. The promise of total peace ended up in the trash. A government that came to power promising sovereignty ended up implementing Washington’s anti-drug strategy as a credential for access to the Oval Office. And I always point out, this is the president who mocked the Venezuelan tragedy.
This is not a defeat for Petro ‘s movement at the hands of the right. It is the transformation of Petro ‘s movement into an instrument of the very logic it claimed to combat, the structural limitation of a project that never resolved the contradiction between its discourse of transformation and its inability to build the material and political conditions to sustain it in the face of imperial pressure. And this has nothing to do with the formidable popular activism that coalesced around this figure.
The geopolitical impact: Colombia on the chessboard of Greater North America
To understand the true scope of what is happening in Colombia, one must begin with a premise that transcends the electoral cycle. In the grammar of imperial domination in South America, Colombia is the anchor piece without which the U.S. chessboard in the region cannot function. Back in 2000, during the debate in the U.S. Senate on the approval of Plan Colombia, Republican Senator Paul Coverdale stated it unequivocally: to dominate Venezuela, it is necessary to militarily occupy Colombia. That statement remains the key to the most accurate interpretation of Colombia’s position within Washington’s hemispheric strategy. What Plan Colombia inaugurated was not an anti-drug program but the establishment of a permanent military platform in the heart of South America, with the agreement for the use of seven bases by US troops, the mining and energy battalions that by 2015 already concentrated a third of the armed forces guarding refineries, mines, and strategic road points that guarantee the supply chain of the imperial metropolis, and projects like the base on Gorgona Island in the Pacific, facing oil reserves estimated at more than 3 billion barrels. No subsequent government, including Petro’s, seriously attempted to reverse this architecture. The Greater North America doctrine that Hegseth made explicit in 2026, delineating Washington’s immediate security perimeter in Ecuador and declaring that Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Mexico do not belong to the Global South but rather to the extension of US dominance, is the public formalization of a logic that has been governing real-world politics for twenty-five years.
The rise of De la Espriella cannot be interpreted as an isolated Colombian phenomenon. It is the local expression of a regional political restructuring process with a transnational architecture. The Milei-Noboa-Bukele-Kast network is the Latin American franchise of an imperial project whose production centers are the Atlas Network, the Cato Institute, and libertarian structures linked to concentrated financial capital. These are governments that operate as Washington franchises, dismantling mechanisms for autonomous regional integration, opening their territories and resources to the interests of transnational financial capital, and providing formal democratic legitimacy to a reconquest that is, in essence, colonial. Mexico and Brazil do not accept U.S. interference, which begins by defining native criminal groups as terrorist organizations, thus enabling military operations in those territories. Colombia submissively accepted and operationalized this cooperation.
The consequences of a De la Espriella victory are precise and grave. The impact on Venezuela would be immediate: the closure of the diplomatic border space that the Petro administration had partially opened; Colombia’s incorporation into the Western encirclement of any Venezuelan political reconstruction not endorsed by Washington; and its alignment with the containment strategy inaugurated by the January 2026 intervention. Venezuela remains the country with the world’s largest certified oil reserves, and its potential integration into the BRICS payments system—a process the intervention sought, among other things, to disrupt—would have meant for Washington the loss of the dollar as the hemispheric energy anchor. On Brazil, the effect would be the progressive isolation of the Lula project. Under De la Espriella, Colombia would join Argentina and Ecuador in the siege against Brasilia’s regional leadership, gutting the few remaining mechanisms for autonomous integration: CELAC, which already demonstrated its chronic paralysis at the 2026 summit, and UNASUR, which never recovered from the right-wing sabotage of the previous cycle. The Brazil-Colombia axis, which some identified as a strategic possibility, was closed by the Petro administration before the end of its own term.
For Venezuela and Cuba, a De la Espriella government in Bogotá would also mean the closure of the Colombian space as a diplomatic, humanitarian, and political corridor that had partially existed during Petro’s presidency. The already tense Colombian-Venezuelan border would once again become a front of active confrontation. And for the peace process with the ELN, which Petro himself failed to consolidate but rather sabotaged, the second round of voting on June 21 could mean the gateway to a new escalation of violence in a region that never truly emerged from war. The reactivation of counterinsurgency tactics under Washington’s guidance, with the anti-drug justification serving as institutional cover, would reopen this cycle under more complex material conditions than those of the Uribe period. This is because the political economy of war and drug trafficking have gained a territorial reach in recent years that they lacked in 2002. In this scenario, the war in Colombia would not only be a domestic tragedy but also an instrument of regional political maneuvering, useful for justifying the US military presence, obstructing any integration process that requires border stability, and generating migratory flows that Washington can use as leverage. The war in Colombia and the pressure on Venezuela are components of the same strategy and cannot be addressed separately.
The second round and what to expect
On June 21, Colombians will vote between two projects that represent diametrically opposed visions of the country and its place in the world. Cepeda faces the challenge of uniting the centrist vote—the more than one million votes for Fajardo and the 225,000 for López—around a candidacy that many of these voters associate with the decline of Petro’s support. De la Espriella arrives with momentum, the explicit support of the regional network of the new right, and active backing from Washington.
Whatever happens on June 21st, the defeat of the Colombian popular movement was already written in the four years that are ending. It was written by the warmongering right wing, and also by a government that promised transformation but failed to create the conditions to sustain it. That is the bitterest lesson of this cycle, and it is the one some of us have been pointing out since it became clear that Petro’s movement had no strategy for the imperial pressure it was inevitably going to face. The pressure arrived, Petro’s movement yielded, and now Colombia is paying the price. Venezuela is also paying the price, partly facilitated by this.
If Cepeda and his team manage to achieve what they failed to do in the first round, despite having won—something that seems impossible—they will then face a greater and more complex task than simply winning a second round: the rearticulation of the popular movement, the demarcation of imperialism, and the completion of the unfinished agenda that hasn’t even reached halfway. This can be accomplished through organized popular force and the dismantling of reactionary power centers. It is a reset of the way politics is conducted by the dominant sectors within the historical bloc.
The Latin American popular movement faces a right-wing wave under substantially worse conditions than before, because this time the defeat stems not only from the adversary but also from the inability of progressive governments themselves to withstand imperial pressure. Without financial sovereignty, without genuine regional integration, without an autonomous security doctrine, without engagement with the ongoing processes of multipolarity, the cycle will continue to repeat itself. Candidates who inspire, governments that disappoint, right-wing victories presented as inevitable when they are the product of political errors that could have been avoided. To name this clearly is not lamenting. It is the minimum requirement for critical thinking at this moment.