The Daily Populous Monday June 22nd, 2026 day edition
Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by prisongovernor

The Trump-admiring far-right millionaire lawyer and self-styled “outsider” Abelardo de la Espriella has won Colombia’s presidential runoff, defeating the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda.

With 99.99% of ballots counted in the preliminary vote tally, De la Espriella had secured 12.96m votes, or 49.66%, just 250,830 more than Cepeda, who received 12.7m votes, or 48.7%. A further 1.6% of ballots were cast blank.

The margin was narrower than in the first round three weeks ago, when De la Espriella had beaten Cepeda by 673,000 votes.

De la Espriella’s victory marks a sharp swing back to the right after four years under Colombia’s first and only leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, who was barred by the constitution from seeking re-election and therefore backed Cepeda as his successor.

The result is also being seen as further evidence of a wave of far-right candidates sweeping presidential elections across Latin America, after recent victories by Nasry Asfura in Honduras and José Antonio Kast in Chile, while Keiko Fujimori currently leads the vote count in Peru.

Like them, De la Espriella also received the endorsement of the US president, Donald Trump – although only after winning the first round. Trump shared news of the Colombian’s victory in a brief social media post, writing: “He Won, BIG!”.

In his victory speech in Barranquilla, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where his law firm and campaign headquarters are based, De la Espriella promised to respect the constitution.

Although he said during the campaign that he would “disembowel” the left – a remark he later described as merely a figure of speech – he said that he will be the president of “all Colombians”.

“I want to speak especially to those who did not vote for me … 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,” he said from behind bulletproof glass, as he had throughout the campaign.

View image in fullscreen Abelardo De La Espriella addresses supporters. Photograph: Jair Coll/Reuters

In a video posted by the US Republican congresswoman María Elvira Salazar after the result, De la Espriella said: “To solve Colombia’s problems, we need to build a very close alliance with the US, which is not only our main trading partner but also our most important strategic ally in the fight against organised crime.”

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, posted that he had spoken with De la Espriella to congratulate him: “The Trump administration looks forward to working closely with your incoming administration to advance regional security cooperation, end illegal immigration to the United States and strengthen our economic ties. Colombia’s best days are ahead,” he wrote.

When Petro leaves office in about six weeks, only Mexico, Brazil – which will hold elections in October – Uruguay and Guatemala will remain under leftwing governments in the region.

In a post on social media, Petro alleged irregularities in the preliminary vote count released by the National Civil Registry, the independent public body responsible for organising Colombia’s elections.

Petro also wrote that he would only recognise the outcome of the official scrutiny process, which is expected to take about two more days. “No president can be declared yet. It is the scrutiny process that determines who the president is,” he said.

In the first round, the president also alleged fraud in the preliminary count without presenting evidence, drawing widespread criticism from election experts. The difference between the preliminary count and the official tally was less than 0.1%.

Following Petro’s lead, Cepeda declined to recognise the preliminary results and, likewise without presenting evidence, said in his speech that a team of lawyers from his party was “proceeding to challenge 33,000 polling stations across the country”. He added: “Once the final scrutiny result is produced and the corresponding verifications have been carried out, we will recognise the official result that emerges from that scrutiny process.”

There were protests by Cepeda supporters; in Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, demonstrators burned US flags and clashed with police. In the capital, Bogotá, hundreds gathered outside Corferias, the country’s largest polling station.

In his victory speech, De la Espriella called on Petro and Cepeda to respect the result: “Refrain from unleashing social unrest”.

View image in fullscreen Demonstrators clash with riot police as they protest the preliminary results of the presidential runoff election in Cali, Colombia. Photograph: Joaquín Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images

In a campaign dominated by the violence that has once again engulfed the country, De la Espriella prevailed on a promise to adopt an iron fist approach against criminal groups.

Although security indicators remain far below the extraordinarily high levels recorded in the decades before the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the past year has been the most violent since then.

The president-elect, who will take office on 7 August, has pledged to build 10 maximum-security “mega-prisons” and kill criminals “like rats and cockroaches”.

Calling himself “El Tigre” (The Tiger) and having never held public office, De la Espriella has vowed to make a complete break with Petro’s “total peace” plan of negotiating the dismantling of all criminal groups.

After four years of fits and starts – during which analysts say some armed factions took advantage of temporary ceasefires to continue expanding – the government managed to disarm the first criminal group only on Thursday, one with just 99 members, while experts estimate that more than 27,000 people belong to Colombia’s many criminal organisations.

The new president, by contrast, has promised a return to full-scale military confrontation that has done little to curb violence in the past, and said he will seek US support for airstrikes against coca plantations. Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and drug trafficking is the main driver of the country’s violence.

Born in the capital, Bogotá, but raised on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, De la Espriella rose to prominence as a criminal lawyer representing the leaders of a group at the heart of the decades-long armed conflict: the paramilitaries, private armies created by rightwing landowners to fight leftwing guerrilla groups.

Later branching out into liquor, real estate and menswear businesses, and fond of showcasing a lavish lifestyle on social media, he announced his presidential bid in July last year, a month after the rightwing senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event – he died two months after the attack.

View image in fullscreen A supporter of De la Espriella lights a flare at a celebration rally after polls closed in the runoff election. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP

Though long associated with Colombia’s rightwing political establishment through his legal career, De la Espriella presented himself as an “anti-establishment” candidate, following the example of many other far-right leaders who have risen to power across the region in recent years.

His vice-president will be the economist José Manuel Restrepo, who served as finance minister under Petro’s conservative predecessor, Iván Duque. The president-elect said that Restrepo would be responsible for implementing the plan to shrink the state by 40%.

They will take office with a minority in congress and what many analysts see as a deeply divided country after the most polarised election in years, in which the two candidates failed to agree on holding a single debate and instead traded a barrage of insults.

0Hakuna_Matata0 on June 22nd, 2026 at 09:03 UTC »

This guy was a lawyer to the cartels and guerrilla groups. The people that complain the most in that country about those two groups voted for their lawyer to be president

HonkedOffJohn on June 22nd, 2026 at 06:44 UTC »

He was backed by Trump. That's all you need to know about how bad this is for Colombia.

rednecronomicon on June 22nd, 2026 at 06:24 UTC »

I've been reading this book about US intervention in South America. It's really fascinating how secretive, brutal, and devastating the US was to these countries, and the US has been doing it since at least the 1820's.

What's more interesting is how people didn't even know the US was doing it until decades, even a century, later. Makes you wonder what they're doing down there right now because you know they haven't stopped.