COLOMBIAN President Abelardo de la Espriella took office on August 7, all but completing Latin America’s return to right-wing control. Politics in Colombia are now in sync with the US government’s reassertion of regional power announced in its National Security Strategy in November 2025.

In second-round presidential voting on June 21, 49.67 per cent of the voters favoured de la Espriella, candidate for Colombia’s political right. Ivan Cepeda, competing for the progressive Historic Pact Party, secured 48.7 per cent of the vote. The first round of voting for 13 candidates on May 31 had given 43.7 per cent of the vote to de la Espriella and 40.9 per cent to Cepeda.

Outgoing President Gustavo Petro founded and led the Historic Pact Party, and his administration was the only progressive government to serve in Colombia since independence from Spain.

Cepeda, his would-be successor, has solid progressive credentials of his own. He is a senator, a prominent human rights advocate, and the son of Manuel Cepeda, the Colombian Communist Party general secretary murdered by paramilitaries in 1994.

The Petro government’s record on advancing social programmes was mixed, however, which is part of the explanation for why Cepeda didn’t prevail.

Petro also failed to achieve his prime goal of “total peace.” Despite the 2016 peace agreement between Colombia’s government and the Farc leftist insurgents, armed insurgencies and criminal gangs — heirs to the former paramilitary plague — still ravage the countryside.

The current political background in Colombia is characterised by gigantic social and wealth inequalities, militarisation, continuing narco-production and trafficking, and decades of mass killings and population displacements.

Right-wing forces had a great deal at stake in the vote; for them, it was a watershed. Their intensity of purpose showed in the extraordinary measures taken to win the elections and keep another left-leaning government from taking power.

Fraudulent election

The outgoing president has suggested there may have been other factors  at play in Cepeda’s loss, however.

At a press conference on August 3, Petro charged that more than 120,000 handwritten electoral documents sent to national electoral officials from 1,350 polling stations had been altered. Each polling station creates and fills out one such form, the so-called E-14 form, as a record of votes cast at each polling table.

Petro indicated that he was relying on investigations carried out at the polling stations by 70,000 individuals with the assistance of 1,000 computer experts.

The investigators allegedly discovered that individual votes had been changed at the polling stations, supposedly by partisans of de la Espriella officiating there.

They found that out of 350,000 E-14 forms that were examined and scanned, more than 122,000 of them had been “systematically reprocessed, stripping them of their metadata and digital security seals — the hash locks.”

The E-14 forms then materialised under the label “page not scanned” and were “published with different information and also with inconsistent signatures.”

According to Petro, the investigators discovered altered electoral rolls showing municipalities claiming more voters than residents. These were located in Boyaca, Santander, Antioquia, and Cundinamarca departments and also in the “coffee-growing axis.” These were precisely the regions that gave de la Espriella his lead of 751,000 votes.

A text from Petro said: “For the first time, electoral fraud is achieved through the use of software and algorithms. The world takes the message that [electoral] choice can be manipulated through such software.”

According to TeleSur: “Petro affirmed that the logistics and financing of this fraud involved foreign resources and interests … [also] that the National Electoral Council lacks the technical tools to identify these anomalies in the software.”

The former president suggested that Israeli cyber-intelligence firm BlackCore had carried out the electronic manipulation. He had earlier accused that firm of having “deployed 500,000 bots — fake profiles — to manipulate the Colombian electorate.”

Colombian election officials defended the transparency and security of their election processes, and electoral observers from the Organisation of American States and the European Union did likewise.

A different kind of guy

The right-wing political parties opposing Cepeda had one other extraordinary tool in their bag, specifically their own presidential candidate.

De la Espriella is a citizen of the US, Colombia, and Italy. He lived in Miami for 10 years, moving to Colombia only in 2026. While in the US, he gained great wealth from two sources.

As a lawyer, he defended accused Colombian paramilitaries, politicians accused of corruption, and other criminals. As a wine and rum impresario, he prospered greatly and then crashed in 2026; he owes almost $1 million. The new president owns homes in Miami, Italy and Colombia.

De la Espriella is a defender and childhood friend of the renowned death-dealing former paramilitary chieftain Salvatore Mancuso. He and his family also have personal and political ties with the brutal and lawless former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe (2002-12), himself accused of ties with narco-traffickers and paramilitaries.

As a younger man, the now 48-year-old de la Espriella formed the Foundation for Peace Initiatives, which despite its lofty name was actually a front for extolling and recruiting paramilitaries.

As president, meanwhile, he promises to set up 10 mega-prisons as per Bukele of El Salvador, who has received deported detainees swept up by President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant sweeps.

Going the extra mile

De la Espriella as president may well notch an extraordinary feat in itself. The linkage between Colombia’s government and US imperialism is already exceedingly tight, but the new president’s personal disposition and record suggest he is well equipped for adding even more cement to US-Colombia relations.

He has a lot to build on. The US government for decades provided financial and material support for Colombia’s military operations against leftist insurgents, often under the pretence of fighting narco-traffickers.

The US military recommended years ago that the Colombian government rely on paramilitaries to control the countryside. Thereafter, the US provided indirect support for the paramilitaries while turning a blind eye to their murders and mayhem.

The “Plan Colombia” initiative (2000-15) represented the high point of perennial US financial support and material aid for Colombia’s military. The US military has maintained up to eight air bases in Colombia, deployed troops and contractors there, and trained Colombian troops. The US also helped design and finance Colombia’s prison system.

De la Espriella took the stage in 2023 when, living in Miami, he became a US citizen. He donated to the Republican Party as Trump was gearing up for another White House run and was invited to Mar-a-Lago.

As a candidate, he promised to end diplomatic relations with US-targeted Cuba and Nicaragua and restore ties with Israel. In early 2026, de la Espriella met privately in Washington with Secretary of State Marco Rubio; he indicated ominously on social media that “important things are discussed in secret.”

Shared objectives

The State Department honoured his ascent to power on August 7 by awarding Colombia $1 billion (around £740 million) that very day toward “achievement of our shared objectives.”

He anticipates US (and Israeli) military forces joining Colombian counterparts in fighting crime and narco-trafficking. Colombia will be part of the US government-sponsored Shield of the Americas, a collection of right-wing Latin American and Caribbean governments co-operating with US plans for regional dominance.

De la Espriella’s investiture as president took place in Cali, not in the nation’s capital, Bogota. He gave his inaugural address to soldiers assembled at a nearby army base, not to civilians. He thereby gave notice of his government’s “iron fist” and of Colombia as an accomplice of aggressive US imperialism.

The president’s unorthodox style — read combativeness — was on full display again as Colombians coped with the disastrous magnitude 7.4 earthquake that hit Manizales and other cities just three days later, on August 10.

He accepted aid material but not “foreign rescue teams, despite offers from at least six countries and multilateral bodies,” according to mercopress.com. Exceptions were teams being sent by the United States, and possibly by Argentina, both regarded as “friendly countries.”

Colombian Communist Party organisation secretary Jorge Gomez, interviewed by party member Nelson Lombana Silva, summarised the situation: “[W]e…must understand that this is a new era.… This has been the most important electoral result in all the history of the left. The inauguration is a new moment, one ushered in by fraud… but also fundamentally by something very special: the rise of a fascist far-right movement.”

De la Espriella “will try to roll back social reforms — the gains the people have made in land ownership, health care, education and the democratisation of the state apparatus.”

The new president must “inform the country of the scope of the oath he took to become a US citizen… [and] to disclose whether he is a member of any US intelligence agency.

“We’re going to have to make significant progress toward the idea of a Broad Anti-Fascist Front that confronts authoritarianism, anti-human rights forces, and anti-reform forces… And a second major strategy… is the concept of so-called civil disobedience.”

The prospects for peace and progress in Colombia have now severely dimmed.

This is an edited version of an article first published at peoplesworld.org.