Colombia may be on the verge of electing a far-right president who’s mused about how much fun he had blowing up cats as a kid. On Sunday, in a shocking result, Abelardo De La Espriella got the most votes in the first-round election, netting 44 percent of ballots cast. The candidate from the ruling left-wing Pacto Historico coalition, Iván Cepeda, came in second, with 41 percent. Paloma Valencia—who represents Colombia’s more institutional right, and is aligned with the disgraced former president, Alvaro Uribe—took home a much lower than expected 7 percent. De La Espriella and Cepeda will now face each other in a June 21 runoff.
Trump was relatively quiet about the election until Wednesday morning, when he issued a soaring endorsement of De La Espriella on social media. “Because of his tremendous accomplishments in life,” Trump wrote, “and his political support for me, personally, it is my Honor to give Abelardo my Complete and Total endorsement.”
The most surprising thing about this endorsement might be that it didn’t happen sooner. The U.S. has a long, ugly, and violent history of meddling in Latin American democracy. In recent years, Republicans—including top Trump administration officials—have taken a special interest in a new breed of aspiring strongman, championing the likes of Argentina’s president Javier Milei, Chile’s José Antonio Kast, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa. Lately, it seems, for guidance on how to approach Colombia, Trump has turned to Colombian-born Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno.
The former car dealer hasn’t been shy about his dislike of Colombia’s current left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, or his affinity for De La Espriella. Last October, when Moreno met with Trump to discuss Latin American politics, he brought the president a fake image of Petro in an orange jumpsuit. In March, when Moreno posed for pictures embracing De La Espriella, the pair flashed smiles while delivering the candidate’s signature military-style salute.
Moreno’s interventions in Colombia have not been merely symbolic. He’s pushed, for instance, for the U.S. to impose sanctions on Petro and his family; the Treasury Department did so on the grounds that the president has “allowed drug cartels to flourish and refused to stop this activity.” When Cepeda was ahead in the polls, days before Moreno traveled to the country to serve as an accredited election observer for Sunday’s elections (as part of a larger delegation from the U.S.), the Ohio senator suggested that election officials should invalidate votes from “parts of the country that are not secure.” Pleased with what he saw on the ground on Sunday, Moreno instead praised the country’s electoral process after polls closed and congratulated De La Espriella, who thanked the senator for his “support during Sunday’s electoral process.” On Tuesday, Moreno told reporters that he had “vetted” the candidate and found him to be “impeccable.” The next day, Trump issued his endorsement.
In many ways, the thumb’s up was to be expected. Aesthetically, De La Espriella has many of the trappings of other far-right strongmen Republicans have come to love. He’s a showy, self-styled “outsider” to politics with a penchant for donning the jersey of his country’s soccer team, threatening to exact revenge on the left, and cozying up to Trump. While he’s campaigned on vaguely populist rhetoric, he likes to wear Louis Vuitton loafers, buy $10,000 bottles of alcohol, and run his mouth. In one television appearance, he admitted to having tied firecrackers to cats as a child to watch them explode. “It was terrible,” he laughed, “but I enjoyed it.” Moreno’s showboating and odd confessions aside, however, the U.S. right seems to value candidates who will welcome U.S. presence in their country and pursue a likeminded brand of authoritarianism. De La Espriella has proposed opening 10 “mega-prisons” and said he wants to foster closer ties to the U.S. and Israel. He plans to slash 700,000 government employee and contractor jobs, “put God back into our children’s classes,” and build a “Miracle Homeland.”
From Bukele’s gulag network to Javier Milei’s chainsaws and Trump’s theatrics, members of the far right have been learning from one another. “We’re seeing the replication of a Trumpist political economy across the continent,” said David Adler, the general coordinator for the Progressive International, who was in Colombia for Sunday’s election. “That may not be a coincidence, as we’ve seen in repeated electoral contest. The U.S. is intervening financially, politically, technologically to push these elections towards their preferred candidates that happen to mimic the style, the approach, and the geopolitical orientation of the Trump White House.”
However, although they share a love of Trump’s attention, Moreno’s embrace of De La Espriella does appear to be at odds with some of his own policy positions. Born in Colombia to a prominent political family, Moreno moved to the U.S. as a child and has renounced his Colombian citizen. Citing that experience, he’s introduced legislation to outlaw dual citizenship. “Being an American citizen is an honor and a privilege—and if you want to be an American, it’s all or nothing,” he’s written. De La Espriella, meanwhile, is a citizen of Colombia, Italy, and the United States. He owns property in Miami, and traveled to the U.S. twice during his campaign.
This isn’t the only contradiction to be found in MAGA world’s embrace of Latin America’s far right—and De La Espriella in particular. The Trump administration has justified its enthusiasm for the region’s hardline candidates as means of confronting narco-traffickers. The Shield of the Americas—the Trump administration’s alliance of its favorite leaders in Latin America—was ostensibly founded in order to “advance strategies that stop foreign interference in our hemisphere, criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels, and illegal and mass immigration.” It’s officially called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. The administration has carried out all manner of atrocities in the name of confronting narco-traffickers, from the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro to ongoing military strikes on purported drug smugglers in the Caribbean and Pacific; the bombings have already killed more than 200 people. There’s been scant evidence that the growing list of victims—including several fishermen—were actually engaged in “narco-trafficking operations,” as U.S. officials claim.
Key U.S. allies in the region, however, have their own well-documented ties to traffickers and paramilitaries. De La Espriella—who’s promised to “wipe out narco-terrorism and those who I’ve declared a military target like cockroaches, like rats”—spent much of his legal career defending them in court. Among his clients are Uribe, who was convicted last year of bribing paramilitary witnesses to change damaging testimony that incriminated him. The former president—whom Moreno visited in Colombia last year—also happens to be a friend of De La Espriella’s father. A collection of declassified State Department documents, published by the National Security Archive in 2018, showed that U.S. diplomats harbored serious concerns about Uribe’s links to the narcos, even including him on list of suspected Colombian “Narcopols.” De La Espriella has also defended the former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso and Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab, a one-time member of Nicolas Maduro’s cabinet who was handed over to the U.S. last month and faces charges of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars.
However confident De La Espriella and his allies in the U.S. might be, the election in Colombia isn’t over. Cepeda—a human rights advocate who’s been critical of U.S. meddling in the region—took home more votes than Petro did in the first round of the last presidential elections. He’ll face an uphill battle to expand the Pacto Historico’s base over the coming weeks. Moreno, for his part, plans to return as an accredited observer for the June 21 runoff. As has been the case in recent elections, including in Honduras, the White House could try to tip the scales even farther to support its preferred candidate.
The Donroe Doctrine—as Republican policy toward Latin American policy has been called—is many things. It is cosmopolitan, it is violent, and it is more than willing to violate international law. It’s also a meeting point for those openly pledging to continue committing extrajudicial murders and the supposedly more respectable supporters of the Latin American far right, like Moreno. Whatever claims Moreno might make about supporting “democracy” in Latin America, there’s no hiding the fact that Abelardo De La Espriella and his ilk are promising to destroy it.
