August 7 will be a dark day, for it is when Colombia’s presidential turnover is set to take place. On this day, which marks the anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá – the decisive 1819 battle in which Simón Bolívar’s army defeated Spanish troops to secure Colombia’s independence – outgoing president Gustavo Petro will hand over power to Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia’s new president-elect.
However, it is dubious whether “elect” is an adequate word to describe the far-right de la Espriella or his triumph in the election runoff on June 21. It was a process that, if not outright compromised, certainly embodied irregularities that, had they crowned an anti-imperialist or Bolivarian candidate, would have faced swift criticism, condemnation and sanctions from the US, its Western allies, and their election observers. Fortunately for these imperial institutions, which mask their ugly faces under the façade of liberalism, Colombia’s new president will not need any of that; rather, he will serve US interests as a de facto viceroy – especially as he himself is a US citizen.
It is no secret that de la Espriella – who proudly flaunts the fact that he voted for Trump in the 2024 US presidential election – lived in Miami for a decade and only returned to the country of his birth to campaign. During his time in Miami, de la Espriella, a lawyer, represented political figures allied with paramilitaries, such as former congresswoman Eleonora Pineda and former senator Dieb Maloof. From 2013 to 2019, he also served as legal counsel to Alex Saab, who was later indicted in the United States on charges including money laundering and operating as a financial agent for the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro. You couldn’t make it up.
In fact, during the final days of his election campaign, de la Espriella’s wife, Ana Lucía Pineda, remarked that if her husband lost the election, they would simply return to their comfortable life in Miami. Throughout this campaign, de la Espriella positioned himself in the mould of Javier Milei in Argentina, and Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil: an obedient vassal to the imperial whims of Donald Trump and US hegemony – a Delcy Rodriguez, only without a gun to his head.
He openly leveraged Donald Trump’s blatant disregard for international law and the imperial fervour of the “Donroe Doctrine” in Latin America to scare Colombians away from voting for Iván Cepeda, the anti-imperialist candidate of Petro’s Historic Pact coalition. His campaign was explicitly endorsed by Donald Trump – unquestionably a form of external political pressure, even if conveniently disregarded by the very people who rail against foreign intervention in elections closer to home. But that is merely the tip of an iceberg built not just by the US, but by Israel as well.
Petro explicitly accused BlackCore, an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm, of conducting a “massive digital disinformation campaign” to manipulate the electorate. He alleged that the firm deployed approximately 500,000 automated “bot” accounts to disseminate “millions of lies” about himself and Cepeda across social media platforms to sway public perception.
Colombian and American reactionaries and private media outlets have framed these accusations as the ravings of a bitter outgoing president. However, these allegations cannot be readily dismissed, coming as they do in the immediate aftermath of Hondurasgate – an exposé by journalists with Canal Red detailing a transnational disinformation network involving actors from Honduras, Argentina, Israel, and the United States colluding to influence regional politics and destabilise progressive governments across Latin America, including those of Petro and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum.
Additionally, electoral pressures came directly from Colombian corporations and the ruling class heading them, too. Independent Colombian media outlet Revista Raya reported on an internal Ministry of Labour document detailing complaints from employees across 59 companies, in which workers alleged that employers threatened them with job loss or claimed their companies would be “expropriated” if Cepeda won, effectively coercing them to vote for de la Espriella. Those from Global South countries hollowed out by imperialism and enforced neoliberal austerity will recognise how frequently the landowning and corporate class acts to coerce workers into supporting elite-backed candidates.
Despite these covert and overt interventions, de la Espriella barely prevailed in the runoff. He scraped through with 49.66% of the vote against Cepeda’s 48.70%, the narrowest margin of victory ever recorded in a Colombian presidential election. Immediately, this machismo figure, cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump and Javier Milei, and who infamously boasted of tying firecrackers to cats and watching them explode as a child, announced he would restore Colombia’s ties with the apartheid state of Israel (which Petro severed, alongside coal exports) and move Colombia’s embassy to Jerusalem. This decision is telling, for it only lends further credence to Petro’s claims of Israeli meddling in the electoral process.
Similarly, de la Espriella has vowed to suspend Colombia’s Palestinian embassy, cut ties with Cuba and Nicaragua (but maintain a “constructive” relationship with Delcy Rodriguez’s – Marco Rubio’s – Venezuela), join Trump’s murderous Shield of the Americas alliance and enforce the laissez-faire economic policies that have ravaged working people across Latin America for the profits of US companies for decades. Ultimately, the Colombian-American will be less Colombian, more American in who his agenda will serve.
So, August 7, the day the cat torturer enters the Casa de Nariño, the office of the executive branch in Bogotá, will be a dark day for all of us – and certainly for the millions of Colombians who rejected de la Espriella’s odious politics and whose lives were directly improved by Petro’s progressive economic agenda, which was defined by structural reform through aggressive state intervention.
Petro achieved a landmark 23.7% combined rise in minimum wage by 2026, alongside comprehensive labour reforms mandating indefinite contracts as standard and expanding evening and holiday pay surcharges for the working class. At the same time, his government expanded social spending to deliver direct monthly transfers to female-headed households in extreme poverty, as well as universal tuition-free public higher education for low-income students. These policies delivered measurable reductions in both national poverty and unemployment. According to official statistics, monetary poverty dropped from 36.6% in 2022 to 31.8% in 2024, lifting over 1.3 million Colombians out of poverty, while unemployment fell from 11.2% in 2022 to 8.29% by 2025, reaching the lowest annual rate recorded in over two decades.
And this is without mentioning Petro’s progressive climate record, which included banning non-conventional fossil fuel extraction, such as fracking, and making Colombia the first major fossil-fuel-producing nation to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty at COP28. Most, if not all, of this will be undone by the incoming government, the cabinet of which is set to be riddled with corrupt, establishment figures from erstwhile Colombian administrations.
As he concludes his historic term as Colombia’s first left-wing leader, with an approval rating floating around 50% – among the highest for an outgoing Colombian president in modern history – Petro described the election process and de la Espriella’s ascendancy starkly: “The hardest blow to national sovereignty since the Spanish reconquest.”
It harkens back to the infamous words uttered by another anti-imperialist Latin American leader in 2008, when, following a cross-border raid by the Colombian military into Ecuador that killed a FARC commander, Hugo Chávez called Colombia the “Israel of Latin America”, arguing that just as Washington used Israel as its proxy in the Middle East, it sought to transform Colombia into an enforcement arm in Latin America to block regional unity. This claim was embraced by then Colombian president Álvaro Uribe. Petro inverted this dynamic, transforming the country from a steadfast vassal of empire to a state standing alongside the wretched of the earth. Now, the old status quo is returning.
It may feel like a grim moment for anti-imperialists in Latin America and beyond, but the fight is far from over. Protests broke out shortly after election results were announced in Bogotá and Cali, and Petro has called on everyone who values sovereignty and solidarity to take to the streets in sustained protest against the incoming government. Meanwhile, the Historic Pact retains a powerful presence in both chambers of the Colombian Congress following gains in the March legislative elections. It will exert resistance as de la Espriella inevitably attempts to gut the state to enrich his allies and benefactors.
The gains made under Petro’s outgoing government cannot be easily dismantled if there is unrelenting popular pressure against the “outsider” who, like Trump, is anti-establishment in branding only. Like those rejecting the authoritarian neoliberal policies of Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, those fighting the military establishment in Pakistan, those documenting and resisting the tyranny of ICE in the United States, and those “cockroaches” standing up to fascism, corruption and crony capitalism in India, Colombians, too, will resist – and socialists and internationalists around the world must stand firmly in their support.
We must remain unified against the blight of imperialism and neoliberalism to build a collective future rooted in dignity – a future in which our collective existence amounts to more than one where the many endlessly tighten their belts to generate unimaginable wealth for the few who exploit them; the insulated few who descend to any low to add another dollar to their stock portfolios and offshore bank accounts.
