Colombia’s Bukele moment: A new war on the cartels begins

Latin America has always had a penchant for political pendulum swings. One decade it is marching under red banners, quoting revolutionaries and expanding the state. The next it is electing men who promise to shrink government, build prisons and declare war on criminals.

This week, Colombia may have delivered the most consequential swing of all.

Abelardo de la Espriella, the hard-right lawyer nicknamed “The Tiger”, has won Colombia’s presidential run-off by less than a percentage point, defeating left-wing senator Iván Cepeda in one of the closest elections in modern Colombian history. Preliminary results showed de la Espriella with roughly 49.6 per cent of the vote against Cepeda’s 48.7 per cent, a margin of fewer than 250,000 votes in a country of more than 50 million people.

More from Opinion

The result is razor-thin. However, the implications are anything but.

For Colombia, this is not merely a change of government. It is a rejection of the governing philosophy that defined the previous administration. For Latin America, it raises a larger question. Is the region genuinely witnessing another retreat of the left, or merely the latest turn in its endless ideological carousel? The election was about one main agenda and, while campaign consultants love complexity, voters usually don’t.

De la Espriella’s campaign was built around a brutally simple proposition. Colombia is becoming more dangerous, and the state is losing control, so his message wasn’t nuanced or academic or, as usual, wrapped in reams of development jargon and promises.

It was simple. No negotiations with criminal groups. No accommodation with armed actors. No patience. Just plain force. He pledged to end peace talks with armed organisations, dramatically expand prisons, intensify anti-cartel operations and reverse President Petro’s softer approach towards criminal groups. He has openly praised the security model of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whose mass-incarceration campaign transformed the country’s security situation while simultaneously alarming civil liberties advocates.

That message landed because many Colombians increasingly believe the state has been losing ground. So, why is Colombia different? The temptation is to compare Colombia with Ecuador or El Salvador, but that would be a mistake. Colombia is not fighting street gangs. It is confronting one of the most sophisticated criminal ecosystems on Earth. The country’s cocaine economy has survived Pablo Escobar, survived the Medellín Cartel, survived the Cali Cartel and survived decades of American-backed counternarcotics campaigns, and today’s criminal landscape is much harder to crack because it is much more fragmented.

Instead of one kingpin, Colombia faces networks. Instead of one cartel, it faces overlapping structures involving drug traffickers, FARC dissidents, the ELN, regional criminal organisations, illegal mining syndicates and transnational smuggling networks. Large portions of the cocaine trade are now decentralised, making them harder to eliminate through traditional kingpin strategies.

Colombia remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and coca cultivation has expanded significantly over recent years. That reality will certainly create a dilemma for de la Espriella. His campaign promises are politically attractive because they sound decisive. But criminal insurgencies are not defeated by slogans. The Colombian state has spent decades learning that lesson the hard way.

So, what can the cartels be expected to do now? Are they likely to start panicking immediately? Probably not. Criminal organisations generally react to new governments in three stages: waiting, testing and adapting.

Expect an initial period in which armed groups seek to gauge whether de la Espriella’s rhetoric translates into operational capacity. If security forces intensify pressure, violence could temporarily increase as criminal networks probe state resolve and seek to preserve territorial control.

Ironically, the short-term result of a tougher security policy may be more violence, not less. The question is whether the government can sustain pressure long enough to alter criminal incentives. Bukele succeeded in El Salvador partly because he was confronting concentrated gang structures operating in a much smaller country. Colombia’s geography, borders, jungles and deeply entrenched criminal economies make the challenge vastly more difficult.

And then there is the other, more dramatic question. Is socialism collapsing across Latin America? The claim circulating online is that Colombia represents another nail in the coffin of Latin American socialism. There is definitely a grain of truth in there, somewhere.

Across the region, voters have increasingly punished incumbents regardless of ideology. Argentina elected the libertarian outsider Javier Milei. Ecuador moved towards a more security-focused leadership. Several governments across the continent have faced growing voter frustration over crime, inflation and weak economic growth. Latin American voters have been forced to become increasingly transactional. If the left governs and crime rises, voters turn right. If the right governs and inequality worsens, voters turn left. The ideological romance that once defined Latin American politics is giving way to something more pragmatic and more volatile. Citizens are just asking the simple question: who can make daily life safer and more prosperous? That answer changes every election cycle.

In Colombia, supporters see de la Espriella as Colombia’s Bukele moment. Critics see something darker. The president-elect has promised sweeping changes despite lacking overwhelming legislative support. Analysts have already raised concerns about institutional tensions, executive overreach and the strain that an aggressive law-and-order agenda could place on democratic safeguards.

This is the paradox facing modern Latin America. Citizens want stronger states capable of defeating criminal networks. But they also want democratic institutions capable of restraining power. Those objectives are sometimes in tension. The stronger the hand used against crime, the greater the temptation to use that hand elsewhere. Ultimately, Colombians were not voting against socialism; they were voting for civil safety and security. They looked at rising criminal violence, armed groups, coca economies and territorial instability and decided to try something radically different. The country has effectively hired a man whose political message can be summarised in two words: Enough already. Whether that produces a Colombian renaissance or a Colombian backlash will depend on something campaign rallies cannot answer.

The question is not whether Abelardo de la Espriella is willing to fight the cartels. Everyone knows he is. The real question is whether the Colombian state is still strong enough to win. And in Latin America, that is always a pretty heavy question.

(The author is a freelance journalist and features writer based out of Delhi. Her main areas of focus are politics, social issues, climate change and lifestyle-related topics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)