Of tigers and terrorists
Colombia’s pivotal, polarised election could not be tighter
A Trump-loving populist is rising fast
The men dressed as tigers never stop screaming their support.
On stage, framed by an inflatable claw and plumes of sparks, is Abelardo de la Espriella, the hard-right Colombian presidential candidate who dubs himself “El Tigre”.
Sporting a bulletproof vest and bouncing around behind bulletproof glass, Mr Espriella (pictured) grinningly salutes and bellows his catchphrase: “firme por la patria” (strong for the homeland).
The favoured props of Iván Cepeda, the hard-left candidate, are instead the pages of his speeches which, glasses on, he carefully reads from. Paloma Valencia, the establishment centre-right candidate, is different again.
“We represent the long road, the road of work, the road of knowledge,” she says, “without magical realism or miracles.”
The Economist has met all three main candidates.
Any of them could yet be the next president. Mr Cepeda is on course to win the first round of voting on May 31st (see chart), but a run-off will surely be needed three weeks later.
Polling for either hypothetical matchup is extremely tight.
The stakes are unusually high.
The election will signal whether the right-wing wave sweeping Latin America has crested.
It will also test whether the traditional centre-right can beat charismatic Trump-loving populism.
Voters will be choosing between radically different visions, both for improving the economy and for stopping drug-traffickers in the country that supplies two-thirds of the world’s cocaine.
Some even argue that democracy itself is at stake.
Colombia is one of the world’s most unequal countries.
For 60 years communist rebel groups attacked the state and the army and paramilitary groups fought back.
Both sides regularly killed civilians.
In 2016 the government reached a hard-won peace agreement with the FARC, the largest rebel group.
Then, in 2022, Gustavo Petro was elected as the nation’s first left-wing president.
His leadership has been chaotic.
He has damaged the health system and his scheme of “Total Peace”—which entailed simultaneous negotiation with all remaining armed groups—has failed.
The groups have expanded, cocaine production is at record highs and civilians are caught up in the violence more often than any time in the past decade, according to the Red Cross, an NGO.
Last year a presidential hopeful, Miguel Uribe Turbay, was assassinated.
The economy has beaten expectations, however.
Last year The Economist ranked it fourth out of 36 mostly rich countries on a combined measure of growth, inflation, unemployment and the stockmarket.
Since then Mr Petro has increased the already high minimum wage by 17% in real terms.
Growth is consumption-led, investment is weak and the government is heavily overspending, while bullying the central bank to lower interest rates.
Still, jam today is popular: Mr Petro’s approval rating is near 50%.
This helps Mr Cepeda, a senator and Petro ally.
In contrast to Mr Petro (who is constitutionally limited to a single four-year term) he is calm, disciplined and austere.
His political inspiration is José Mujica, a former guerrilla who became president of Uruguay while continuing to drive a battered Volkswagen Beetle and living in a tiny farmhouse.
Mr Cepeda’s career has focused on uncovering abuses by state forces and pushing peace negotiations.
His arch nemesis is Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing former president who restored desperately needed order, but under whose presidency some 6,000 young men were killed by the army and falsely passed off as guerrillas.
Mr Uribe claimed not to know.
Government-linked paramilitaries assassinated Mr Cepeda’s father, a communist; the FARC killed Mr Uribe’s.
The two men’s mutual loathing hangs over the campaign.
Mr Cepeda promises to continue with Total Peace, which he helped design, despite its failings.
He will be more organised, but will probably be even more reluctant to use force against rebel groups than Mr Petro has been.
Economically he wants to redistribute land using voluntary state purchases and seizures from drug gangs, to spend much more on welfare, and to tilt government procurement in favour of smaller providers such as community kitchens.
Fiscal concerns will be solved through higher taxes, personal austerity in office and fighting corruption, he says.
His rivals claim he is a threat to democracy.
That seems less clear.
“We are not going to attack democracy,” he insists.
He would be able to nominate two board members of the central bank.
That might lead to an increase in inflation, but it is a constitutional right.
He will probably only be able to nominate one judge to the Constitutional Court.
Mr Cepeda has traditionally been “open to conciliation and debate”, notes Laura Lizarazo of Control Risks, a consultancy.
Indeed he has huge faith in dialogue and promises to convene one on Colombia’s big issues to reach a “national accord”.
Mr Petro’s influence is a risk, however.
The outgoing president has complained of a “soft coup” when courts and lawmakers blocked his plans, and he is eager to change the constitution.
Mr Cepeda has distanced himself from that, but not ruled it out.
Mr de la Espriella, by contrast, is a smooth-talking former criminal-defence lawyer, now a businessman.
He has a mansion in Miami, perfect teeth and macho style.
On television he recently showed a photo of himself in tight trousers apparently, though hardly conclusively, showing a large penis.
“With that photo I won some pretty cool votes from the female electorate,” he said.
Another physical feature is more relevant to Mr de la Espriella’s appeal.
His beard is carefully groomed in the unmistakable style of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s dictator, who has crushed gangs by detaining a staggering 8% of all young men in the country.
The murder rate has plummeted, winning him legions of fans across Latin America.
Mr de la Espriella says Colombia is experiencing a “pandemic of insecurity”.
He promises to build ten privately run megaprisons in the jungle “in the style of President Bukele”.
He says “it will probably be necessary to use a state of exception,” a constitutional move to temporarily give the president and the armed forces far-reaching powers.
Mass trials of gang members are a possibility, he says, and longer periods of detention without trial may need to be looked at.
He claims this would all be done legally.
“I’m a democrat,” he insists.
A prickly one.
Between 2008 and 2019 he filed more than 100 defamation complaints against journalists.
He claims that he will reduce the size of the Colombian state by 40% in four years.
He espouses free markets.
Yet populism creeps in.
He also promises to strong-arm banks into offering mortgages at rates of 2%, a fantastical proposition given they are currently around 17%.
He says that being a wealthy outsider makes him independent.
There are questions about his past.
He was legal counsel to Alex Saab, a close ally of Nicolás Maduro, the ousted former president of Venezuela who has been charged with money laundering and extradited to the United States.
He also (unsuccessfully) defended David Murcia Guzmán, who ran a huge pyramid scheme in Colombia, and has been associated with former paramilitary figures.
All this is just a product of his work as a defence lawyer, he responds.
Some question his rapid ascent to wealth and allege illicit enrichment in his work defending high-profile criminals.
He denies this.
Far from being an outsider, Ms Valencia is a senator and the granddaughter of a former president, with a team of experienced politicians around her.
While Mr Cepeda despises Mr Uribe, she recently told a rally that “Uribe is my father.”
She would be Colombia’s first female president, but warns that “It is a very sexist country.”
Outflanked by Mr de la Espriella, she has played for the centre, picking Juan Daniel Oviedo, an openly gay moderate who used to run the statistics agency, as her running mate.
On security her right-wing instincts remain.
“I’m not for conspiracy theories,” she says, but Mr Cepeda’s persistence with the failing Total Peace is “no longer a mistake, it’s a plan”.
Her own approach clearly echoes Mr Uribe’s.
She opposes the peace deal struck in 2016 and wants a big agreement with the United States to fight gangs.
Some 30,000 new soldiers should not just fight gangsters and rebels, but maintain order more broadly.
And she wants new prisons.
She had wanted Mr Uribe as her defence minister.
Yet even Mr Oviedo publicly disagreed with that and Mr Uribe eventually declined.
The state must shrink, she says, but fixing fiscal woes requires growth and that means tax cuts.
Her free-market vision is combined with a focus on the informal sector, “the real economy”, in which more than half the population toils.
She promises help with access to markets, building a credit history and creating co-operatives to allow bulk purchases.
Education is another priority.
Graduates from the state system “can’t read or write”, she fumes.
The trouble is “it’s very difficult to make common sense attractive when confronted with populism,” she complains, describing Colombian populism as “cinematic”.
Should she lose in the first round, Colombians will face perhaps the most polarised choice of any election in the world in recent memory.
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