After a four-year historic shift to the left, Colombia made a sharp shift to the far right in Sunday’s presidential election, in line with a broader ultraconservative political shift in Latin America, particularly in the Trump 2.0 era.
One after another, countries are sliding toward the nationalist “New Right,” turning businessmen and political outsiders into quasi-ethnic saviors.
Not by chance, most of them have the “blessings” of the American president.
The case of Colombia’s newly elected president, Abelardo de la Espriella, nicknamed “The Tiger”, is the latest concrete example.
- In Argentina, the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Millei butchers the state with his “chain saw”.
- In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele rules with authoritarianism, sacrificing human rights in the name of security.
- Chile recently elected President of the Pinochet dictatorship, José Antonio Castro.
- In countries like Ecuador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Paraguay, their pro-Trump right-wing leaderships lean toward the far right.
- In Peru, Keiko Fuhimori, the daughter of the former dictator, is on the verge of being elected to the presidency, having secured a marginal lead pending the official ratification of the June 7 election result.
- With Cuba, Nicaragua and post-Maduro Venezuela forming a separate category on their own, the left camp’s presence in the presidency is dwindling as U.S. pressures and threats increase.
- Mexico’s Claudia Seinbaum,
- Guatemala’s Bernardo Arevalo,
- Uruguay’s Yamandu Orsi and
- Brazil’s Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, who will fight in October for re-election against Flavius Bolsonaro, son of jailed far-right former president and would-be putschist Jair Bolsonaro, also known as the “Tropical Trump”.
From the “lion” to the “tiger”
“The lion and the tiger roar in Latin America!” celebrated in X Javier Milley the victory of his like-minded Abelardo de la Esprièreya in Colombia, using their nicknames.
Speaking to supporters in Bogotá, the 47-year-old president-elect promised a “miracle state,” with a far-right “signature.”
A declared atheist for years, he says he discovered God after the death of his beloved aunt Beatrice, whom he now considers his “spiritual guide”.
With supporters from the business elite, the military and the Christian Right, he had declared a pre-election “spiritual war”, “with the wisdom of God”, against the forces of the Left.
A criminologist and wealthy businessman with zero political experience, the offspring of a wealthy family with triple citizenship (Colombian, American and Italian) and pro-Israel positions, he has been modelled on Presidents Trump of the United States, Millei of Argentina and Bukele of El Salvador.
The latter, in fact, toiled him even in appearance.
Ahead of his official inauguration on August 7, he has announced a 90-day “shock plan” in Colombia, waging a full-scale war – with active U.S. assistance – against cartels and armed groups.
It is irrelevant that, as a criminalist, he previously defended right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
It promises “law and order” with the construction of ten gigantic maximum security prisons (according to Bukele’s model) and, at the same time, a massive shrinking of the state (in Millei’s footsteps).
Behind Abelardo de la Esprièreya there are economic, political, business and technocratic elites that shape the future of Colombia through rarely visible routes.
Their frightened gaze is toward the United States following realistic submission.
It is estimated that the new president will rule with less power than he expects, in a country that the election result has shown to be divided.
The very next day after Donald Trump expressed “full and complete support” for him, on June 2, Abelardo de la Esprilleya rushed to publish a lengthy post, accompanied by an AI photo with a bald eagle next to a tiger, with the American and Colombian flags waving in the background.
“You have paved the way for the people to defeat the established forces that have long dominated,” he wrote.
It now belongs to the new army of far-right elected leaders in Latin America, who are marching with the political “manual” of the MAGA tramp movement.
They are competing as Washington’s willing partners in security and immigration policy, as long as the U.S. president seeks – by all means – to consolidate U.S. hegemony and curb Chinese influence.
To his great satisfaction, the far right tends to become the dominant current in the region, whose history is full of upheavals.
After years of individual alternations between the traditional Right and the Left in power, the former seems to shrink and become increasingly limited to the role of the opposition, as the self-proclaimed anti-establishment far right reaps popular discontent and anger at the establishment.
In the background are years of mismanagement and corruption scandals, hatred of the elites – who are pulling the strings of power from the background – unbridgeable economic inequalities, polarized societies and a new explosion of violence.
But pro-Trump politicians who came to power promising immediate solutions to deep crises, favoring harsh measures and brutal repression, find them dark, as e.g. in Chile and Ecuador.
The economic “miracle” that Millei celebrates in Argentina is widely criticized as the welfare of numbers rather than people.
Hence the declining popularity of the “anarcho-capitalist” president.
It is analogous to that of Donald Trump, who seems to be heading for a painful defeat in the November midterm elections.
