By Santiago Torrado, EL PAÍS, May 24, 2026
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
EL PAÍS is accompanying the Historic Pact Party candidate in Pasto, the outpost of the left that he chose for opening and closing a campaign that totals more than 100 massive events.
Iván Cepeda (Bogotá, 63 years old) climbs smoothly up the steps to the platform, dressed in the Mao-style shirt and jacket that he usually wears. The heavily armed bodyguards that surround him are keeping an eye on the favorite throughout Colombia’s long presidential race. They’re arriving a little bit late at the packed Plaza de Nariño in the heart of Pasto where he’s being acclaimed by the multitude. “Here’s where I started my road to the Presidency, and here I am once more,” he reminds them this Friday noon, as he kicks off his speech, the leftist Senator who’s trying to succeed Gustavo Petro.
“The next time I get back to this city, I will already be the President of Colombia, the Head of State, and the leader of the second progressive administration in our history,” he promises calmly from the foothills of the Galeras Volcano. Here, at more than 800 kilometers by highway from Bogotá, in the southeast corner of the map of Colombia, he announces that, if he wins, the biggest work of his term will happen out in the countryside: “It will be an itinerant administration that I will manage from the rural cities and municipalities of the country, in a permanent dialog with the people, their organizations, and their movements.”
In the final stretch of the campaign, the representative of the left leads the two candidates from the right that are competing for second place in the polls: for the far right, Abelardo De la Espriella and Paloma Valencia, who is also a Senator and favored by ex-President Álvaro Uribe, with whom Cepeda has been clashing legally for more than a decade. They’re all competing on Sunday, May 31 for one of the two places in the second round, but the Historic Pact Party candidate is trying to skip that duel with no need for a second round. He notes that in closing his speeches: “My name is Iván Cepeda, and I’m going to be your President . . . in the first round.” A catchy tune by Edson Velandia and Adriana Lizcano, adapted with election overtones, thunders in the plaza and reinforces the idea with its refrain: “Why punch twice when you can punch once.”
As Petro did four years ago, Cepeda is turning to filling up plazas, with the purpose of getting closer to half the votes plus one, which is what he needs. He’s now had more than a hundred of these events throughout the length and breadth of the country, in spite of the security threats that could ambush every such event. He’s had a marathon campaign, but without going to debates and with infrequent interviews—although he usually listens to the journalists that approach him in the Congress. He always reads his speeches, which his aides think will give him an aura of authority. In the speeches, he turns to his programmatic proposals, although without a formal Plan for Administration. He often appeals to a specific public, which allows him to strengthen his messages and contrast his concepts with those of his competitors.
The speech in Pasto, a stronghold of the left, approaches the transformation of education in the countryside, with a wink at the teachers’ unions, the largest in a country with a very small labor movement. In other speeches, he’s dealt with all kinds of issues. “There is no democracy without sexual diversity,” he says days later in the little square of Lourdes in eastern Bogotá, speaking to the LGBTI+ community, with the theme “Yes to rights, No to the right”. From Cauca, the Department where not only Valencia, but his ticket’s Vice President, indigenous Senator Aida Quilcué come from, he demanded this week that the Democratic Center Party candidate “apologize to the indigenous peoples, to the Afro-Colombian communities, and to Colombia’s campesinos for having dispossessed them from their properties, as well as having discriminated against them, stigmatized them, and persecuted them.” All through this weekend, he has been having these definitive closings of his campaign, in the capital, in Cartagena, and in Barranquilla.
In August of last year, when he launched his primary campaign, also from Pasto, he presented himself as a human rights defender, “a survivor of political genocide, the son of a Patriotic Union Senator who was murdered for his commitment to the rights of the people.” His father, the political columnist Manuel Cepeda Vargas, was murdered by agents of the government in complicity with paramilitaries in Bogotá on August 9, 1994. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found it to be part of a systematic plan of political extermination of Colombia’s left. In a campaign marked by fire because of the murder of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a primary candidate for the right-wing Democratic Center Party, the party founded by ex-President Uribe, there have been extreme precautions, like the shields of armor flanking Cepeda.
The leftist candidate stands out as one of the many orphans left by the long history of political violence in Colombia. Two others were with him on the platform in Pasto. “Let the winds of the south blow fiercely,” called out another Senator, María José Pizarro. She’s the daughter of Carlos Pizarro, the chief of the M-19 guerrillas who signed the peace and was murdered a month and a half after he laid down his weapons, when he was a candidate for President in the bloody campaign of 1990.
The other one was former Interior Minister Juan Fernando Cristo, of liberal origin, the first of the partners of the so-called Alliance for Life. The other, the doctor and former member of Congress, Jorge Cristo, was murdered by ELN guerrillas in 1996. “We didn’t discredit the threats or the alerts in terms of security,” emphasized Pizarro, who heads Cepeda’s debate team. “We had some systems to look out for ourselves. We weren’t persecuted for no reason. We went into exile, they killed our families . . . we took care of ourselves, but we’re not going to let them paralyze us with fear,” she insisted.
Cepeda himself has equipped his team for a wave, which will get bigger as he advances and gets stronger. After Historic Pact Party won the popular consultation authoritatiively in October, and after gaining the largest caucus in the legislative elections in March, he’s been ahead in the polls by quite a bit. He leads by more than 40% with people intending to vote, although he’s still far from the 50% plus 1 that he needs in order to win in the first round.
“We’ve undertaken this last phase by constructing the Alliance for Life, which has already put together sectors of nearly the whole political spectrum,” Cepeda told EL PAÍS, referring to the broadest electoral coalition that includes the Green Alliance Party, On the March Party, and dissidents from the traditional Liberal Party, in addition to social movements. “The strategy is to keep expanding that wave. We are convinced that we can win in the first round.,” he insists.
“We’re exercising a lot of capillary action in the country,” agrees Senator Pizarro. “It’s not only in the public plazas, which are getting filled, of course; we also have presence on social networks and media in a very organic manner, and of course the work in the street, we’re very strong there,” she details. “All the leaders of Historic Pact have to get themselves out in the country in the few days that are left before the election. We’re going to break our backs to win in the first round,” stressed the debate chief. “The public plaza has worked, but it has a limit; it wears you out,” explains another source close to the campaign who preferred not to be mentioned. “You have to reach the urban middle class, the undecided, who are basically the people in the center,” and warning that that’s difficult.
The campaign has been thought to be moving to consolidate a base of support, as expressed in the social movements. “That’s why our preference has to do with presence out in the countryside and also in public demonstrations,” corroborated Representative Gabriel Becerra, another figure who usually is with Cepeda on the platforms. “We have a footprint out in the countryside; we’ve been able to build strong support in the Pacific area, in the Caribbean, and in Bogotá itself,” he points out. The trips are meant to reinforce his presence where he’s strong, or to counteract the hegemony of the right in places like Antioquia or Santander. The Alliance for Life accelerates those moves so as not to lose momentum.