By Juan Gabriel Vásquez, EL PAÍS, June 14, 2026
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
If what the latest surveys are saying comes to pass, Colombia looks ready to make a choice within a week for the most backward-looking and dangerous proposal for governance in recent history. Still more serious than that proposal would be the personality that Colombians have decided to trust: a lawyer for mafiosos and swindlers, a caricature of the most grotesque Latin American machismo, who uses violent words to scare people, like the journalists who criticize him, and who has threatened to “disembowel” his opponents.
Of course he’s also an arriviste who’s a bit ridiculous, but in reality, that’s not important. It’s more important that the laughable opportunism of this personage who yesterday declared himself to be an atheist and today is weeping in the churches; who defended gay adoption yesterday and today launches homophobic comments. Because he has realized, very astutely, that there is no kind of contempt that doesn’t win votes in this country.
Abelardo De la Espriella has suggested to us in all of his communications that that stuff about civil rights and individual liberties isn’t anything that bothers him, the stuff about social inequality or the building of a country with more solidarity doesn’t do anything for him.
What’s equally important, although it doesn’t seem that way to him, is his evident willingness to surrender unconditionally to the Trump administration: the one who has deliberately set the earth on fire, the accomplice to the authoritarians and the umbrella for the genocides, the one who murders innocent citizens in the full view of everybody, has got on board with methodical racism and a xenophobia whose principal victims are Latin American, the one that’s gone back to considering Latin America his colony, that intervenes to remove dictators and replace them with puppets, the one that has systematically overturned the international order.
Yes! That’s the regime that Abelardo De la Espriella admires, and that says a lot. His rhetorical genuflections, his ridiculous obsequiousness before Trump’s every word and before the administration which, right now, it’s not an exaggeration to call fascist. That also ought to be a concern for the whole world, because that’s where some of his recent proposals are coming from. For example, the cheap sophistry—but so eloquent because it exposes his whole manner of understanding the world—suggesting that Colombia should withdraw from international agencies.
So . . . how did we get here? There are no easy answers, in spite of what Colombian fanaticism is always suggesting. We could talk about a lot of things. We could talk, for example, about the programmatic imbecility of the new technologies that have replaced any trace of adult reasoning with serial infantilism. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to lament that so many citizens form their opinions by looking at cartoons of well-built tigers or stick men wearing football team shirts.
But now I want to talk about the immense responsibility of Petro and his administration in this possible catastrophe. First the most obvious: De la Espriella is Petro’s invention that he inflated in various ways and then didn’t know what to do with it, just like another left in Argentina inflated Milei to be able to cut off Macri’s moderate right. And second, because of what’s happening here, the way thousands of Colombians have thrown themselves into the arms of the extremist mirage represented by De la Espriella is what the radical left is collecting after their four years of governing out of their bubble of sectarianism, arrogance, demagogy, incoherence, and contempt.
That’s the way it is. In a certain sense, the Iván Cepeda campaign is the victim of the version of Colombian life that Petrismo has been meticulously building in the last four years. It’s been four years of dividing the citizenry, of inventing a country where the only people are Petrist, and the rest are an elite of enslavers and killers; of insulting, outraging, and discrediting those who contradict them. And I see a simple story of the way that Petro found to get people talking about something else, something that wasn’t the corruption that was eating the country right under his nose, not the gross incompetence of his mediocre officials, not the presence in his administration of abusers, misogynists, or evangelical preachers who showed contempt for gays and rejected the right to abortion. Petro was very slowly building an administration that governed only for those who were able to forgive him everything: the unfettered patronage, the rampant corruption, or a failure as ringing as “total peace”; that was an irresponsibility that has gotten us to levels of violence that we had previously overcome.
For four years, Petro dedicated himself with admirable constancy to justifying the lack of confidence that a good part of the center left had always had (or the moderate left, or the social democrats, like you wanted to call them). I’m not just talking about the contempt he had always had for experience and knowledge, or his tendency to reward incompetence or shifting of ethical limits with positions in the administration. Four years ago we thought that coming to power with such a responsibility—the first leftist government in Colombia’s history, for those who don’t remember one López Pumarejo—would get it into our heads that the opposition is one thing and the administration is another thing and the President is the President of everybody and not his side alone. But he didn’t understand that. It never occurred to him that it wouldn’t be a good idea, in a country that was trying to heal the wounds of a long war, to eulogize the M-19 so frequently. It never occurred to him that it wouldn’t be a good idea that, having sworn, with Mockus and Claudia López that he would never propose a constitutional convention, to convert a proposal for a constitutional convention into the final linchpin of his term. And of course it never occurred to him that it wouldn’t be a good idea in such a suspicious society to be shouting fraud after the first round and say he would not recognize the results of the voting.
I’m writing out of frustration, of course. The myopia and the tribalism of the leaders we have is frustrating and it’s frustrating how easy it’s been for De la Espriella to get as far as he has without anything to offer that’s real. I correct myself: he offers spectacle, vulgarity, fear, and hate, and all that commotion of sound and light—and the noise and the fury—serve to conceal the emptiness of his proposals. The “Miracle Fatherland”? Just a country that’s been poisoned or is extremely naïve could believe that that has any possibility of becoming reality. If anything, it teaches the life of politics that there aren’t any miracles. There’s negotiation, there are slow reforms, there are renunciations and concessions, but it looks as if none of these concepts is passing through a good moment in today’s Colombia. I don’t know what’s going to happen in one week, but I do know that there are going to be four difficult years.
Something reminds me of a verse and a phrase from a novel. The phrase that Simon Bolívar says in “The General in His Labyrinth”: “Every Colombian is an enemy country.” Isn’t that the way so many see us? The verse is by Sánchez Ferlosio: “More bad years are coming and they’re going to make us still more blind.” I very much fear that the next administration will prove him right.