Pro-Trump ‘anti-woke’ lawyer and leftist senator head to runoff for Colombia’s presidency

With votes counted from more than 99% of polling stations, de la Espriella received 43.72% of the vote, while Cepeda secured 40.92%. Conservative candidate Paloma Valencia came third with 6.92%. The runoff will take place on June 21.

Colombia has historically been the United States’ most important ally in the region in terms of security cooperation and counternarcotics efforts. The US is Colombia’s largest trading partner, and the country shares a long border with neighboring Venezuela.

Relations between Washington and Bogota deteriorated significantly in recent years under outgoing President Gustavo Petro, who criticized US President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies and military strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats. The two leaders frequently traded insults on social media and in public statements.

Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing president, is constitutionally barred from seeking a second consecutive term and has endorsed Cepeda.

For his conservative policies and friendly stance toward the US, de la Espriella has been compared to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, one of Trump’s closest allies in Latin America.

For his conservative policies and pro-US stance, de la Espriella has been compared to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a vocal Trump ally in the region. The candidate has praised Trump’s “cultural battle against wokeism” and vowed to uphold traditional gender norms.

De la Espriella welcomed Trump’s return to the White House and backed the US commando raid in Caracas earlier this year, during which American forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“It has been revealed how USAID and woke populism fueled the leftward shift in countries like Colombia… To guarantee a fair race, it is urgent that your father’s administration puts Petro in his place,” de la Espriella wrote on X in January in response to a post by Donald Trump Jr.

Cepeda, the son of a Communist senator killed in 1994 by state-linked paramilitaries, has opposed Trump’s interventionism and condemned his threats against Petro. “We are neither a colony nor a protectorate of the United States. We will not submit to any form of imperial or authoritarian domination,” Cepeda wrote on X in January.

In an interview with Jacobin shortly after Maduro’s abduction, Cepeda denounced Trump’s attempts to revive the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which treats Latin America and the Caribbean as an exclusive sphere of US influence.

“We are a zone of peace. And we do not accept foreign interference. That is how governments and peoples must align,” he said.