Today is the second round of the presidential election in Colombia.
Even if you’re not particularly interested in Colombian politics, you should be concerned about a dangerous turn this country’s politics might take.
More couldn’t be on the line: workers’ rights, the protection of the world’s most biodiverse regions (the health of which affects us all), and resistance to implementing a violent Donroe Doctrine across the entire continent.
The run-off we’re seeing today will determine whether Colombia’s current President Gustavo Petro’s focus on social programs, workers’ rights, and environmental protections will remain intact and continued by Iván Cepeda, the candidate of the left, or if we see a turn to the far right, represented by Abelardo de la Espriella. His pro-extraction, pro-Israel, and “tough on crime” political agenda, promising to fight “the radical left,” has been unsurprisingly endorsed by the Donald Trump administration.
We have seen these swings in Latin America for decades: the two Pink Tides (political turns to the left) have alternated between left-leaning to far-right leaders in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and other countries. Yet in Colombia, Gustavo Petro has been the country’s first leftist president, winning in 2022 in a victory that remains historically unprecedented. He has since been one of the loudest anti-imperial and anti-Zionist voices out there. Petro has walked his talk, too, by expelling Israeli diplomats and ending all of Colombia’s coal exports to Israel in 2025.
The first round of the presidential elections saw Iván Cepeda receive 40.90% of the vote, while Abelardo de la Espriella received 43.74%.
We will soon see whether Gustavo Petro’s victory has indeed set a precedent and whether Colombia reaffirms its commitment to life-affirming policies, including an anti-Zionist stance.
The opposite would mean what it has meant for the people of Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, and the U.S. under its current far-right administration: years of active labour, environmental, and other antifascist organising, and fighting the unraveling of social programs that had benefited millions.
I will end by disclosing that Colombia is one of the countries dearest to my heart. It’s where I’ve spent a year in the past years (Gustavo Petro’s years), where I participated in and organised events for Palestine, and what I’ve shown, with so much love and joy, to my friends and family.
To see such a magnificent country, with people so incredible and a history marked with so much violence, potentially go down the path of fascism, zionism, and the glorification of the U.S. empire would be devastating. But to see Iván Cepeda win and Gustavo Petro’s policies continue would be a victory and a boost of hope that the world couldn’t need more these days.
As always, stay strong, check on others, and keep your heart open.
❤️💔❤️
Justina
PS. See three initiatives I have starting this July: my second workshop on launching a political podcast (July 14), my anticolonial English classes, and anticolonial mental health conversations.
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