When Colombians return to the polls on June 21, they will be deciding far more than who will become their country’s next president. The runoff election between Iván Cepeda of the left-wing Pacto Histórico coalition and Abelardo de la Espriella of the conservative Salvación Nacional movement represents much more than a routine transfer of power. At stake is the direction one of Latin America’s most influential nations will take at a time when democracies around the world are facing mounting pressure. The issues dominating Colombia’s campaign sound remarkably familiar to Americans. Political polarization, public security, migration, economic inequality, disinformation, judicial independence, and confidence in democratic institutions have become defining challenges not only in Colombia but throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Many observers see Colombia’s election as a preview of where democracies across the Americas may be headed. Over the past several years, Latin America has experienced a series of political upheavals. Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina turned to Javier Milei, Mexico chose Claudia Sheinbaum, Chile elected Gabriel Boric, Ecuador brought Daniel Noboa to power, while Peru has cycled through successive political crises. Together, these developments suggest that traditional party systems have weakened as societies have become increasingly polarized. Colombia now stands at one of the most consequential moments in that broader regional transformation.
For more than six decades, Colombia’s history has been shaped by armed conflict, guerrilla warfare, drug cartels, paramilitary organizations, and political violence. The 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla movement marked a historic turning point, yet its implementation has remained deeply contested. Armed groups continue to control parts of the country, while former guerrillas, human rights advocates, journalists, and community leaders continue to be targeted and killed. In many regions, peace remains more of a promise than a reality.
That is precisely why one of the central questions of this election is whether Colombia will continue implementing the peace accords or return to a strategy centered primarily on military solutions. Iván Cepeda has spent decades as one of Colombia’s most prominent human rights advocates. As a senator, he has consistently defended the implementation of the peace agreement while participating in numerous investigations into political violence and abuses committed by state actors. His supporters argue that Colombia cannot escape its cycle of violence without addressing social inequality, land ownership, and persistent rural poverty.
Abelardo de la Espriella offers a sharply different vision. His campaign has focused on strengthening public security, restoring order, and taking a tougher approach toward organized crime. He argues that left-wing governments have been overly lenient toward armed groups, allowing insecurity to worsen. His supporters believe Colombia now needs a stronger state and more decisive leadership.
Speaking during an American Community Media briefing, Stanford University political scientist Beatriz Magaloni argued that Latin America’s greatest challenge today is no longer simply whether left- or right-wing governments hold power. The more fundamental problem, she said, is that citizens are steadily losing confidence in democratic institutions themselves. Magaloni’s research has long examined the relationship between poverty, violence, and weak state institutions. As co-director of Stanford’s Democracy Action Lab, she has repeatedly emphasized that when people no longer believe the state can protect them, they become increasingly willing to embrace political leaders who promise simple solutions to complex problems. Such promises, however, often come at the expense of democratic checks and balances.
Colombia is especially vulnerable in this regard. Land ownership remains extraordinarily unequal, and many of the country’s long-running conflicts continue to revolve around disputes over land. Millions of Colombians have been displaced over the decades, while large landowners and illegal economic networks continue to wield enormous influence. Land reform is therefore not merely an economic issue but one of the central tests of Colombian democracy itself.
Alex Sierra, an anthropologist with the Centro de Estudios Sociojurídicos Latinoamericanos (CESJUL), argues that the election is about far more than who governs from Bogotá. The real question, he says, is whether rural communities will finally be treated as full citizens. His research shows that in many parts of Colombia, residents interact more frequently with paramilitary organizations and armed groups than with legitimate state institutions. Democracy, he argues, cannot truly exist until the state’s presence is represented not primarily by soldiers but by schools, healthcare, functioning courts, and effective local government.
The election also carries significant implications for the United States. For decades, Washington has been Colombia’s closest strategic partner in the fight against drug trafficking. Through Plan Colombia, the United States invested billions of dollars in military and law enforcement assistance. Although the partnership significantly weakened the major drug cartels, it also contributed to the militarization of the conflict while numerous human rights violations occurred.
In recent years, new challenges have emerged. Venezuela’s political and economic collapse has driven more than 2.5 million Venezuelan refugees into Colombia, creating one of the largest humanitarian crises in the country’s history. Migration has therefore become not only an American domestic issue but one of Latin America’s defining political questions. Colombia’s experience illustrates how difficult it is to remain both humane and effective when confronting migration on such an enormous scale.
Migration is particularly significant because the outcome of Colombia’s election could directly influence migration patterns toward the United States. If public security continues to deteriorate, political instability deepens, or armed conflict escalates once again, the consequences will almost certainly be felt north of Colombia’s borders. Experience throughout Latin America has repeatedly shown that political crises are quickly followed by increased migration. For that reason, policymakers in Washington are watching Colombia’s election closely, even if it appears at first glance to be purely a domestic political contest.
Research conducted by Stanford University’s Democracy Action Lab suggests that the stability of democratic institutions now depends less on constitutional rules than on the degree to which citizens trust their own governments. Beatriz Magaloni has repeatedly argued that when societies lose that trust, the door opens for political leaders who promise to restore order through their own personal authority. History, however, demonstrates that systems built around strong personalities rarely strengthen democracy over the long term. More often, they deepen social divisions while gradually weakening the very institutions designed to limit political power.
The same pattern is increasingly visible beyond Colombia. In the United States as well, political debate has evolved beyond competing economic programs or policy proposals into a broader argument over the future of democracy itself. In that sense, Colombia’s campaign feels strikingly familiar to many American observers. The same questions dominating U.S. politics have become central in Colombia: how to preserve both security and liberty, how to combat organized crime without sacrificing human rights, and how to reduce inequality while maintaining public confidence in democratic institutions.
During the American Community Media briefing, Magaloni noted that residents of Colombia’s cities and suburban areas are „living with crime, extortion, and insecurity,” making de la Espriella’s tough-on-crime message „a very attractive solution” for many voters. She observed that his approach deliberately mirrors that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose style and policies have clearly influenced de la Espriella, widely known by his nickname, „The Tiger.” One of his signature campaign promises is the construction of ten mega-prisons across Colombia modeled after El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
Yet Magaloni emphasized that Colombia’s rural regions face an entirely different reality. In areas where many of the country’s historically marginalized Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities live, residents are being „terrorized” by expanding armed criminal organizations fighting for control of land, mining operations, and drug trafficking routes. She argued that Colombia’s political polarization, reflected in de la Espriella’s 49.7 percent of the vote compared with Cepeda’s 48.7 percent, is far less ideological than election results might suggest. „Polarization suggests that citizens fundamentally disagree over left- and right-wing policies,” Magaloni explained. „But in Latin America today, while it appears to be a confrontation between left and right, it is actually about how people experience what they perceive as the state’s abandonment of their daily lives.”
Sociologist, documentary photographer, and journalist Manuel Ortiz believes that this is precisely why elections should never be viewed solely through political strategies or opinion polls. For years, he has documented life in Colombia’s poorest regions, where the consequences of armed conflict remain part of everyday existence. In his experience, election campaigns often overlook those who bear the greatest burden of political decisions. For rural families, Indigenous communities, Afro-Colombians, and internally displaced people, democracy is not an abstract concept. It means knowing whether their children can safely attend school, whether medical care is available, or whether armed groups will once again take control of their communities.
Ortiz argues that international media often focus exclusively on political elites while the real stories unfold in remote villages and marginalized regions. His photographs consistently portray people who, after decades of violence, simply long for a predictable and peaceful life. For them, peace is not a political slogan but the hope of finally living without fear. „Colombia is gripped by fear,” said Alex Sierra of CESJUL. „Some people fear that Abelardo will persecute and even kill those of us who oppose him,” he said the day after the first-round voting concluded. „Others fear that the left, by refusing to accept the election results, could create an atmosphere…” His remarks reflected the profound anxiety that now permeates both sides of Colombia’s political divide.
Sierra believes this also explains why Colombian society remains so deeply polarized. Urban centers and rural regions exist in fundamentally different realities. While parts of Bogotá and Medellín resemble modern, rapidly developing metropolitan areas, many remote regions still experience the near absence of government institutions. The election therefore will determine far more than which political platform wins power. It will also reveal whether Colombia can begin closing one of the deepest historical divides in its society.
The campaign has also generated intense debate over judicial independence and the functioning of democratic institutions. Numerous civil society organizations have warned that democracy depends on far more than conducting free elections. It also requires defeated candidates to accept the results and winners to respect constitutional limits on their own authority. Latin American history offers many examples of democratically elected leaders who gradually reshaped institutions to serve their own political interests. Many analysts therefore believe that the true test of Colombia’s democracy will begin only after June 21.
Having spent decades documenting human rights abuses throughout Colombia and Latin America, Sierra warned that many left-wing activists—including young protesters wounded by supposedly „less-lethal” police weapons during demonstrations five years ago—fear the return of what he described as „openly fascist” policing practices. He also cautioned that de la Espriella would inherit enormous challenges related to the country’s expanding paramilitary presence. More than 57 armed organizations with what he described as „war-making capacity” now control territory across Colombia, threatening to unleash „a dramatic new spiral of violence.” De la Espriella himself, who is also a naturalized U.S. citizen, has said he would welcome American military assistance in confronting those groups.
Drawing on his experience observing elections in Honduras and Chile, Sierra said he has identified what he considers „a pattern of direct intervention by Donald Trump” in elections throughout the region. Such involvement, he argued, has „a profoundly negative impact” on democracies that remain „extremely fragile” and continue to be shaped by a long-standing historical sensitivity to American influence.
It is no coincidence that Colombia’s election has attracted international attention. For the hundreds of thousands of Colombians living in the United States, the country’s future remains deeply personal. Many continue to maintain close family ties while building new lives in America. For them, this election is about both the country they left behind and the future they hope to preserve.
Researchers at the Democracy Action Lab also emphasize that democracies have become increasingly interconnected. Political strategies, communication techniques, and institutional practices pioneered in one country rapidly spread to others. Disinformation, the political weaponization of social media, fear-based campaigning, and the deliberate polarization of society have all become global phenomena. Colombia’s election therefore carries implications far beyond the borders of a single Latin American nation.
That helps explain why so many international observers now describe Colombia’s election as a democratic litmus test. The outcome will reveal not only what future Colombians choose for themselves but also the direction democratic politics across the hemisphere may be taking. Will polarization continue to deepen, or can democratic institutions regain public confidence? Will political competition remain grounded in constitutional rules, or will power politics and mutual distrust once again become the defining forces?
Ultimately, the June 21 election is about far more than who occupies the presidential palace in Bogotá. The deeper question is whether one of Latin America’s most important democracies can demonstrate that even amid profound political division, historical grievances, the legacy of armed conflict, and the rise of political extremism, a democratic path remains possible. Colombians are not the only ones awaiting that answer. The entire Western Hemisphere – and, in many respects, the broader democratic world – is watching Bogotá, because in today’s interconnected world, the fate of democracy in one nation is no longer solely its own concern.
