Perhaps in 50 years’ time, the CIA will declassify documents showing how they and Mossad rigged elections throughout Latin America during the mid-2020s.
Colombia held its first round of presidential elections on Sunday. As with the recent elections in Argentina and Honduras, the process was rife with irregularities and clear instances of direct interference, not only from the US but also neighbouring Ecuador. There have even been accusations, as yet unsubstantiated, of massive electoral fraud.
The stakes could not be higher. The two candidates who will be facing off in the run-off elections on June 21, after coming first and second in Sunday’s elections, could not offer more starkly different political visions for Colombia.
A victory for second-placed Ivan Cepeda would cement the progressive economic, social and environmental policies of his predecessor, Gustavo Petro, who has led Colombia’s first-ever left-leaning government in its 200-year history. If his challenger, the hard-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who picked up the most votes in the first round, wins, Colombia will become the next Latin American country to fall under the aegis of Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine”.
If triumphant, Espriella, a former defence lawyer with a penchant for defending will presumably adopt a Plan Colombia 2.0-style security arrangement with the US, as the former Colombian president (and Epstein client) Andrés Pastrana called for last year. If recent events in neighbouring Ecuador are any indication, this will mean granting de facto control over Colombian territory to US Southern Command and government agencies like the DEA and FBI.
Espriella already travelled to Washington to participate in Trump’s Shield of the Americas summit after making large campaign donations to members of the “Miami mafia”, as Progressive International’s David Adler recounts in the clip below.
Espriella has already pledged to recommence the mass fumigation of cocaine fields in Colombia as well as the bombing of terrorist guerrilla camps. Like Argentina’s Milei, he seems to thrive off violence and conflict. In the clip, he admits, quite proudly, of how he tortured and killed cats with fireworks for fun as a child…
As Lee Schlenker reports for Responsible Statecraft, the June 21 run-off “pits diametrically opposed visions for Latin America’s third largest country and economy against one another”:
De la Espriella has promised to end Petro’s “Total Peace” negotiations with the country’s guerilla, paramilitary, and criminal groups; unleash lethal military force to fight drug trafficking, and construct ten maximum-security prisons for low-level criminals just has President Nayib Bukele has in El Salvador.
He also wants to cut taxes for the private sector, resume aerial fumigation of coca crops, join the Trump administration’s “Shield of the Americas” consortium, and issue new concessions for fracking and oil exploration.
Cepeda, on the other hand, intends to double-down on the demobilization of armed actors through peace negotiations and intensify the country’s clean energy transition. He promises to center human rights and combat illicit finance as the cornerstone of his counternarcotics strategy, and seeks to deepen Colombia’s leadership role in Latin America, invest in public education, and prioritize anti-militarism and international law in the country’s foreign affairs.
A Multi-pronged Intervention
The US’ overt meddling in Colombia’s elections began with the arrival in Bogota on Friday, just two days before the election, of the Colombian-born US Senator Bernie Moreno, who has close ties with Trump, Marco Rubio and Colombia’s conservative elite. Moreno was accompanied on his trip by 87 US State Department.
The US State Department delegation was there, ostensibly, to observe Sunday’s presidential election, for which it was formally accredited. However, as Progressive International notes in an official statement denouncing the visit, it didn’t take long for the delegation to begin flouting Colombia’s election laws:
The Consejo Nacional Electoral — including but not limited to its Resolución 09458 of 2025 — requires that all internationally accredited observers refrain from any “demonstration in favor of or against parties, movements or candidates.
The law stipulates clearly that observers are prohibited from engaging in activities of “party-political character”, risking permanent expulsion from the country if they are found to have done so…
Senator Moreno appears to have already violated these laws. According to multiple Colombian and international media reports published today, Senator Moreno has planned a meeting with the two leading right-wing presidential candidates — Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella — with the explicit purpose of facilitating their political rapprochement ahead of a possible runoff against the Pacto Histórico on June 21.
This constitutes an active political intervention in the electoral process by a foreign national operating under the cover of an observer mandate.
The intervention follows a pattern that pre-dates the arrival of the US delegation. Senator Moreno is a member of the Republican Party with documented personal ties to Colombia’s conservative elite — and a public record of hostility toward the Petro government.
Prior to his arrival in Bogota, Moreno issued a number of veiled threats including insinuations that “narco-terrorist” groups linked to the government of Gustavo Petro were threatening the freedom to vote in the elections. He even warned that Washington would not recognize the result “if they are going to count votes that are the result of clear intimidation.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s former advisor Roger Stone, who seems to have a thing for Latin America right now, published an article days before Sunday’s election extolling the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who he says “captures the fury, the fear, and the hope of millions of Colombians who want safety restored, national sovereignty reclaimed, and prosperity to finally be unleashed”:
Colombia’s largely disgraced former president, Alvaro Uribe, whose candidate barely scraped together 5% of the total votes, warned that a vote for Cepeda “could lead to an armed action against the country”.
There was also direct meddling from the government of neighbouring Ecuador. Just days before the vote, Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa met with Espriella to discuss future joint collaboration. In the meeting, clips of which were broadcast on legacy and social media, Noboa pledged to remove all of his government’s 100% tariffs on Colombian goods if Espriella wins the elections.
As we’ve noted in previous articles, Noboa seems quite happy for Ecuador to be used as a beachhead for US military and destabilisation operations in the region — essentially the role Colombia has historically played — even after a majority of Ecuadorians voted against the reinstallation of US bases on Ecuadorian soil.
But the most serious allegation regarding these elections — thus far unsubstantiated — is that massive electoral fraud was committed during the preliminary count to benefit Espriella, who secured 10.3 million votes — just under 44% of the vote. Both Colombia’s outgoing President, Gustavo Petro, and his political heir, Ivan Cepeda, have claimed that nearly one million voter IDs appeared at polling stations that were not registered in the official electoral census.
“The so-called count being transmitted is not legally binding,” wrote Petro on X shortly after the election was called. “Its data is not considered official. As president, I do not accept the results of the preliminary count”
In Colombia, the “pre-conteo”, or preliminary count, is based on officials tallying the ballot sheets and entering them into an online software. But the “escrutinio”, or scrutinized results, usually take several days to be announced and are ratified by judges.
On Monday, Cepeda partially walked back his allegation by acknowledging that compelling evidence has yet to emerge of massive voter fraud. That said, he still wants to wait for the scrutinised results to be announced before accepting the results of the preliminary count.
The domestic and international legacy media have tried to debunk Petro and Ivan’s claims. However, as Colombia Reports notes, their fears are not entirely unjustified:
Petro on multiple occasions said that the National Registry failed to comply with a 2018 court order that ordered the nationalization of the software and shield it from fraud.
The software continues to be the property of the controversial company Thomas Greg & Sons, which is owned by two convicted fraudsters.
Because this company has claimed that its software is a trade secret, IT experts of the Historic Pact have not been allowed to conduct audits that would allow them to confirm the software’s code can’t be altered.
“Without a proper audit of the election software, there can be no full confidence in the process,” said the political party in a statement earlier this month.
The Historic Pact sued the National Registry on Thursday in a last-minute attempt to force the election organizer to guarantee the tracking of tally sheets as they are integrated in the total vote count.
This is not the first time a Latin American country has seen widespread allegations of massive electoral fraud since Trump launched his Donroe Doctrine last year. In Honduras’ December elections, the recount of the votes took weeks. The favourite to win, Salvador Nasrallah, claimed that some disputed votes were not counted despite the weeks-long review of disputed tally sheets.
Interestingly, the company that managed the ballot count, Colombia-based Grupo ASD, was also involved in managing the preliminary count of Colombia’s first round elections. Despite concerns raised by the Petro government about the irregularities in the Honduran elections, Grupo ASD apparently refused to withdraw fully from the counting process.
Another Pro-Israeli Government?
Whoever does the counting, one thing is clear: on June 21, Espriella will face off against Ivan Cepeda, who obtained just over 9.6 million votes. While the result is being presented by the legacy media and many on social media as a crushing defeat for HP, it is actually the best result ever achieved by the Colombian left in a first round of the presidential election.
This is a remarkable achievement for a party that has faced near-total opposition from Colombia’s landed oligarchy and the traditional political parties and media they control. As Elvin Calcaño writes for Canal Red (machine translation), “Elites like Colombia’s, who base their wealth and power on the possession of land, care more about being in command than money itself”:
[W]ith the left in government they have not stopped making money. There is even data that suggests that some Colombian economic conglomerates have increased their revenues over the past four years. But with Petro and the Historic Pact they do not rule. And they cannot has that.
During his last two and a half years in government, Gustavo Petro has made perhaps an even more powerful enemy: Israel. Not only has he been one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s naked criminality in Gaza; unlike most other heads of state or government, he has consistently turned those words into actions, or at least tried to.
Under Petro, Colombia broke ties with Israel in May 2024, banned coal exports, and expelled Israeli diplomats in late 2025. Petro even signed Presidential Directive No. 07, which institutionalized a pro-Palestinian posture across the Colombian state.
Israel, and by extension Washington, would like nothing more than to reverse these commitments. In Espriella, they appear to have found the perfect tool for achieving that…
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Nick Corbishley 