Columbia's election and Latin America's 'Donroe' moment

Daniel Raisbeck is an independent policy analyst on Latin America.

How can a losing presidential candidate obtain 100 per cent of the vote in dozens of voting booths across a country? Colombians have a term for this extraordinary case of voter unanimity: “voto fusil,” or voting at gunpoint.

The guns in question are, predominately, those of the FARC and ELN, Cuba-backed, Marxist-Leninist guerrilla groups that, under the outgoing, extreme left-wing president Gustavo Petro, have had carte blanche to wreak havoc across the countryside.

According to the Ombudsman’s Office, the FARC, ELN, and other “armed groups” threaten over 70 per cent of Colombia’s municipalities. Since their control over the cocaine trade is their main source of revenue, they have been keen to uphold the new status quo, one in which the total area planted with coca leaf—the main natural ingredient for cocaine— is at an all-time high, at nearly 300,000 hectares.

Hence the guerrilla groups’ outspoken support for the status quo candidate and Petro’s dauphin, Iván Cepeda, a Marxist and lifelong politician whose father, a Communist Party apparatchik, was such a staunch FARC ally that an entire “urban front” still bears his name.

According to an independent report by Fundación Misión Colombia Transparente, the gunpoint tactic gave Cepeda some four million votes across areas under the armed groups’ direct control. This left the pro-Hugo Chávez, pro-Fidel Castro ticket within a whisker—less than one percentage point—of winning the June 21st runoff election.

Alas, it did not suffice. Abelardo de la Espriella, a popular, conservative defense lawyer and political outsider, is now Colombia’s president-elect.

During the campaign, the global press often described De la Espriella as a blend between El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei. There is some truth to this. Bukele-like, De la Espriella, who bears a physical resemblance to the Salvadoran strongman according to some, promised to fight drug traffickers and criminal bands indiscriminately. He also pledged to build “mega-prisons” to house convicts in a country where, like El Salvador pre-Bukele, the prison system is a springboard for further crime.

Yet Colombia’s institutions are stronger than El Salvador’s, and De la Espriella is unlikely to send the army into Congress or change the constitution at whim to remain in power. He openly campaigned, in fact, to uphold the constitution, which does not allow re-election (and which Petro failed to overturn).

Like Milei, De la Espriella attacked career politicians, a popular target. He also pledged to cut back the state— much bloated under Petro’s fiscal deficits and record debt levels— by 40 per cent. At one point, he even expressed support for a plan to get rid of 136 government agencies and cut spending by 4 per cent of GDP, drafted by yours truly.

And while Milei portrays himself as a lion to his supporters, De la Espriella nicknamed himself “El Tigre,” a feral reference that outraged the Bogota-based, soft-left intellectuals who, perched in the interior highlands, regard the new president as an outré, beyond the pale “costeño” (an inhabitant of the Caribbean coastal region).

Predictably, the intelligentsia did not perceive that, after four years of Petro’s economic stagnation and the breakdown in basic security, most Colombians cared little for traditional candidates’ “modest stillness and humility.” Rather, they welcomed a leader willing to “imitate the action of the tiger” against the ruling communists.

If you read The Economist, however, you will be told that the key to understand De la Espriella’s rise is—who else?— Donald Trump. Colombia’s president-elect, in fact, is “the Trumpiest” of the new Latin American lot of right-wing leaders according to the magazine’s ‘Insider’ podcast.

There are some similarities. Both succeeded in the private sector before mounting an upset against the establishment as total political outsiders. And both have a penchant for showmanship; De la Espriella sings opera and ballads in self-financed music videos.

While Trump is amused by the “Tiger” nickname and seems to think De la Espriella won because of his endorsement, the reality is that his strongest influence on the Colombian election was indirect. Petro and the Colombian left lost the election, I would argue, in the early hours of January 3^rd. It was then when Trump gave the green light for Operation Absolute Resolve, the spectacular mission in which Delta Force operatives seized Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s tyrant, from his Caracas hideout. Hours later, Maduro was facing trial for narco-terrorism at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Petro denounced the operation as a flagrant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. He had good reasons to be concerned: in the early 2000’s, he advised Hugo Chávez, whom he called a “great Latin American leader” upon his death in 2013. More recently, in 2024, Petro refused to question Maduro’s blatant election fraud, which even the left-wing Carter Center called out unequivocally.

With Maduro and his wife, Cilia, as inmates at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, the Colombian hard left lost a figurehead and crucial supporter, whose funds might have pushed Cepeda over the finish line.

More directly, the Trump administration placed Petro and his wife, Veronica, under the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control list— otherwise known as the Clinton List— in October, 2025. This froze their U.S.-related assets and, politically, sent the message that Petro’s post-presidential future could resemble Maduro’s. Subsequently, Petro has spoken to Trump and asked to be removed from the list. Non-interference in this year’s election was understood to be a condition toward that end.

Yet Petro openly campaigned for Cepeda—which the constitution does not allow a sitting president to do— and has refused to recognize the election’s result, claiming that Israel infiltrated the software used to tally the votes. So Petro might be dealing with U.S. sanctions for some time to come.

Trump’s new “Donroe Doctrine” has not only seen action in Colombia. In October, 2025, the U.S. Treasury propped up the Argentine peso and approved an unprecedented, $20 billion currency swap line for Argentina through its Exchange Stabilization Fund. This de facto bailout of the Milei government also had an electoral effect, helping pro-Milei parties avoid a Peronist victory—anticipated in several polls— in the parliamentary election.

As a tactic to boost a regional ally electorally, Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s Argentina gambit paid off. Strategically, though, saving the Argentine peso is a disservice to Argentines. Recall that Milei won the 2023 election with the promise to dollarise the economy and shut down the central bank, a measure that— if implemented at the time— certainly would have produced single-digit annual inflation by now.

Dollarised Panama, for instance, constantly produces inflation levels below those of the United States, a testament to the virtues of impeding politicians and bureaucrats from meddling with a national currency.

By contrast, Milei and his finance minister, Luis Caputo, have opted for exchange rate controls— an initial “crawling peg” followed by a band mechanism— and constant central bank intervention in the currency markets. Although this policy— coupled with timely fiscal discipline— did prevent a bout of hyperinflation in early 2024, the government can now only tout single-digit monthly inflation levels, which leave the annual figure above the level of Haiti (ca. 20 per cent at the time of writing).

According to some commentators, the Latin American left has not won an election since Trump put an end to USAID, an agency that, among numerous other “DEI” projects, was funding a “transgender opera” through a Colombian university. Whether or not the cause-effect relationship stands, the fact is that voters in both Chile and Peru also rejected hard left candidates.

In Chile, conservative José Antonio Kast’s landslide win against a communist-backed opponent and ensured the survival of Chile’s current constitution, which dates from the Pinochet era— though with subsequent reforms— and is arguably the region’s best in terms of the defence of property rights and the promotion of economic growth. For Chile’s extreme left, dismantling the constitution has been a priority since the 2019 “social explosion” (estallido social), a bout of urban terrorism disguised as a popular protest movement.

In Peru, a razor-thin margin ensured the return of what is now the Fujimori dynasty, as Keiko, the daughter of former president-turned-dictator Alberto Fujimori, won the presidency in her fourth consecutive attempt. Less heralded, though perhaps more significant, was Keiko Fujimori’s extension of Julio Velarde’s tenure at the head of Peru’s central bank.

Since the early 2000’s, Velarde has led the only Latin American central bank whose low inflation levels are comparable to those of dollarised Panama, Ecuador, and El Salvador. Along with Fujimori’s free market reforms, this is why Peru, a semi-dollarized economy— dollars can be used for all transactions save the payment of taxes— has continued to prosper despite political chaos and nine different presidents in the last twelve years.

Trump should take heed if the Donroe Doctrine is to have any lasting impact beyond the election victories of like-minded, often charismatic candidates in nations with clearly fickle electorates. Especially in countries like Venezuela and Argentina, the poster children for why Latin America should have no central banks at all, dollarisation is the one structural measure that future left-wing governments will not be able to undo.

As Ecuadoreans proved under Rafael Correa, a Chávez acolyte who wielded power from 2007 to 2017 and failed to de-dollarise, a strong currency is always more popular than the ruling populist. And, unlike socialism, it is actually benevolent in the long run.

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