A fork in the road ahead of the May elections — between Petro's reform course, a conservative restoration and a Latin American Bonapartism. In a country whose selection conditions reach far beyond its national elections.
In May 2026 Colombia faces a presidential election whose significance goes beyond the usual Latin American routine. On 31 May Colombians vote in the first round, on 21 June presumably in the run-off. Three candidates dominate the field — Iván Cepeda for the left, Abelardo De La Espriella for the radical right, Paloma Valencia for the centre-right. Between them it will be decided whether Colombia continues the reform direction of the Petro years or returns to a conservative restoration that works hand in hand with Trump's Washington. But this question is only the surface. Beneath it lies a deeper question that no election decides — can Colombia be its own actor at all, or does it remain a stage for forces that operate elsewhere?
This paper attempts a sober analysis from the perspective of the Megamachine framework. Colombia cannot be understood on its own terms. What happens in the country happens within a field of selection conditions that reach far beyond national politics — the global drug economy, the geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, the historically grown structures of colonial rule, civil war and drug economy. What room for manoeuvre exists in this field, what Petro's government has done with it, what his possible successors would do with it — that is the subject of the following observations.
By Latin American standards Colombia is a paradoxical country. It is one of the strongest economies in the region, with a formally stable democratic constitution since 1991 and one of the oldest uninterrupted electoral traditions in Latin America. At the same time, since the early sixties it has been entangled in an internal armed conflict that has not ended despite the peace agreement of 2016. The murder rate stands at about twenty-five to twenty-six killings per hundred thousand inhabitants — low by Colombian standards, but still very high by international comparison.
Structural inequality is extreme. According to World Bank data the Gini coefficient stands at 53.9 — one of the highest values in the world. The gap between the urban centres — Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla — and the rural regions is not one of degree but of kind. In the cities there are functioning institutions, a modern economy, a lively cultural life. In large parts of the rural periphery the state is present only in traces. There armed groups rule, often with their own tax systems, their own courts, their own security apparatuses — a parallel state financed by the drug economy, illegal mining and logging.
Geographical location is a factor in its own right. Colombia is the only South American country with coastlines on both the Pacific and the Caribbean. It lies at the entrance to the Panama Canal. It has a 2,200-kilometre border with Venezuela, an almost equally long one with Brazil, shorter ones with Peru and Ecuador. Historically this location has had two consequences — Colombia is a hub of international trade routes, and it is a strategic forward zone for the United States. Both characteristics have shaped the country.
The population structure is heterogeneous. About seventy per cent of the population are considered mestizos of mixed European and indigenous descent, about ten per cent Afro-Colombians, about four to five per cent indigenous people, with more than a hundred recognised peoples and many languages, and the rest white descendants of European immigrants. The social hierarchy still correlates largely with skin colour today — a late consequence of the colonial era that stands in no Colombian constitution but corresponds to every Colombian reality. Indigenous people and Afro-Colombians make up a disproportionately large share of the poor, of the victims of violence and of the displaced.
These structural findings are the precondition of any analysis. Whoever treats Colombia as a normal democratic country overlooks the depth of inequality. Whoever sees it as a pure regime of violence overlooks the institutions that function in spite of everything. Both simplifications miss the point.
In 2022 Gustavo Petro took office as the first left-wing president in Colombian history. His election victory was historic — a country governed for decades by liberal and conservative elites, often with US backing, often in the shadow of paramilitary violence, chose a former guerrilla fighter of the M-19. Petro was active in this urban guerrilla as a young man, demobilised with it in 1990, then became a senator, mayor of Bogotá and finally president. His programme was ambitious.
The policy of Total Peace (Paz Total), the core project of his government, envisaged parallel negotiations with all remaining armed groups — the ELN guerrilla, the FARC dissidents, the Clan del Golfo and several urban gangs in Medellín, Buenaventura and Quibdó. The legal basis was passed by Congress in November 2022. The idea went beyond the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, which concerned only one group. Petro wanted to end the conflict structurally, not militarily.
The record after three and a half years is mixed. On the one hand — the first year-long ceasefire with the ELN in the country's history, truth and reconciliation processes with several groups, an extension of the PDET development programmes for rural conflict regions, secured until 2037 with Petro's signature in February 2026. On the other hand — the armed groups have grown during the negotiations, not shrunk. ACLED, a conflict research organisation, has called this the paradox of Total Peace — violence was reduced, but the groups capable of exercising it have grown. At the end of 2024 negotiations with the ELN broke down after the group carried out an attack in Arauca. In June 2025 the conservative presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was fatally wounded in an assassination attempt — an event that has poisoned the political atmosphere.
The economic reforms largely stalled. The tax reform was watered down at the first attempt, the health reform is stuck in Congress, the labour market reform was in 2025 more forced through by Petro's referendum push than negotiated, which led to constitutional disputes. Petro's attempt to bypass the majorities in Congress through direct appeals to voters and a constituent process has brought him under suspicion of straining the democratic rules of the game. The Atlantic Council and other observers have spoken of democratic backsliding — a term previously applied to Orbán, Erdoğan, Modi, and now being used for Colombia as well.
Drug policy was Petro's most radical shift. He ended forced coca eradication and relied instead on voluntary crop substitution and social programmes in the growing areas. The statistical result — the area under coca cultivation rose from 230,000 hectares in 2022 to 270,000 hectares in 2025, the area eradicated annually fell from 69,000 hectares in 2022 to 11,000 hectares in 2025. Cocaine production reached record levels. Petro's argument was that forced eradication had not worked for decades, that it had only hit the farmers, not the cartels. Structural reform instead of fighting symptoms. Trump and his Secretary of State Rubio did not accept this argument.
Petro's approval ratings fluctuated dramatically over the course of his term — from 56 per cent at the start in 2022 down to 26 per cent in July 2024, then a recovery to 49 per cent in February 2026, and in April 2026 about 49 per cent approval against 48.9 per cent disapproval. This recovery in the late phase of his term is remarkable. It is owed partly to a series of concrete measures — the 23.7 per cent increase in the minimum wage at the beginning of 2026, the energy emergency declarations, the successes in relations with Trump after the February meeting. It is owed partly to the confrontation with Trump, which Petro interprets in nationalist terms and which goes down well with the population.
In September 2025 Donald Trump decertified Colombia as a partner in the drug war — a historic step that put the country on the list with Afghanistan, Bolivia, Myanmar and Venezuela. It was a break with three decades of continuous US–Colombian security partnership, which had shaped the relationship since Plan Colombia in the late nineties. The roughly 380 million dollars of annual US aid for Colombian counter-narcotics work is thereby in question. Secretary of State Rubio imposed sanctions on Petro personally — a first for a sitting president of a country allied with the United States.
On the surface Washington's reasoning concerns drug policy — Petro had sabotaged coca eradication, cocaine production had exploded. The underlying logic is different. In the course of his second term Trump has established a geopolitical line that redefines Latin America as a backyard. Operations against suspected drug boats off the Venezuelan coast, military threats towards Maduro, the designation of Colombian and Mexican cartels as terrorist organisations — what Trump's foreign policy describes is the return to a Monroe Doctrine logic in which the southern countries of Latin America count not as sovereign actors but as spaces to be disciplined.
Colombia's rapprochement with China is the other side of this constellation. In 2025 Petro's government signed a cooperation agreement with China within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative — a further step in a movement that can be observed throughout Latin America. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico — all have intensified their relations with China in recent years. The old US hegemony has not disappeared from South America, but it has acquired competition.
For Colombia this is a double-edged situation. On the one hand multipolarity opens up new room for manoeuvre — Petro was able to resist the US drug-war logic because he had alternatives. On the other hand the country is deeply intertwined with the US economy — the United States remains Colombia's most important trading partner, and the free trade agreement in force since 2012 is the basis for a large part of its non-commodity exports. An open confrontation with Trump is economically risky. The question of the February 2026 meeting between Petro and Trump at the White House was how far both sides actually want to take this risk. The meeting was more conciliatory in tone than the preceding months had suggested — but the sanctions remained in place, and the diplomatic damage has not been repaired.
The three leading candidates embody three different answers to the Colombian situation. The choice between them is not merely one of persons but a structural decision of direction.
Iván Cepeda — senator of the Pacto Histórico, Petro's successor candidate — stands for the continuation and deepening of the Petro project. He has been known for decades as a human rights defender, has in particular denounced the links between politics and right-wing paramilitaries, and as the son of a communist politician murdered by the state is himself a victim of the country's political violence. His programme is a deepening of the Petro reforms — progressive tax policy, structural reform of the economy away from raw material extraction, strengthening of the peace justice system, consolidation of land reform, the convening of a constituent assembly. In the April 2026 Invamer poll Cepeda leads with 44.3 per cent in the first round — a figure that makes a run-off likely but does not rule out an outright victory.
Paloma Valencia — senator of the Centro Democrático, the party of former president Álvaro Uribe — represents the conservative centre. She is a lawyer, belongs to the established establishment, and represents programmes compatible with the tradition of conservative Colombian politics — security policy with a stronger military presence, market-friendly economic policy, preservation of the traditional US alliance. At 19.8 per cent in the April poll.
Abelardo De La Espriella — independent lawyer, styling himself as the Colombian Bukele — represents the radical right. His programme — air strikes and spraying against drug growers and armed groups in the first ninety days, new maximum-security prisons, stronger gun rights, expansion of fossil energy production, close military and police cooperation with the United States and Israel, possibly direct US military operations on Colombian soil, drastic reduction of the state. At 21.5 per cent in the April poll.
These three programmes are not gradual variations of one another. They are three structurally different directions. Cepeda stands for deepening the reform course. Valencia stands for a return to the conservative pre-Petro situation with its institutional continuity, its elite structures, its ties to the United States. De La Espriella stands for something new — a Colombian Bonapartism that would not respect the institutional rules of the game, that would cooperate with Trump's Washington in a way that tends to give up Colombian sovereignty, that wants to solve the security question with methods modelled on Bukele's El Salvador and Milei's Argentina.
The historical parallel with the radical right elsewhere is obvious. In 2025 De La Espriella met Santiago Abascal, leader of the Spanish VOX party, in Madrid. He has taken part in meetings of the Foro de Madrid — an alliance of conservative actors from Argentina, Chile, Italy and Spain. It is an international network under construction, and he is part of it. What began in Argentina with Milei, what established itself in Chile with Kast, what was attempted in Brazil with Bolsonaro before his defeat — Colombia could be the next link in a chain in which the radical right is beginning to reorganise the Latin American continent.
The findings that point to continued deterioration are real.
At the level of violence: according to Human Rights Watch reports, 2025 was one of the most severe years of the decade in humanitarian terms. Displacements, kidnappings, killings of social leaders and of former FARC fighters have increased. In March 2026 the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that between 2016 and 2025, 972 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia — almost a hundred a year on average. 23 per cent of the victims were indigenous, although indigenous people make up only 4.7 per cent of the population. The recruitment of child soldiers by armed groups demonstrably rose in 2025 — Genocide Watch places the country at stage 5 of its genocide scale, pointing to the systematic persecution of indigenous people and Afro-Colombians.
At the institutional level: Petro's attempts to push reforms past a resistant Congress by referendum and constituent assembly have strained institutional stability. The judiciary has blocked him several times, but the tension between executive and judiciary has grown. The corruption cases in Petro's own circle — Benedetti, Sarabia, the scandal surrounding his son — have damaged his image as a reformer. Administrative efficiency remains a fundamental problem in many provinces.
At the economic level: growth in 2024 was about 2 per cent, well below the Latin American average. Foreign direct investment fell in 2025. In its energy transition policy the Petro government disrupted the fossil investment pipeline without building up sufficient new alternatives. The economy remains dependent on raw materials, with all the volatility that brings.
At the political and cultural level: polarisation has reached a level that Colombian observers compare with the late nineties — the phase before the escalation of the armed conflict. The language of public discourse has coarsened. Political murders are no longer isolated cases but part of the reality of the election campaign. The attack on Uribe Turbay is a symptom, not an exception.
The counter-findings are less spectacular, but they cannot be overlooked.
The peace infrastructure established with the FARC in 2016 has held despite all its problems. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz) has taken up its work. In 2022 the Truth Commission presented its final report, which under the title No matarás (Thou shalt not kill) documents the experience of the conflict. The PDET programmes for the 170 most severely affected municipalities are running, if slowly. The institutional architecture of peace stands.
The democratic constitution holds despite all the tensions. There are elections, the results are accepted, the transfer of power from Duque to Petro in 2022 took place without crisis. The Constitutional Court has defended its independence against Petro's encroachments — which shows that the separation of powers in Colombia has more real substance than in many countries where it exists only nominally.
The regional reforms in some cities and provinces serve as models. Medellín's urban transformation since the early 2000s — with its famous library-city policy, with the Metrocables that connect the poor hillside settlements to the formal city, with consistent investment in public spaces — is internationally recognised. Bogotá's transport policy, with the TransMilenio system and the expansion of cycling infrastructure, has won recognition. These reforms are not uniformly successful, but they show that institutional renewal is possible in Colombia.
The energy of civil society is considerable. Indigenous movements, Afro-Colombian organisations, farmers' associations, feminist groups, ecological initiatives are active and politically visible. The farmers' rights anchored in the peace agreement have released a mobilisation that can no longer be reversed. The mourning movements after political murders show that society does not accept the violence.
Economic diversification is slowly getting under way. The tourism sector has stabilised; Colombia is no longer the most dangerous destination in South America. The creative industries — film, music, digital services — are growing. The middle class in the big cities is real, with educational standards that are competitive in the region. The Pacific Alliance and the free trade agreement with the United States remain structural advantages, even if they are under strain under Trump.
These counter-findings do not refute the diagnosis of free fall. But they show that the substance for a different direction exists. It is scattered, uneven, vulnerable — but it is not zero.
From the Megamachine perspective, Colombia is a country bound into global selection conditions on several levels at once, which narrow its own room for manoeuvre.
The first level is the drug economy. It is not primarily a Colombian phenomenon but a global market structure. Demand arises in the United States and in Europe, supply is produced in the Andean states, transport runs through Central America and the Caribbean. Whoever eliminates the Colombian coca farmers does not eliminate demand — he shifts cultivation to Peru, to Bolivia, to the Venezuelan borderlands. It has been like this for fifty years. Petro's attempt to break out of this logic — crop substitution instead of destruction, development instead of repression — is structurally right, but it competes with a market dynamic he cannot change on his own. Colombian drug policy is not sovereign; it is a response to conditions set elsewhere.
The second level is raw material extraction. Colombia is an oil exporter, a coal exporter, a gold producer, an emerald producer. These raw materials are traded on a global market whose pricing no Colombian actor influences. The economy is structurally extractive. Petro's attempt to transform it is ambitious, but it runs up against the simple fact that Colombia lives off raw materials for half of its foreign trade. Turning away from this structure is a task for generations, not a four-year task.
The third level is geopolitical integration. For decades Colombia was the closest US ally in South America, with military bases, intelligence cooperation, a drug-war alliance. This integration brought the country stability and investment — and at the same time made it the stage for operations that were not in its interest. Plan Colombia pushed back the FARC, but it also strengthened the paramilitaries, who later produced even more deaths. The Trump turn does not reverse this logic — it merely makes it harsher. What room for manoeuvre Colombia has gained through the multipolar world is limited. It is room between Washington and Beijing, not room beyond both.
The fourth level is the oligarchic structure within. Colombia has a small, very influential economic elite — the Ardila Lülle group, the Santo Domingo family, the Sarmiento Angulo group, a few others. These groups control large parts of the media, the banking sector, industry. They are transnationally intertwined — with US investors, with European corporations, with Chinese partners. Petro's reforms have barely touched these structures. Cepeda's programme provides for a progressive tax reform, a constituent assembly, a deepening of land reform. Whether that could be pushed through is open. What is certain — the opposing forces are organised.
Colombia cannot be understood on its own terms. The selection conditions that shape its situation are not set nationally. What is decided in the May elections is not which direction the country itself takes — but which position it occupies in a field whose rules of the game are determined elsewhere.
If the structural conditions set a wide frame, the question remains what can be decided within that frame. Here three possible paths emerge.
Path A — deepening the reform course under Cepeda. If Cepeda wins — which according to the polls is the most likely variant —, he would have the opportunity to consolidate the Petro project. To continue land reform, to strengthen the peace justice system, to develop drug policy further towards decriminalisation, to push through progressive tax reform, to tackle the structural diversification of the economy. The price would be continued confrontation with Trump's Washington, which could become economically costly. The benefit would be the consolidation of a reform course that otherwise no longer has any counterpart in Latin America. Cepeda is personally more credible than Petro — he is not as polarising, has no shadow of corruption, has been recognised as a human rights defender for decades. But he has the same structural problems as Petro — no majority in Congress, Petro fatigue in parts of the electorate, the institutional brakes.
Path B — conservative restoration under Valencia. If the run-off against Cepeda is won by Valencia, it would be a return to the pre-Petro situation under modified conditions. The US alliance would be repaired, drug policy would switch back to forced eradication, the economic reforms would be rolled back, land reform slowed or reversed. That would not be a catastrophe but a return to a normality that shaped Colombia for thirty years. This normality produced structural weaknesses, but it also stabilised the country. What it does not solve is the fundamental question of structural inequality and the unfinished peace agenda.
Path C — Bonapartism under De La Espriella. If De La Espriella reaches the run-off and wins — which cannot be ruled out, since he is competing with Valencia in the polls —, it would be a rupture. His programme would strain the institutional rules of the game, drive forward the concentration of power in the executive, militarise security policy, and seek cooperation with Trump far beyond the usual measure. The historical parallel would not be Uribe, who was an institutional conservative — it would be Bukele in El Salvador, with all the consequences that entails for human rights, the separation of powers and democratic substance. De La Espriella speaks of free elections in 2030 — such promises have not always been kept on Bukele's path.
Which path actually materialises depends on three factors. First — who reaches the run-off. If De La Espriella faces Cepeda, a Cepeda majority is likely, because the moderate right around Valencia would not support him. If Valencia faces Cepeda, the race is open. If De La Espriella faces Valencia, which is unlikely, there would be a confrontation between the radical and the moderate right, with Cepeda absent. Second — turnout. Colombia traditionally has low turnout, and left-wing voters are harder to mobilise. Third — political violence. The attack on Uribe Turbay in 2025 showed that the risk of real electoral manipulation through violence exists. Further incidents could change the outcome dramatically.
What is structurally open about Colombia is not only the question of the next president. It is the deeper question of whether the country can be the subject of its own history, or whether it remains a stage for forces that operate elsewhere.
The Petro years were the most serious attempt in decades to give this question a positive answer. A left-wing government that breaks with the US drug war, that negotiates with all armed groups, that attempts land reform, that tackles structural inequality — all this would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. In substance it did not go as far as Petro's programme promised. But it established a course that can no longer be completely reversed. Even a Valencia government would not turn everything back, because many of the reforms are institutionally anchored.
What remains open is the speed. Colombia has the substance for a different direction — the institutional remnants of the peace infrastructure, the energy of civil society, regional diversity, economic room for manoeuvre in the multipolar world. But this substance erodes with every year in which violence returns, in which the peace agenda is slowed, in which the institutional rules of the game are strained. The fork is open, but not indefinitely. The next government will decide at what speed Colombia moves in one direction or the other.
From the Megamachine perspective, the Colombian situation is exemplary of a phenomenon that can be observed throughout the Global South. Countries bound into extractive global economies, into geopolitical tensions between great powers, into historically grown structures of inequality — they have limited room for manoeuvre, but they do have room for manoeuvre. What they do with it is not predetermined. It is a question of political decision, of organised forces in civil society, of institutional architecture.
What Colombia teaches — anyone looking at it from outside — is that the question path or fall is not binary. Both movements take place at the same time. The peace justice system works while political murders happen. Land reform is carried out while displacement continues. The democratic institutions hold while polarisation grows. The reform attempt is undertaken while the drug economy expands. This simultaneity cannot be resolved — it is the Colombian reality. The question is in which direction the weight shifts.
In May 2026 Colombia faces an election whose significance goes beyond day-to-day politics. Three paths lie open — deepening the reform course, conservative restoration, Latin American Bonapartism.
Which path actually materialises depends on Colombian voters — but also on selection conditions set far outside the country. Trump's decertification, Beijing's Belt and Road rapprochement, the global drug economy, the transnational radical right — they all act upon an election that is formally decided in Bogotá.
From the Megamachine perspective, Colombia is not a special case. It is exemplary of the situation of the Global South — bound into structures set elsewhere, with limited but real room for manoeuvre. What it makes of this will become observable in the coming months.
— Hans Ley & Claude Dedo / beyond-decay.org