Colombia last month elected Abelardo de la Espriella president, consolidating a right-wing wave across Latin America, now spanning Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, and, more recently, Peru. The election was extremely close: de La Espriella received 49.66 percent of the votes (12,959,542) against leftist candidate Iván Cepeda Castro’s 48.70 percent (12,708,712), less than one percent difference. But that small margin may have profound implications for climate and human rights.
In the days following the election, the results were contested and further reviewed before being finally confirmed by the National Electoral Commission. Although there were rumors of electoral fraud, in part spread by the current president and Cepeda ally Gustavo Petro, the consensus is that, although the margin is thin, de La Espriella legitimately secured more votes than Cepeda.
The two candidates couldn’t be any more different. De la Espriella, a far-right candidate and political outsider, managed to secure a victory after rallying his supporters behind a campaign of “mano dura” (or “tough on crime”) policies and AI-created content. Cepeda, the left-wing Senator supported by the current president and state-owned outlets, promised to continue the legacy of the current administration and focus on inequality and peace. Cepeda’s father, a left-wing senator and journalist, was murdered in 1994, at the peak of violence against left-wing candidates and social leaders.
De La Espriella’s campaign echoed positions and sentiments common among right-wing candidates: a rejection of “wokeism” and political correctness, an imperative to address violent crime through hardline measures, and a refusal to negotiate peace with armed actors and implement the contested peace accords adopted in 2016. De La Espriella tapped into voters’ fears over Colombia’s “Venezuelization”—the notion that the Colombian left will guide the country into deep instability and financial strain—as well as the trajectory of the economy after a 23 percent raise in the minimum wage, and increasing violence amidst a fragile and contested peace. The campaign also promised to cut the administrative state by 40 percent, inspired by Javier Milei’s campaign promise in Argentina, and borrowed the idea of wearing football jerseys from Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign, rallying his supporters behind the campaign’s message of patriotism, while appealing to Colombians’ love for football, particularly during the World Cup.
The close victory underscored the stark polarization in the country, forcing voters to choose between candidates at what seemed like political extremes. As with other contested elections around the world, the battle pitted relatives, friends, and co-workers against each other, with extreme rhetoric across social media platforms. De La Espriella’s campaign slogan became “Defensores de La Patria” or “Our Country’s Defenders,” evoking MAGAesque sentiments about “reclaiming” the country from its current leaders. His campaign has publicly applauded the efforts of Milei, Bolsonaro, and Nayib Bukele to combat crime in the region and received an endorsement from President Donald Trump. De La Espriella is a U.S. citizen and has donated to the U.S. Republican party in the past.
Cepeda, on the other hand, campaigned under the “Historic Pact,” a coalition of left-leaning political groups and social movements, and chose an Indigenous senator, Aida Marina Quilcué Vivas, as his vice-president. Both Cepeda and Quilcué have been victims of state violence and have defended “comprehensive peace” and the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement. Post-election analyses noted that, to its detriment, their campaign only released its platform a few weeks before the election, and refused to engage with the savvy political marketing of its opponent.
De la Espriella, by contrast, was clear about his proposed policies. Although it is still too early to tell whether campaign promises will translate into policy changes, de la Espriella’s platform on climate and human rights marks a stark departure from the Petro administration.
Implications for Climate Policy
In 2025, at the U.N. climate negotiations held in Brazil, the Netherlands and Colombia announced they would host the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This was significant because Colombia became the first major oil producer to announce it would halt new fossil-fuel expansion. Colombia’s main exports include coal and oil.
Nearly 60 countries attended the meeting, representing 15 percent of global fossil fuel production. The largest producers in the meeting included Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Norway, and Nigeria—some of which are making efforts to decarbonize domestically through renewable energy sources and electric vehicles in some cases, but exporting significant amounts of coal, oil, or gas. Other participants have announced or appear to be planning new exploration, such as the Netherlands and the UK.
While it remains to be seen how much progress can materialize following the first meeting of the coalition, the Santa Marta participants agreed to create an expert panel to advise on a transition, the Science Panel for the Global Energy Transition. During the meetings, a group of leading scientists also launched a report recommending a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure and the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies, while guaranteeing financial incentives for clean-energy sources.
The Petro administration has also decried the current investor-state dispute settlement mechanism and pledged to exit, arguing it remains an obstacle to decarbonization and the phase-out of fossil fuels by protecting private investments and entrenching fossil fuels. Under Petro, Colombia joined coalitions seeking to move beyond oil and coal, hosted the U.N. biodiversity meeting in 2024, and oversaw efforts to reduce coal exports and expand renewable energy. However, some commentators criticize these positions as merely “rhetoric” that is not backed by significant domestic improvements.
With Colombia’s leadership change, the coalition behind rethinking investment protection and a fossil fuel phase-out will lose an important ally. Colombia’s economy’s reliance on oil and coal exports will likely continue and deepen under the new administration.
De La Espriella has promised to review the delimitation of environmental conservation areas (including páramos) and to prioritize fossil fuel exploration, including fracking, which the current administration has opposed. He has also expressed support for other extractive industries, such as mining for gold, copper, silver, and rare-earth minerals, alarming environmental defenders who already navigate one of the deadliest countries for environmental activists. Indigenous consultation processes and environmental review may also suffer setbacks under the new government.
The elections in Colombia mirror similar results in Peru, where voters elected Keiko Fujimori in a close vote, and may have lasting consequences for deforestation in the Amazon.
The Obstacles of Peace
Colombia’s armed conflict has been described as the longest-running conflict in the Western hemisphere. While its history and current iteration are too complex to explore here, some context is essential to explore the implications of the recent elections.
The conflict began with left-wing, Marxist guerrillas in the 1950s, who originally sought the redistribution of wealth and land for the people, but later turned to more lucrative, illegal means to acquire power and control over land, resources, and drug-trafficking routes. The largest faction, organized as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC, entered into a peace agreement with the Colombian government in 2016 after years of negotiations.
Since then, the implementation of the agreement has faced resistance by FARC dissidents that refused to sign the agreement and other armed groups or criminal bands seeking to continue to profit from war and drug trafficking. The agreement also faces resistance from those who oppose its contents, arguing it provided “amnesty” for criminals and failed to punish them. The Petro administration has faced significant criticism for failed negotiations with other armed groups, which has allowed them to gain strength without any real concessions to the public.
Interestingly, the areas most affected by war—often those in the “periphery,” rural areas far removed from the capital and other main cities—have consistently voted in favor of the peace agreements or the parties supporting them, including in the 2016 referendum, the 2022 elections, and the most recent elections.
While Cepeda’s campaign sought to continue implementing the agreements, de La Espriella vowed to destroy them, proposing to dismantle the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (or JEP), the main transitional justice mechanism, and undermine the recommendations from the Truth Commission. However, the JEP’s future may ultimately depend on a constitutional reform approved by Congress, and the incoming administration may encounter judicial challenges to reverse the process.
De La Espriella’s praise for the former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Velez, particularly in light of the false-positives scandal under his administration, whereby military officials dressed campesinos in guerrilla clothing and claimed they were guerrilla members killed in combat, raises concerns about the future president’s respect for human rights. Furthermore, de la Espriella’s comments about building mega-prisons and adopting hardline policies, as he aims to follow what Bukele has done in El Salvador, might give a sense of what may come. It is possible that under the new government, aerial fumigations of coca crops with glyphosate to combat drugs may return, which environmental and human rights organizations have denounced in the past because of their severe health and environmental impacts on affected populations, which mostly comprise campesinos.
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De la Espriella adopted a more moderate tone after winning, calling for unity and assuring his government would respect dissent and uphold Constitutional guarantees. He named a renowned marine biologist as Minister of the Environment, although he also picked an alleged climate denier as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Some commentators believe his extreme rhetoric was mostly a strategic choice to appeal to his voters. But even if he takes a more moderate route, the landscape for climate and human rights matters seems fraught.
