Voters on Sunday sent a left-winger and a right-winger into the June 21 runoff of Colombia's presidential election, with the right-winger looking like the front-runner — especially among expat voters in South Florida.
Conservative populist Abelardo De la Espriella of the Defenders of the Homeland movement took 44% of the total vote in Sunday's first round, ahead of 41% for Iván Cepeda of the liberal Historic Pact movement, an ally of current leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro.
In South Florida, home to the U.S.'s largest Colombian diaspora community, an estimated 90% voted for De la Espriella, an admirer of President Donald Trump whose nickname is "El Tigre," or The Tiger.
His campaign calling for an iron fist against Colombia's recent wave of criminal violence resonated with expats who were often victims of the country's notorious public insecurity, especially during the half-century-long civil war that ended a decade ago.
“The biggest issue that has always been at the forefront of Colombian politics and elections has been security," expat Fabio Andrade, a Weston city commissioner who will support De la Espriella in the runoff, told WLRN.
"De la Espriella got the message: no more peace negotiations, no more amnesty for criminals.”
Cepeda has advocated for continued peace talks with Colombia's criminal groups, some of whom are splinter factions from the civil war's leftist guerrilla and right-wing paramilitary armies.
De la Espriella, by contrast, has called for a more martial approach, including the construction of several megaprisons similar to those right-wing authoritarian President Nayib Bukele has used in El Salvador to house gang members — and, say critics, political opponents.
READ MORE: Colombians in South Florida stand to feel caught in the middle of the Petro-Trump feud
Republicans in the U.S. are also largely behind De la Espriella. Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, a vocal opponent of the Latin American left, endorsed him last week in a video addressed to Colombians.
"Abelardo De la Espriella is a personal friend ... and a friend of the United States," she said.
If so, however, he's also a controversial amigo. De la Espriella was once the attorney of Colombian-born Alex Saab, the alleged corruption maestro for recently U.S.-ousted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela just extradited Saab to the U.S. on massive embezzlement and international money-laundering charges.
De la Espriella insists that having been a criminal's defense lawyer doesn't make him a criminal himself — and his Colombian supporters appear to agree.
Either way, a De la Espriella victory in Latin America's third largest country would be a brass ring for the Trump administration-led effort to move the western hemisphere to the right — as it has recently in countries like Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Honduras.
Still, Andrade — who in the first-round vote supported another conservative candidate, Paloma Valencia — cautioned that De la Espriella, who has often cast himself as a reactionary firebrand on the stump, still needs to secure more moderate Colombian voters to lock up a June 21 win.
"He needs to reach out to the middle more," Andrade said. "For the final round he needs to be a little more centrist. His speeches need to be moderated a bit so people in the middle also feel he'll take care of what needs to be done" in the the social security arena as well.
Although the term-limited Petro, a former leftist guerrilla during the civil war, is widely regarded as an ineffective if not erratic president, the failure of his right-wing predecessor, Iván Duque, to adequately address Colombia's stark socio-economic inequality pushed voters to the left in the 2022 election.
Until Sunday's first-round election, in fact, Cepeda was leading most voter polls.
