COMMENTARY Colombia should have shed its violent, centuries-old polarization when its civil war ended, but its political pendulum still swings far right and far left — especially in this presidential election.
To appreciate how far right-versus-far left Colombia has become, start not with campaigns, but with clothing.
When U.S. candidates want to show they stand for their national values, they wrap themselves in the American flag. When South American candidates want to show they stand for la patria, they wrap themselves in the national soccer jersey.
Right-wing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro draped his country’s Amarelinha, or Little Yellow, futebol attire around his political project.
Left-wing former Bolivian President Evo Morales donned La Verde, or The Green, on the stump as often as he wore his party’s trademark indigenous chompas.
Now we have populist right-wing Colombian presidential front-runner Abelardo de la Espriella co-opting La Amarilla (The Yellow) as the uniform of his Defenders of the Homeland movement against his left-wing rival, Senator Iván Cepeda, in the June 21 run-off election.
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But while past partisan adoption of the camisetas looked like little more than patriotic swagger, this time the practice — and the reaction of De la Espriella’s opponents to it — feel more indicative of the toxic, polarized ditch where Colombia’s presidential election, and its politics generally, seem to reside right now.
In a video, Congressman and De la Espriella supporter Daniel Briceño asserts that Colombia’s national soccer jersey, when it’s worn by pro-De la Espriella voters, “represents the defense of the freedoms that Cepeda wants to take away from us.”
In turn, Cepeda calls the De la Espriella campaign’s adoption of La Amarilla “an opportunistic act” — a “theft of something that belongs to the entire nation” that might even be illegal.
To which one can only say to both Briceño and Cepeda: Seriously?
This is a soccer jersey, guys, not Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of Chiquinquirá.
Colombia's jersey war feels less like patriotic swagger and more like the toxic, polarized ditch where its politics and presidential race seem to sit now.
What’s most distressing about their hysteria, though, and about the De la Espriella-Cepeda match-up itself, is how they reflect the reality that Colombia’s political center not only doesn’t hold anymore — it may not even exist anymore.
In many ways it hasn’t for the past decade, since the country finally ended its half-century-long civil war in 2016.
Angry protests
It’s no coincidence that the armistice was inked under the centrist government of then President Juan Manuel Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Peace Prize.
Santos understood that Colombia’s enormous potential can’t be unlocked until it heals the violent, centuries-old conservative-liberal fractures that make for dramatic reading in García Márquez novels, but lousy civics in the 21st century.
Rather than find that center, Colombia’s political pendulum has kept swinging from hard right to hard left.
From 2018 to 2022 it veered way derecha (right) under then President Iván Duque. Derechista neglect of Colombia’s epic socio-economic inequality, among the world’s worst, led to angry mass street protests — and to the pendulum veering way izquierda (left) with the election of former leftist guerrilla and current President Gustavo Petro.
Thanks to Petro’s izquierdista neglect of public security — and the post-civil war criminal groups plaguing Colombia today — his Historic Pact movement and its candidate, Cepeda, appear likely to lose to De la Espriella, as the pendulum flies reaccionario again.
If you want a really startling sign of how extremist Colombian politics have gotten, consider that Uribismo — the movement named for former conservative President Alvaro Uribe that used to be the standard bearer of the country’s right — is now considered centrist, and just another centrist also-ran at that.
In last Sunday’s presidential first round, the Uribista candidate, Senator Paloma Valencia, captured just 1.6 million votes, or 7% compared to De la Espriella’s 44%.
The 47-year-old De la Espriella — El Tigre, or The Tiger, to his fans — is the new, harder right-wing darling who on Sunday night called Cepeda a “miserable criminal” and Petro “a miserable drug addict,” as he furiously championed a militarized iron fist against Colombian crime.
So what? you’ll ask. What country isn’t dishearteningly if not violently polarized these days — including the U.S. under right-wing President Donald Trump?
Here’s what, I’d say: America’s judicial and other institutions are sturdy enough to absorb it and rebound; Colombia’s aren’t yet — as centrists like Santos realized when they pushed for the 2016 peace deal.
So we’ve come to this moment in Colombia — when the wearing or not wearing of a soccer jersey defines you as a “miserable criminal.”
