The U.S. relationship with Colombia was fraying.
Just five months ago, President Trump threatened military action against the country. He called its leftist president “a sick man,” accusing him of “running cocaine factories.” And the decades-old alliance with Latin America’s third most populous country — a pivotal player in the U.S. antidrug war — briefly seemed on the verge of unraveling.
Then came Sunday’s presidential election in Colombia.
With the apparent victory of Abelardo De La Espriella, a Trump-endorsed, right-wing outsider who has vowed to destroy narcotraffickers with military might, Colombia is poised to vault solidly back into Mr. Trump’s good graces.
Mr. De La Espriella’s triumph, the latest in a conservative resurgence and anti-incumbent wave sweeping Latin America, gives Mr. Trump a key right-wing ally as he seeks to expand U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere.
It proved, yet again, that the norm-breaking endorsement of an American president in a Latin American election could help propel a populist wave. This, in a region scarred by decades of intervention from Washington but also fed up with drug-fueled violence.
Now, Mr. Trump will have an enthusiastic ally at the helm of Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine and a key player in the U.S. president’s increasingly militarized battle against drug trafficking.
Mr. De La Espriella’s presidency raises the possibility that U.S. forces will become more deeply involved in fighting Colombia’s illegal drug organizations as Mr. Trump clamors to send American troops to combat cartels in places like Mexico. Though Mr. De La Espriella has spoken out forcefully about preserving Colombia’s sovereignty and has ruled out a U.S.-led “incursion,” he supports increased intelligence sharing and operational support.
The new push has been welcomed by many disillusioned Colombians but has raised concerns among critics who worry that a purely military approach would lead to more bloodshed without making any meaningful dent in drug flows.
Colombia’s departing leftist president, Gustavo Petro, openly quarreled with Mr. Trump even as many of his South American neighbors have fallen in line.
The United States, after deposing former President Nicolás Maduro in January, now holds outsize sway over Venezuela, where last week it killed the leader of a transnational gang in a joint strike. The Pentagon recently began joint military operations against drug gangs in Ecuador, the world’s largest transit hub forcocaine. And Bolivia welcomed back U.S. drug agents on its soil for the first time after two decades of leftist government.
Mr. De La Espriella will “probably end up being the best partner for the United States in Latin America,” Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, a Republican born in Colombia, said in an interview.
Mr. Trump appeared elated by his victory: “He Won, BIG!” he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday night.
Following El Salvador’s lead, Mr. De La Espriella has promised to build remote megaprisons and has called for an all-out military assault against drug trafficking groups, raising concerns that his iron-fist approach could erode civil liberties and lead to civilian casualties.
“There is no liberty without security,” he said during his victory speech on Sunday. “There is no democracy without authority.”
Mr. De La Espriella has hailed the joint strikes in Ecuador as a potential model. He wants Colombia to join a recently created coalition between the United States and other Latin American countries to combat cartels.
And Mr. De La Espriella has celebrated the U.S. military strikes against suspected drug smuggling boats that have killed more than 200 people in South American waters, and which a range of legal experts say are illegal, extrajudicial killings. Mr. De La Espriella has said that his own military would shoot down planes and boats carrying drugs off Colombia’s coast.
“The U.S. administration will be looking for an approach which is kinetically focused,” said Kevin Whitaker, the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 2014 to 2019. “It is not centered on law enforcement, on achieving judicial outcomes, as had increasingly become U.S. and Colombian policy.”
The United States helped bolster Colombia’s military by investing nearly $15 billion in Colombia over more than 20 years, to purchase attack helicopters, intelligence hardware and help rural regions transition away from coca, the plant mixed with chemicals to make cocaine.
While the funds helped weaken Colombia’s once largest guerrilla army, which profited from drugs, it failed to disrupt the global cocaine trade over the long run, experts say.
Cocaine production, driven by global demand, has now reached record highs. Smuggling networks are moving cocaine by speedboats, submarines or cargo containers to Mexico, the United States and Europe. And the groups that control the drug trade have grown stronger over the past decade.
Mr. De La Espriella won over Colombians alarmed by the worsening security situation under Mr. Petro.
Mr. Petro, whose drug policy focused on seizing cocaine and incentivizing farmers to replace coca with legal crops, largely resisted Mr. Trump’s pressure to enact more hard-line measures. That prompted Mr. Trump to accuse him of allowing drug trafficking to flourish and to impose economic sanctions on him.
That is expected to change under Mr. De La Espriella, a criminal defense lawyer with no previous government experience who, according to preliminary official results, beat Mr. Petro’s would-be successor in one of Colombia’s closest elections ever.
“The general tone will probably be a much more positive relationship where the U.S. demands things or asks for things, and Abelardo is willing to give the U.S. those things,” said Kyle Johnson, co-founder of the Conflict Responses Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Colombia.
For one, Mr. De La Espriella has vowed to use airplanes to spray herbicide over thousands of acres to kill coca plants, a tactic Mr. Trump has pushed for after Colombia abandoned aerial fumigation in 2015 because of health concerns and a court ban.
There could also be a shift in Colombia’s extradition policy.
Mr. Petro, skeptical of extraditions, mostly sent many low and midlevel traffickers to the United States for questioning, prosecution and to build cases against transnational smuggling.
Mr. De La Espriella could please Mr. Trump by prioritizing the capture of higher-ranking drug traffickers or extraditing those under U.S. indictment who are sitting in Colombian jails, analysts say.
But Mr. Whitaker, the former ambassador, cautioned that prioritizing drug leaders without tackling the groups’ underlying financial structures was often a quick fix for a more complex problem.
“You take out the senior leadership and there are people below who are actually pretty capable,” he said. “The organization is not degraded.”
Mr. Trump is likely to recertify Colombia as a drug control partner after he revoked the certification in September for the first time in nearly 30 years. The decertification threatened millions of dollars in anti-narcotics aid to Colombia and worsened diplomatic relations.
Analysts also said the United States was likely to provide intelligence and operational support to the Colombian military, which has suffered high turnover under Mr. Petro.
“That is an area where joint work would be absolutely fundamental,” said Carolina Barco, the former Colombian ambassador to the United States from 2006 to 2010.
Mr. De La Espriella has spoken with bombast about flexing military power, with drones and artificial intelligence, but he has offered few specifics and has already backtracked on his most ambitious promise.
He said he would reclaim territorial control from armed groups in regions with little government presence within 90 days, a time frame he also included in his platform, but which most analysts said was unrealistic.
He walked back the 90-day window in a recent interview, claiming it was “fake news,” and instead said he would capture or kill 10 drug leaders within 90 days.
Critics of Mr. De La Espriella have called his military-first approach shortsighted after decades of failed attempts, by both the United States and Colombia, to fully eliminate drug production. The tactic, they worry, could lead to human rights abuses and fracture drug groups, sparking more violence without curbing cocaine demand.
Mr. Johnson, the security analyst, said Mr. De La Espriella’s support of Mr. Trump’s lethal boat strikes, which have shown no evidence of slowing cocaine trafficking to the United States, amounted to political theater.
“It’s not effective in fighting drugs, but effective in messaging and saying that you’re fighting drugs, fighting these terrorists and you’re protecting the American people,” he said.
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Barranquilla, Colombia. Annie Correal contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.
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