Trump’s Colombia Prize

President Trump has made a muscular pivot to the Western Hemisphere. He sent special forces to capture the Venezuelan president. He deployed a fleet of warships in waters close to Cuba. He has aggressively supported right-wing populist candidates across the region, with some success.

Today my colleague Annie Correal, a Latin America correspondent currently based in Bogotá, writes about Trump’s biggest prize to date: Colombia, where his favored candidate just ousted one of the few remaining left-leaning governments in the region.

(P.S. As a proud resident of Wales, I can’t help but encourage you to read today’s Around the World item. Spoiler alert: Yes, everyone does know everyone else.)

The right-wing victory in Colombia is Trump’s victory, too

By Annie Correal

On Sunday night, Abelardo De La Espriella, a 47-year-old lawyer who calls himself “The Tiger,” appeared before a crowd in Barranquilla, on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia. He introduced himself from behind bulletproof glass as the country’s new president. Fireworks lit the sky.

De La Espriella’s supporters weren’t the only ones celebrating. Roughly 3,000 kilometers north, some in the White House were exuberant, too. “He Won, BIG!” Trump wrote on social media. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called De La Espriella to congratulate him and said the administration was looking forward to working together.

De La Espriella’s apparent win — the voting appears to be very close, with a customary review of votes still continuing — would signify the end of Colombia’s first left-wing government, under President Gustavo Petro. It adds another right-wing populist leader to a growing roster in the region. It’s a victory for Trump, who has been throwing his weight behind right-wing leaders in Latin America from Honduras to Argentina as he seeks to rid the region of leftist influence.

But the push isn’t just about ideology.

Trump has said he wants to use U.S. military force to “eradicate” cartels and gangs across Latin America. Doing so requires allies who are willing to enter into contentious agreements that allow the U.S. military to conduct joint operations in their territory. That hasn’t been an easy sell, and so far, only a few countries have officially gotten on board.

In Colombia, as one Latin America analyst put it to me recently, Trump has secured his biggest trophy to date.

‘Retribution’

The Trump administration’s first choice for conducting these sorts of operations would most likely be Mexico, which Trump has long blamed for flooding America with fentanyl. But leaders in Mexico have been adamant that they will not allow the U.S. to strike cartels within its borders.

In some ways, Colombia is almost as important.

It supplies about two-thirds of the world’s cocaine and its armed groups are known to partner with those in Mexico. Several powerful Colombian trafficking groups have already been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S.

U.S. officials do not necessarily think that they can stop the flow of drugs by targeting these groups and their leaders, experts have told me. Decades of anti-narcotics efforts in Latin America have shown that if one cartel head is taken out, another soon steps in as a replacement.

Instead, experts say, Trump’s new military push is part effort to exercise greater control over the region, and part spectacle for his base — an attempt to show that Trump is hitting back against the powerful criminal groups he has blamed for causing mayhem at home.

This month, the U.S. killed a leader of the Tren de Aragua gang in Venezuela in a joint operation with Venezuelan forces. Trump celebrated it as a major victory. He posted a video on Truth Social of a building exploding and invoked the names of crime victims in Georgia and Texas, calling the operation “retribution.”

The Shield of the Americas

That is the kind of thing we could expect to see in Colombia with a willing right-wing ally like De La Espriella in charge, experts say.

De La Espriella’s pledge to crush his country’s armed groups is part of what got him elected. Many Colombians are fed up with their country’s decades-long, drug-fueled armed conflict, which has recently seen a resurgence of violence under the leftist President Petro.

Unlike Petro, De La Espriella has applauded the U.S. military strikes on suspected drug boats, which have killed over 200 people off South America’s coast, and has said he’d engage in similar operations in Colombian waters. He has also said he’s eager to enroll Colombia in Trump’s regional security coalition, the Shield of the Americas.

Around 20 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have enrolled in the coalition to date. So far, only Ecuador and Guatemala have signed on to do joint operations with the U.S.; other countries have resisted formal agreements, fearing pushback from citizens, after a long history of bloody U.S. interventions in the region.

De La Espriella, who ran on a nationalist platform, has said he has a similar red line. But experts say there is little doubt he will allow Trump to do what he wants, including conducting operations in one of Latin America’s largest countries.

His victory means that Brazil and Mexico — the region’s first and second largest countries — are now the only significant left-leaning holdouts.

Brazil has an upcoming election in the fall; Trump has already met at the White House with the right-wing contender, the son of the jailed former leader Jair Bolsonaro. I expect we will be hearing more from Trump on that race before long.

Related: Trump said that Venezuela “has become a happy country.” Its people disagree and anger has mounted.

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