Author: Karen Dayana Mosquera Palacios
This is an English translation of the article originally published in Spanish by La Ceiba. Read the original version at laceiba.lat.
On May 31, the third most populous country in Latin America will decide far more than its next government.
Colombia as Hinge: The Right Turn in Latin America and What This Election Can Break or Confirm
Latin America is living through one of the most intense electoral cycles of the past decade in 2026. Peru, Colombia, and Brazil will elect presidents throughout the year in a regional landscape where the second Trump administration has ceased to be a distant actor and has become a direct variable in the internal politics of several countries. U.S. foreign policy is openly transactional and interventionist: ranging from the military operation in Venezuela at the start of the year and the tightening of the blockade against Cuba, to threats to take control of the Panama Canal, diplomatic and tariff coercion against Mexico, and pressure on Brazilian justice following the conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro for his coup attempt.
Recent cases are notable. In Honduras, Trump posted on his X account, just hours before polls opened, that he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernández — convicted of drug trafficking in the United States — if Nasry Asfura, a candidate from the same party, won. After a disputed counting process that dragged on for months, Asfura was declared the winner and Juan Orlando regained his freedom. In Argentina, Trump openly conditioned U.S. financial support on a victory by Javier Milei’s party in the October 26, 2025 legislative elections. Two countries, two elections, the same hand. The pattern is not new, but it has never been so explicit.
The Latin American political map clearly shows that the three major progressive left governments still standing in the region are Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Mexico maintains a degree of stability under Claudia Sheinbaum. Brazil, however, votes in October, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will seek a fourth term. Colombia votes now. If this government falls, the bloc fractures.
The effect is not automatic. Brazil has a different scale, a different capacity for resistance, and its own internal and regional dynamics. But symbolism matters in politics, and a defeat in Colombia three months before the Brazilian elections would be, at best, a rhetorical gift for those seeking to prove that the Latin American progressive cycle has failed and is reaching its end. At worst, it would represent a blow to the close and deeply integrated relations built under the Petro and Lula governments, and would put at risk the possible consolidation of a bloc of resistance to Trumpian hegemony in the hemisphere. What Colombia decides on May 31 does not belong to, nor does it only affect, Colombia.
The Electoral Map: Three Candidates, Two Poles, and a Weakened Center
Colombia is living through a historic moment in its democratic life: it is the first time the left is not only defending the power it won four years ago, but also seeking to preserve it and consolidate it as a long-term national project.
The March 8, 2026 legislative elections marked a milestone. The progressive forces represented in the Pacto Histórico — the ruling party — achieved their best-ever result in Congress and won more votes than any other party in the country, securing 25 seats. That is not a majority; Congress remains dominated by the right, but it is a sign that there is an electorate that did not vote for Petro and his party as a protest vote, but is actually identifying with a project.
That changes the nature of the dispute. It is no longer about whether the left can reach power. It is about a political force that has been consolidating itself and now contests whether it can stay there. That shift is what makes these elections different from all previous ones and complicates the analysis of Colombia from both within and outside.
A few days before the first round, the electoral landscape is defined by a polarization that leaves no room for the center. Fourteen candidates registered with the National Registry, but voting intention has concentrated around three figures. Iván Cepeda Castro, senator for the Pacto Histórico, leads all polls with between 38% and 40% of voting intention. He is followed by Abelardo de la Espriella of the Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland) movement, at around 24%, and Senator Paloma Valencia of the Centro Democrático (Democratic Centre), with approximately 19%.
Centrist figures such as Sergio Fajardo and Claudia López fail to gain traction in the polls. Their candidacies illustrate something deeper: Colombian society is divided into two blocs and there is no oxygen for intermediate positions.
The fragmentation of the right-wing vote and the nonexistent center is, paradoxically, the factor that could most benefit Cepeda. His campaign hopes that the contest between De la Espriella and Valencia for the conservative electorate will allow him to win in the first round — unprecedented in Colombian history for a left-wing candidate.
Cepeda represents continuity with Petro’s political project and promises to deepen policies and reforms that Petro was unable to consolidate. De la Espriella and Valencia, though rivals, agree on the fundamentals: dismantling current government policies, a hard line against criminal structures, and the return of Colombia to the role of Washington’s main ally in the region. These are two distinct national visions, and the consequences of each extend well beyond Bogotá.
The Pressure No One Names, but Everyone Feels
To say there is major external interest in the results of Colombia’s presidential elections is not speculation — it is a reality. And since January 2026 it has an official name: the “Donroe Doctrine.” The concept — fusing Donald Trump’s name with the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, and asserting in essence that “America is for the Americans” — was adopted by the U.S. president himself following the military operation in Venezuela. What was conceived in the 19th century as a warning to European powers not to intervene in the Western Hemisphere is today the ideological justification for Washington to openly intervene in the political affairs of its southern neighbors, under the argument that the Western Hemisphere is its natural and inviolable sphere of influence.
Colombia is not a peripheral case within that doctrine. It is a central one. The country shares more than 2,200 kilometers of border with Venezuela and hosts approximately three million Venezuelan migrants, meaning that any instability in the neighboring country immediately becomes a matter of Colombian domestic policy. For Washington — which has explicitly raised the possibility of incorporating Venezuela as the 51st U.S. state — it is strategically important that the next government in Bogotá align itself with its regional policy and support its position toward Caracas.
A government that continues the Petro line, which maintained diplomatic relations with Maduro and openly criticized U.S. pressure on Venezuela, represents a genuine hemispheric inconvenience for the White House.
The case of Ecuador illustrates how that pressure can also operate through closest neighbors. President Daniel Noboa, invoking a lack of control and cooperation by the Colombian government on border security and the greater fiscal and military burden Ecuador has had to assume to contain criminal structures operating in that zone, decided as a retaliatory measure to impose 30% tariffs on Colombian imports in February, raised them to 50% in March, and announced they would reach 100% as of May 1.
Two readings can be made of this unilateral decision. The first: the Ecuadorian president, despite acting against Ecuador’s international obligations, wants to pressure Colombia into adopting a stance more aligned with his country’s position on cross-border security.
The second, a political reading: to tip the electoral balance toward candidates closer to his positions. Just days ago, Centro Democrático candidate Paloma Valencia announced a call she held with Noboa, in which the Ecuadorian president offered to reduce tariffs to 75%. The maneuver exposed what was already evident: the Colombia-Ecuador border is also a political front where the Colombian election is being fought with tariffs and diplomatic pressure.
When one observes the patterns shared between these Ecuadorian presidential decisions and those of President Trump, it is impossible not to ask what role Washington plays in the decisions being made from Quito. Is it mere ideological influence? Is Noboa signaling to Trump to consolidate himself as his best ally in the region? Or is he acting on concrete directives from Washington? What is clear is that these policies — which are openly contrary to international law — have been directed exclusively at governments that Washington has declared opposed to its interests.
It should be recalled that, before his dispute with Colombia, Noboa imposed a 27% tariff on Mexican imports in 2025, shortly after the United States imposed tariffs on Mexico. That decision came amid diplomatic tensions following the 2024 rupture in relations, when Ecuadorian police violently broke into the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest former Vice President Jorge Glas, violating the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
Colombia and Mexico have something in common: they are governments Washington has repeatedly identified as contrary to its interests. That Noboa has exerted economic and diplomatic pressure on both, with a synchronization that is hard to ignore, is an open question that no one has formally answered, but that many in the region are asking.
Adding to this chain of external pressures on the Colombian elections is the Honduras Gate scandal, which serves as an illustration of an intervention model that does not arrive as a declaration of war, but as coordination between local and international actors and carefully orchestrated media positioning.
In the leaked audio recordings, a voice identified as that of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández claims the Israeli government played a decisive role in his pardon and release in the United States, speaks of creating an information cell to launch operations against left-wing governments in the region, and explicitly mentions that “some dossiers against Mexico and Colombia are coming,” all with the backing of actors in Honduras, the United States, Israel, Argentina, and other conservative sectors of the region.
Regardless of the arguments used to dismiss these revelations, what is certain is that this story gave names, figures, and conversations to a network that many in the region suspected existed. With that precedent on the table, asking whether Colombia will be the target of interventions to influence the presidential result is not a rhetorical question. It is a genuine one.
Who Does Washington Back?
Explicit support from the Trump administration for a specific Colombian candidate has been, until now, less visible than in other recent electoral processes in the region. That is probably no coincidence. Open endorsement before the first round can produce the opposite effect in a Colombian electorate deeply divided over U.S. interference in internal affairs. The strategy Washington appears to be adopting is to reserve that support for the second round, where all conservative sectors will seek to unite to defeat Iván Cepeda.
The absence of a declaration does not mean the absence of a position. The tension Petro maintained with the White House throughout his government — criticizing U.S. foreign policy on migration, peace, and security, from the war in Gaza to military operations against vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific as a prelude to the military incursion into Venezuela — left a mark that does not disappear with a visit.
Washington has sent clear signals: the decertification of Colombia as a reliable partner in the fight against drug trafficking, combined with the State Department’s designation of Colombian armed groups as terrorist organizations, directly aligns U.S. security policy with the agenda of right-wing candidates and constitutes an explicit criticism of the negotiated peace policy that the Petro government called “Total Peace.”
Added to this is a detail that should not be read as a neutral gesture: the United States will be an international observer at the May 31 elections. The National Electoral Council confirmed it accredited 86 members of the U.S. embassy to monitor the vote in various cities across the country. The official statement framed it as a cooperation strategy to strengthen the transparency of the process. But this action comes after the U.S. government publicly expressed concern about threats against right-wing candidates such as Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella — which raises an uncomfortable question: what does Washington mean by transparency, and exactly who is it watching?
Despite the fact that open hostility between Trump and Petro eased following the Colombian president’s visit to the White House in February, relations between Bogotá and Washington remain the most strained of the recent democratic period.
If there is a second round — to be held June 21 — that implicit support will likely become explicit. And when it does, the Colombian election will formally become yet another episode in the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin American electoral processes, and a possible win for the regional reconfiguration Washington has been executing under the “Donroe” doctrine.
Violence and Fraud: The Scenarios Nobody Wants in Colombia
While international attention focuses on the name of Colombia’s next president, Colombians are living through this process under pressure and division without parallel in their recent democratic history.
Polarization is so deep that Colombia will go to the polls on May 31 without the three leading candidates having shared a single presidential debate — each deflecting with the excuse of not wanting to participate in polarized settings. It is difficult to speak of democracy and reconciliation in a country so marked by violence when those aspiring to the Casa de Nariño (Colombia’s presidential palace, equivalent to the White House) cannot even agree to attend a public debate.
The absence of debate does not occur in a vacuum. The tone was set by the assassination of presidential pre-candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay in 2025 — the first signal that this campaign would not be an ordinary process. To that targeted political violence is added the violence experienced by local leaders in regions where the state barely reaches, and the violence unleashed directly on the civilian population.
In a single week, between April 24 and 30, dozens of violent and terrorist actions were recorded: drone attacks on military installations, cylinder bombs on roads, and an explosive charge detonated as vehicles passed that killed 22 people and wounded 37. Several attacks failed to hit their targets but added to a sustained campaign of terror, as reported by INDEPAZ. The National Registrar, Hernán Penagos, also requested special reinforcement from security forces for several areas of the country where illegal armed groups directly threaten the conduct of the electoral day. In those regions, voting is not a civic routine. It is an act of courage.
Questions about the transparency of the electoral process complete the complex picture. Before the March legislative elections, President Petro denounced the possibility of electoral fraud based on the alleged manipulation of the software used by the National Registry for vote counting, sparking a national debate about the reliability of the system.
Oversight bodies have defended its soundness and highlighted that the software has undergone technical audits, including international reviews. That this debate exists just days before a presidential election in such a polarized country — with external actors who have declared interests in the outcome — is not a minor detail.
What Colombia Is Telling the World
Colombia votes on May 31 under the conditions this article has described: with high levels of violence, without debates, and with doubts about the transparency of its electoral system — while the hemisphere’s leading power has already militarily threatened the country, cut its diplomatic aid, calls its outgoing president a criminal, and operates militarily in its waters under the “Donroe” Doctrine, the ideological justification with which Washington has declared this hemisphere its operational backyard.
This is not a fictional scenario. It is the real one.
In that context, what Colombians decide on May 31 is a political act of a magnitude that goes far beyond choosing a government. It is an imperfect response, taken under pressure, to the most urgent question Latin America faces today: Can a Latin American democracy decide for itself under the “Donroe” Doctrine?
Brazil will hear the answer in October. Mexico will read it immediately. Washington already knows what it wants. The only real unknown is what Colombians will decide.