September 9, 2026
Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Barranquilla, Colombia, to meet with President Abelardo De la Espriella. The visit was part of a three-country regional tour, and it was the clearest sign yet of how fast, and how completely, Colombia’s new government has aligned itself with Washington. The two governments signed what they are calling the “Barranquilla Accords,” two memoranda of understanding on civil nuclear cooperation and on critical minerals and rare earths, part of a broader U.S. push to secure supply chains outside China, which currently dominates rare-earth production and refining.
What is happening in Colombia right now looks less like the normal give-and-take between allied governments and more like a playbook, one increasingly familiar across Latin America, associated with Donald Trump. Trump endorsed De la Espriella during the campaign, explicitly comparing De la Espriella’s movement to his own MAGA. De la Espriella wrote back, crediting Trump with paving the way against the region’s “entrenched powers” and adding that in Colombia, “we have now begun to follow the same path.”
De la Espriella’s government began in turbulence. Three days after his August 7 inauguration, a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia, killing more than 330 people and displacing hundreds of thousands. The government estimates reconstruction will cost at least $30 billion and has secured less than half so far. Even so, De la Espriella moved quickly on his campaign promises alongside the disaster response, a choice that says something on its own: he found the bandwidth for ideological moves in the middle of a national emergency.
Domestically, the pattern begins with controlling the message and deliberately confronting institutions that can challenge the government. A leaked directive sought to limit ministers’ interviews to “friendly” outlets. Two days later, a presidential directive centralized official communications under the presidency and required ministers to obtain authorization before speaking to the press, the same press-management instinct that has defined Trump’s own White House.
At the same time, De la Espriella has moved to cast his predecessor as the source of the country’s problems and insecurity. Through a series of executive resolutions, he formally closed the “Paz Total” tables Petro’s government had kept open, revoking negotiators’ status and reclassifying those armed groups as military targets. He warned governors and mayors that none of them may hold their own contacts or negotiations with these groups, closing off any local alternative to his approach. Throughout, he has portrayed the previous administration as complicit in the violence it failed to stop, the standard opening move of a leader positioning himself as the rescuer of a country his predecessor supposedly ruined.
The same instinct extends to what his government itself calls a “cultural battle,” in which religion sits at the center of public life. “In this hand I will carry a Bible, and in this one a rifle to fight crime,” De la Espriella said during the campaign. His Ministry of Education has already proposed allowing churches to run public schools, promising to take “Marx out of education and put God in.” Teachers’ groups rejected the proposal, and legal scholars have questioned its compatibility with Colombia’s constitutional protections for a secular state.
Abroad, the same playbook is producing an equally sharp shift. On August 10, amid the earthquake response, Colombia recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Syrian territory occupied since 1967. Only one other government has taken that position: Trump’s first administration, in 2019. Not Milei, not Bukele, not Noboa. De la Espriella went further than his regional counterparts. Netanyahu thanked him; roughly twenty countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, condemned the move. He has also pledged to move Colombia’s embassy to Jerusalem, echoing Trump’s 2018 decision.
Colombia is also moving deeper into Washington’s security architecture. It joined the U.S.-led “Shield of the Americas,” and days later, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that De la Espriella had authorized “joint military operations” with U.S. forces. Unconfirmed reports also suggest Colombia is now considering withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, which would end two decades of membership. The reports follow a Washington-led campaign urging Latin American governments to abandon the Rome Statute and come weeks after Venezuela withdrew, consistent with De la Espriella’s pledge to reconsider Colombia’s relationship with the UN, the OAS, and the Inter-American human rights system.
The clearest picture of this presidency, though, may come from a single video. Last month, footage circulated of De la Espriella walking slowly past twenty-three body bags after a military strike, triumphant music playing as he narrated the operation for the cameras. Spanish media compared the staging to the security-branding style of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, whose mega-prison model De la Espriella has praised. Colombia’s Human Rights Ombudsman responded directly: “We should not normalize dead bodies becoming part of the backdrop for a public statement, nor death becoming a way to display authority.”
Colombia has lived through more than 50 years of internal armed conflict. A government there should not need reminding, one month into office, that human dignity does not disappear with death, or that even war has limits. This display offers an early sign of how De la Espriella intends to exercise power.
How close Colombia moves toward Washington matters less than what it costs the country to get there: its democracy, its institutions, its foreign policy. But that traffic runs both ways. Whatever room exists for resistance to this playbook in Washington sets the parameters of what is possible everywhere else it shows up, Colombia included.
Last August I spent a week in the United States, participating in the Democracy Defenders Roadshow, swapping notes with community college students packed into a lecture hall across Northern New Jersey, standing before a large, reflective crowd at the Ethical Society in New York City, and sharing a long table at a community dinner in Philadelphia, plates going around while the conversation did too. What stuck with me was not really about Colombia. It was the realization that people up there in the United States do not fully grasp how closely, and how anxiously, the rest of the world is watching them, not just what happens, but whether the United States resists this playbook and the authoritarian tide behind it. What is unfolding in Barranquilla matters, but so does what happens up there. That is the part I tried to leave people with in New Jersey, in New York, in Philadelphia: what is unfolding in Barranquilla is not just Colombia’s problem to solve.