Colombian Right Blames Petro for Cauca Violence as Presidential Race Intensifies

A bomb detonated on the Panamericana highway in Colombia's Cauca department on a Saturday afternoon, killing at least fourteen people and wounding thirty-eight more. The blast, which occurred in a tunnel near the municipality of Cajibío, struck vehicles traveling one of South America's most vital trade routes. Within hours, the attack became the centerpiece of a bitter campaign argument about how to govern a country increasingly fractured by armed violence.

President Gustavo Petro had staked his presidency on a policy called "total peace"—a negotiation strategy aimed at bringing multiple armed groups to the table simultaneously. The strategy had already drawn fierce criticism from the right, which saw it as capitulation. When the Cauca bombing occurred, right-wing candidates seized the moment. Paloma Valencia, the standard-bearer of the Centro Democrático party and protégé of former president Álvaro Uribe, directly blamed Petro for the escalation. She called his government complicit with violent actors, pointing to his willingness to negotiate with figures like Calarcá and allow them public platforms. Valencia countered with her own slogan: "total security," a direct rhetorical inversion of Petro's approach. She proposed Uribe himself as her defense minister and promised to reactivate arrest warrants against criminals who had been brought into peace talks. Abelardo de la Espriella, the far-right candidate, went further still, declaring armed groups "military objectives" and promising to hunt them down like vermin once in office.

The violence in Cauca was attributed to dissident factions of the former FARC, with Petro naming a commander known as Marón as responsible. The military announced it was checking for additional explosives on the highway. The government's response underscored the security dilemma facing the country: armed groups had grown stronger during Petro's tenure, yet his negotiation strategy remained fundamentally at odds with the military-first approach his opponents championed.

Meanwhile, the electoral calendar was accelerating. The left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda, who leads all polling, had spent months avoiding public debates, preferring to campaign in plazas and controlled settings. On a Saturday in late April, he broke that pattern. From Sumapaz, Cepeda challenged both Valencia and De la Espriella to televised debates on substantive policy questions. He framed the challenge as a move away from what he called the "comfortable exercise" of insults and toward serious discussion of development and equity. Both right-wing candidates accepted immediately. Valencia remarked that Cepeda had finally shed his fear; De la Espriella called him a coward for having hidden so long. The debates, once unthinkable, were now set to happen—though Cepeda insisted conditions would be "rigorously negotiated" beforehand.

The Green Party, a centrist force, voted to endorse Cepeda's candidacy, though the decision split the party. Some members saw it as a betrayal of the party's independence; others celebrated the alignment with the left. Separately, the far-right movement Defensores de la Patria, De la Espriella's vehicle, was leading in the recruitment of poll workers for the first round, with nearly eighteen thousand citizens signed up to monitor voting—more than double the number from the ruling Pacto Histórico.

On the border with Ecuador, a new crisis was unfolding. President Daniel Noboa had imposed one-hundred-percent tariffs on Colombian goods, citing Petro's failure to combat drug trafficking in the frontier region. The tariffs threatened to collapse legal commerce while potentially enriching criminal networks. Valencia visited the border and promised that her first presidential act would be to militarize the Cali-Popayán-Pasto corridor and call Noboa to negotiate a reset. She criticized Petro for pursuing trade with Venezuela instead of neighboring countries. The border had become another campaign battleground, with the right positioning itself as the party of order and diplomatic competence.

The electoral machinery continued its work. The national registry began printing ballots for the first round, scheduled for May thirty-first. Thirteen candidates would appear on the ballot, plus an option for blank votes. If any candidate withdrew, their name would remain printed but votes for them would not be counted. Cepeda and his running mate Aída Quilcué occupied the first position. The security situation remained dire enough that the defense minister announced a reward of up to one billion pesos—roughly two hundred seventy thousand dollars—for information preventing attacks on any of the candidates. The campaign had become a contest not only over policy but over the very possibility of holding elections safely in a country where armed groups still held significant territory and firepower.