The AI Candidate: How Algorithms Built Abelardo de la Espriella

Abelardo de la Espriella arrived at a religious broadcaster's studio this week and spoke with the certainty of a man who had been optimized for the moment. He wanted Plan Colombia 2. He wanted American military bases back. He was a Republican in the United States. He believed Colombia should dollarize its economy. The words came out clean, calibrated, persuasive—the kind of statements that test well with microsegmented audiences. What few people watching understood was that the man delivering them had been constructed by the same logic that built the message itself.

The 2026 Colombian presidential campaign of Abelardo de la Espriella is the first in the country's history built entirely on generative AI. It is not a campaign that uses artificial intelligence as a tool. It is a campaign that uses artificial intelligence to manufacture the candidate. In the videos, he appears taller, broader in the shoulders, with more hair. The algorithms do not simply shape what he says; they shape what he is. They refine him, illuminate him, sculpt him into a version of himself deemed presidentiable by the metrics of engagement and viral spread. He is the render before the building, the entertainment before the attention, the call to the herd before the singular observation of any human mystery.

This is not accidental. De la Espriella is a lawyer who built a fortune defending paramilitaries, the pyramid scheme DMG, and Saab—the Venezuelan regime's front man. He found in artificial intelligence the perfect mirror of his own operating logic: a system constructed on theft, repackaged as innovation, that takes what belongs to others, processes it, and charges for the result without credit or permission. The campaign is a remix of what algorithms found most effective elsewhere, adapted to local color like an airport gift shop treating every traveler as a stupid tourist, even in their own country. It is plagiarism without an author, because plagiarism is the architecture of the system itself. When even that fails, it reaches for what belongs to everyone—the flag, the national team jersey, the Constitution, the police, the military salute—stolen to compensate for what it lacks: imagination.

But De la Espriella is only the local interface of something much larger. On June 4, 2026, while a Harvard commencement speaker joked that the mission of the graduating class was to destroy AI—a joke that contained an honest paradox, that to destroy the system you would have to build another system identical to it, meaning the system would have already won—De la Espriella was posting about his plan to establish the world's largest rural internet association with SpaceX. Read this as a contract offered to a reseller of the nation: rural connectivity with data-capture infrastructure, free, as things always are offered when they cost everything, when you are the product. Musk provides the network. Thiel processes what the network produces. Palantir waits with contracts already drafted. The shareholders of BlackRock salivate. It is an architecture tested in one country, exported to the next, perfected with each iteration.

Colombia is being positioned as a laboratory. Gaza was a testing ground for technologies of control that are then sold to the world. The same logic applies here. Venezuela loses Maduro but keeps the regime for oil. Argentina gets Milei with Thiel's financial infrastructure, testing how far state dismantling can go. El Salvador becomes a megaprison under Bukele's punitive populism. Colombia, the oldest and most expensive case, where the war on drugs was invented as a model of permanent intervention, where herbicides were tested and paramilitaries trained with exportable doctrine. Now it is being offered connectivity, surveillance infrastructure disguised as development, all under the banner of Trump's Make America Great Again.

The real adversary for Colombia does not occupy the Palace of Nariño. It has offices in Miami, Austin, Seattle, and San Francisco. It trades on the stock exchange. It has just offered to connect the Colombian countryside for free—that countryside with so much water, so much fresh water, exactly what is needed to cool the data centers that current AI devours without stopping, poisoning everything around them. De la Espriella is the interface. The system does not distinguish applause from insult because both are current for the same algorithm. It works perfectly for a candidate of high-voltage discourse and shouting loquacity who learned to use transgression as electricity: say something scandalous, wait for the shock, measure the views. Whether they applaud or insult does not matter. What matters is that no one stops looking.

In April 2025, a Twitter account called Hot Girls 4 Zohran appeared—two twenty-year-old volunteers, no official affiliation, inspired by Hot Girls for Bernie, giving away merchandise and memes without algorithmic payment. It was real enthusiasm because there was a real cause behind it. A candidate named Mamdani entered with 1 percent of the vote and won with 50.4 percent in a polyglot, multiracial city where the federal government had turned cosmopolitanism into an argument for repression. The Mamdani campaign did not use generative AI. It simply did not use it, and you could see it in everything: posters with taxi yellow, subway blue, bodega typography, the color of old Bollywood signs, materials in Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, and English. Messages without ornament: Freeze the rents. Fast and free buses. Childcare for all families. No public relations jargon. Just design by humans for humans that made conviction visible and awakened reciprocity. The campaign seemed to say: Fuck AI.

On June 21, Colombia votes. A candidate with a real history, real causes, and real people behind him does not need an algorithm to sculpt him or a filter to broaden his shoulders. Of all the available illusions, choosing the one closest to what is real might be the most revolutionary thing possible.