Colombian right-wing candidate vows US-backed airstrikes against drug cartels

Abelardo de la Espriella walks into his campaign headquarters in Bogotá wearing an impeccable suit and a grin. The 47-year-old lawyer, who calls himself "El Tigre," has a simple message for Colombia: elect him in May, and within ninety days he will rain bombs on the drug cartels that have strangled the country for decades. Not just Colombian bombs. American ones. Israeli ones too. He says it plainly, without hedging—this is what he will do, and he will need Washington and Tel Aviv to do it.

De la Espriella is the leading right-wing challenger to the incumbent left, and the polls show him in a dead heat with Iván Cepeda, the leftist candidate and heir to President Gustavo Petro. He represents a movement called "Defensores de la Patria"—Defenders of the Homeland—and he speaks with the confidence of a man who has never had to negotiate with anyone. His plan, as he describes it, is a "shock offensive": immediate airstrikes on narco-terrorist camps, aerial fumigation of cocaine crops, and a massive expansion of the armed forces equipped with first-generation weapons, artificial intelligence, drones, and money. He also wants to build mega-prisons modeled on the one Nayib Bukele constructed in El Salvador, and he supports loosening gun laws while shrinking the state by forty percent.

The candidate is a millionaire with dual Colombian and American citizenship who spent years living luxuriously in Italy, singing opera, and running businesses in law, construction, and alcohol. He claims to be an outsider to politics, unburdened by the compromises of the traditional right. He says he speaks almost daily with former president Álvaro Uribe, the controversial figure who is Cepeda's sworn enemy. He admires Donald Trump, Javier Milei, and Nayib Bukele—men he sees as strong leaders willing to break rules. He wrote a book called "Death to the Tyrant" attacking various dictators, including Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, and he has suggested that Venezuela's new president, Delcy Rodríguez, is a Trump asset who will cooperate or face worse than Maduro did. He believes Venezuela will become Colombia's first commercial partner under a new regime.

But De la Espriella's past creates complications. His critics point out that he has represented controversial clients: paramilitaries, drug traffickers, and Alex Saab, a businessman accused of being a front man for Maduro. He does not apologize for these relationships, calling them purely professional matters. When asked about an earlier interview in which he said he planned to "disembowel" the left, he walked it back—he meant ending their narrative, he clarified, not harming people physically. He was wearing a cap with a snarling feline face when he said this.

Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine producer, despite Petro's four years in office and his recent hardening of military operations under pressure from Washington. Petro attempted to negotiate peace with numerous armed groups but failed. The country is fractured by armed conflict, and the May 31 presidential election—along with legislative elections on March 8—is unfolding in an atmosphere of violence. Candidates face attacks, kidnappings, and threats. De la Espriella travels with heavy security: soldiers, police, bodyguards on motorcycles and in armored cars. He says he is heavily threatened and in grave danger, though he adds with dark humor that he arrived too late to the "distribution of fear."

The election will pit two opposing visions against each other. Petro tried negotiation and failed. De la Espriella promises force—American force, Israeli force, Colombian force, all coordinated and unleashed. He positions himself as the man with the will to do what others will not. Whether Colombian voters will embrace that vision, or whether they will choose to continue Petro's leftist project through Cepeda, will be decided in less than four months. The country watches, and waits, under heavy guard.