Will Colombia Elect Its Own Bukele?

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On the campaign trail, he sports a black bulletproof vest and addresses vast crowds from behind armored glass panels. He greets his followers, whom he calls “defenders of the homeland,” with a military salute. He promises to restore Colombia’s security with an “iron fist.”

Meet Abelardo de la Espriella, the front-runner of Colombia’s presidential race. Ahead of a contentious runoff on Sunday, security is top of mind for many voters, as violent crime has soared in the country in recent years. De la Espriella, a 47-year-old criminal defense lawyer and political newcomer, has cast himself as the “tough on crime” candidate. His campaign promises include the construction of megaprisons, an end to peace talks with armed groups, and an all-out war against criminal organizations. It’s a strategy that he argues has proved successful elsewhere in Latin America.

On the campaign trail, he sports a black bulletproof vest and addresses vast crowds from behind armored glass panels. He greets his followers, whom he calls “defenders of the homeland,” with a military salute. He promises to restore Colombia’s security with an “iron fist.”

Meet Abelardo de la Espriella, the front-runner of Colombia’s presidential race. Ahead of a contentious runoff on Sunday, security is top of mind for many voters, as violent crime has soared in the country in recent years. De la Espriella, a 47-year-old criminal defense lawyer and political newcomer, has cast himself as the “tough on crime” candidate. His campaign promises include the construction of megaprisons, an end to peace talks with armed groups, and an all-out war against criminal organizations. It’s a strategy that he argues has proved successful elsewhere in Latin America.

“What I’m proposing is something that has already worked in other latitudes in El Salvador,” de la Espriella told a Colombian radio station this year, referring to the crackdown led by El Salvador’s notorious hard-right president, Nayib Bukele.

De la Espriella is going up against Iván Cepeda, a senator from Colombia’s leftist ruling party who promises to continue the work of term-limited incumbent Gustavo Petro—peace negotiations, truces, and social programs to address the root causes of violence. Faced with starkly different visions for a Colombia beset by violence, voters will choose whether to give de la Espriella’s Bukele-style platform a chance.

A group of de la Espriella supporters chants while holding a banner featuring an image of Jesus and the slogan “Live the Miracle Homeland” in Spanish in Lourdes Square on May 20.

As Latin America grapples with growing insecurity, right-wing leaders have increasingly embraced Bukele’s model to promise order. In 2022, Bukele declared war on gangs, imposing a state of emergency that allowed mass arrests of suspected gang members. Under his government, El Salvador, once known as one of the world’s most violent countries, has seen homicide rates fall sharply to some of the lowest reported levels in the region. Last year, the homicide rate dropped to 1.3 per 100,000 people, according to official figures, down from 53.1 per 100,000 in 2018, the year before Bukele took office.

“Bukele has become the poster child of the one who was able to reduce insecurity in a really complex place that had a horrible reputation for extreme violence,” said Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, the Andes director for the Washington Office on Latin America. “Since there are no other examples that have worked to the same extent … everyone jumps to this [strategy].”

One admirer is U.S. President Donald Trump, who has prioritized combating crime and drug trafficking in Latin America as a key pillar of his foreign policy and national security strategy. As he seeks closer cooperation with right-wing governments across the region, Trump has praised Bukele as an “example” for other nations in the Western Hemisphere.

Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Peru have all sent senior officials to El Salvador to study Bukele’s security policies and assess if parts of his model can be replicated at home. In Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa unveiled the country’s first Bukele-style megaprison last November and plans to open a second facility, with capacity for 15,000 detainees, in 2027.

In Colombia, de la Espriella promises to go even further. He has vowed to build 10 megaprisons in remote areas where “the sun doesn’t shine.” The facilities would be built, financed, and operated by private companies, while security would be provided by the state and staffed by veterans and reservists, de la Espriella said in a recent interview. He has also pledged to kill or capture 10 criminal group leaders in his first 90 days in office.

But security analysts warn that his approach is unlikely to work in Colombia. “This strategy is attractive to voters because it sounds like a magic wand. It’s sort of like: ‘We’ll just crack down, and then this issue will disappear,’” said Elizabeth Dickinson, the deputy director for Latin America at the International Crisis Group. “What we’ve seen from a long history of evidence is that there is no magic wand. There is no single solution that can address the complexity of organized criminal groups, particularly as they have emerged in Colombia.”

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Violence in the country is driven by a patchwork of armed actors, including left-wing insurgencies, paramilitary successor groups, and urban gangs that profit from a portfolio of illegal trades, such as drug trafficking, illegal mining, and extortion. A peace deal struck a decade ago between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the government helped reduce violence, but poor implementation of both the accord and rural development programs, including coca crop substitution plans, allowed dissident factions to emerge.

When Petro, the country’s first leftist president, took office in 2022, he sought to break with decades of hard-line security policies. Instead, his “total peace” approach proposed negotiating with armed groups and criminal organizations while tackling the conditions that fuel violence through investments in healthcare, education, and public services.

But as Petro prepares to leave office, Colombia faces its worst humanitarian crisis in a decade, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. None of the negotiations has led to a peace deal, and armed groups have expanded their ranks and territorial reach over the past four years, according to the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, or Pares, a Colombian think tank.

Given the sheer size of these criminal groups, solving Colombia’s security crisis by imprisoning armed fighters is unlikely to work, said Laura Bonilla, the deputy director of Pares. In El Salvador, that approach worked because the country is small, its gangs are largely urban, and their numbers are relatively limited. But the picture in Colombia is entirely different. “Colombia has at least 35,000 armed fighters,” Bonilla said. “Where are you going to put them all? Are you really going to capture all of them in areas that they themselves control?”

The Colombian state has never managed to control its vast territory, which is roughly 54 times the size of El Salvador. More than 40 percent of the country is covered by the Amazon rainforest, while three mountain ranges provide ideal seclusion for armed groups. Despite its high defense spending and billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, Colombia still lacks the personnel and firepower needed to impose order throughout the country.

“ It’s a bit of a false narrative to say that you could turn up the military pressure because, in fact, Colombia’s military and police are already operating on all cylinders,” Dickinson said. “The capacities of the security forces really are stretched to their limit.”

Bukele’s security model has also been shadowed by allegations of arbitrary arrests, due process violations, and abuse of detainees from human rights group such as Cristosal and Amnesty International, prompting fears that Colombia could follow a similar path under de la Espriella. Since the crackdown began in 2022, Salvadoran authorities have arrested more than 90,000 people, including thousands of minors, while rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths in custody.

Those fears have made some Colombian voters wary of de la Espriella, including Carmen García, a 42-year-old human rights activist residing in Tibú, a conflict-ridden town near the Venezuelan border. “Those who do wrong must be held accountable, but the problem is that the people who will pay are innocent ones, especially young people,” she said.

Hundreds of de la Espriella supporters gather ahead of the first round of voting, chanting and waving balloons along with Israeli and Colombian flags, in Lourdes Square on May 20.

But many Colombians see things differently. In the first round of voting, de la Espriella captured over 43 percent of the electorate, with more than 10 million votes, putting him in first place ahead of Sunday’s runoff. Recent polls show him besting his opponent, Cepeda, by about 8 percentage points. The margin is notably wider than in the first round, in which Cepeda trailed behind de la Espriella by nearly 3 percentage points.

If de la Espriella is elected, analysts say Colombia could follow a trajectory more similar to Ecuador than El Salvador. Despite adopting Bukele-style policies in 2024, Ecuador recorded a historic number of homicides in 2025, fueled by gang violence. Unlike El Salvador, Ecuador is a hub for the international drug trade. According to analysts, the killing and extradition of gang leaders have triggered deadly, new turf wars over drug trafficking routes while military forces deployed to streets, borders, and prisons have been stretched thin.

What lies ahead for Colombia may not be the orderly crackdown de la Espriella promises. “Things could always end up much worse,” Bonilla said. “In my view, Colombia is much closer to becoming Ecuador than El Salvador.”

Christina Noriega is a journalist and photographer based in Colombia. She covers human rights, gender equality, social movements, and the environment. X: @c_mnoriega

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