Colombia prepares to go to polls in election shadowed by resurgence of political violence | Colombia

M.ateo Pérez Rueda was one internship away from completing his political science degree. The 24-year-old also worked as a bicycle delivery boy and sold fruit salads and juice to fund his passion: Colombian independent digital magazine El Confidente.

On May 4, the military traveled to Briceño, in the western state of Antioquia, to report on long-running conflict between paramilitary forces and opponents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

He stopped responding to his family the next day.

Three long days of suffering followed; Relatives and friends pressed authorities for information until a humanitarian mission confirmed what many feared: Rueda had been kidnapped, tortured and killed by one of the Farc opposition groups known as the 36th Front.

His case has become another symbol of rising political violence, which has reached its highest levels in a decade and made the decades-long internal armed conflict central to this Sunday’s presidential election.

The vote will be a contest between left and right, and two completely conflicting proposals regarding the war that has claimed the lives of almost half a million people.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who cannot run for re-election under the constitution, supported Iván Cepeda, a 63-year-old left-wing senator who is ahead in the polls and is considered the architect of the government’s “total peace” effort to sign disarmament agreements with all criminal groups. Many security experts consider the plan a failure, noting that armed groups have taken advantage of temporary ceasefires to continue expanding, but Cepeda remains committed to the plan.

The two main rivals, far-right lawyer and “outsider” Abelardo de la Espriella, 47, and right-wing senator Paloma Valencia, 48, are promising a return to all-out war once they take office.

There was an increase in guerrilla attacks, murders, kidnappings, forced displacements and massacres during the election period; Last year, right-wing senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot and killed during a campaign event. The violence is widely seen as a reminder that while the landmark 2016 peace deal between the government and the majority of the Farc has reduced violence significantly over the years, it has not completely ended it.

While subsequent administrations were slow to implement the agreement, some Farc groups and other rebel groups refused to sign any agreement, instead increasing their power and size.

“The war has never ended here in Antioquia,” said Jorge Rueda, Mateo’s cousin and godfather, who lives a few blocks from the journalist in Yarumal, just 33 miles (53km) from where the journalist was killed. Although various rebel groups claim a political agenda, most of the violence stems from competition over drug production, retail and smuggling (Colombia remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine), illegal gold mining, logging, and local corruption. “The battle here is about micro-commerce, the other is about gold mines,” Rueda added.

On Monday, more than 50 people were killed in clashes between two Farc opposition groups on the opposite side of the country, in the southern region of Guaviare. Most of them were children and young people who were forcibly recruited by criminal organizations.

Alejandro Chala, a researcher at Fundación Paz y Reconciliación, argued that although the numbers are high, the current moment cannot be compared with the pre-peace agreement period, when the murder rate reached about 80 per 100,000 people; it’s currently around 26 per 100,000.

“The violence is now much more regionally concentrated and largely embedded in the main areas where illicit economic means operate… It obviously creates a lot of media noise, but it doesn’t have the national reach that it has in the past,” he said.

Still, Espriella argues that it is necessary to “free Colombia from crime”, while Valencia says the country needs “total security” rather than “total peace”.

Until recently Cepeda was at the top of the polls while Valencia were in second place; but in the last two weeks Espriella has surpassed him. Since a large portion of voters are still undecided, the outcome is uncertain: If no candidate wins more than half the votes, a runoff election will be held on June 21.

Valencia has been a senator since 2014 and is the grandson of former president Guillermo León Valencia and a staunch follower of former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, whose two terms between 2002 and 2010 were marked by an aggressive military conflict with armed groups, producing limited results and tainted by the “false positives” scandal, in which innocent people were extrajudicially killed and falsely labeled by the military. as enemy combatants.

Espriella is a criminal lawyer and millionaire businessman with a luxurious lifestyle, owning wine and rum brands as well as cattle ranching and real estate investments, but has never held public office. He is a fan of Donald Trump and sparked controversy during the campaign by telling a radio host that he won over female voters because of the size of his genitals.

With his neatly trimmed beard, he models himself after Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s populist autocrat who imprisoned at least 2% of his country’s adult population as part of a controversial crackdown on gangs. Espriella promised to follow the Salvadoran mano dura (iron fist) approach and build 10 maximum security “mega prisons”.

“It also carries some elements of this new counterculture against political correctness,” said Sandra Borda Guzmán, associate professor of political science at Universidad de los Andes. [Argentina’s president] Javier Milei and Donald Trump.”

Although Espriella has openly expressed his admiration for Trump, the US president has so far refrained from endorsing either him or Valencia, unlike recent elections that featured far-right candidates in Hungary, Honduras and Argentina.

Guzmán believes one reason for this may lie in Espriella’s recent past: For years, he served as a lawyer for the likes of Colombian businessman Álex Saab, who is considered the main financial leader of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and was recently deported to the United States by acting president Delcy Rodríguez.

“As a criminal lawyer, Espriella has long been linked to individuals prosecuted or extradited by the United States, and these close ties remain worrisome for Washington. Therefore, he is not an ideal candidate for the White House,” Guzmán said.

He believes another reason why the United States did not openly seek to interfere in the election was because “they eventually realized that these interventions were having the exact opposite effect of what they wanted,” noting that Trump’s attacks on Petro – calling him a “sick man” and a “drug trafficking leader” – resulted in the Colombian president increasing his popularity.

Petro, a former member of a smaller rebel group that signed a peace agreement years before the Farc agreement, is Colombia’s first left-wing president. His approval ratings are considered high for a president nearing the end of his term; many analysts attribute this to falling poverty rates, as well as expansions of government social programs and increases in the minimum wage.

Despite losing his godson Mateo to the internal armed conflict, Jorge Rueda believes Colombia is in a better situation.

“I might angrily say something different, but I wholeheartedly believe that Colombia has made tremendous progress in recent years… such as giving young people better opportunities to avoid participating in armed conflicts. But there are some areas that have never improved,” he said.

He added that the absence of the state in these areas allows criminal groups to take control and eliminate any possibility of private investment. “That’s why I think it’s so important that Mateo’s case gets attention, and his death serves to show that there is still a forgotten part of Colombia, and that neglect is what keeps the war so intense.”