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The Trump Administration’s Electoral Meddling in Latin America Reaches New Heights in Colombia

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Perhaps in 50 years’ time, the CIA will declassify documents showing how they and Mossad rigged elections throughout Latin America during the mid-2020s.

Colombia held its first round of presidential elections on Sunday. As with the recent elections in Argentina and Honduras, the process was rife with irregularities and clear instances of direct interference, not only from the US but also neighbouring Ecuador. There have even been accusations, as yet unsubstantiated, of massive electoral fraud.

The stakes could not be higher. The two candidates who will be facing off in the run-off elections on June 21, after coming first and second in Sunday’s elections, could not offer more starkly different political visions for Colombia.

A victory for second-placed Ivan Cepeda, a human rights lawyer, would cement the progressive economic, social and environmental policies of his predecessor, Gustavo Petro, who has led Colombia’s first-ever left-leaning government. If his challenger, the hard-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella wins, Colombia will become the next Latin American country to fall under the aegis of Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine”.

Espriella is a former defence lawyer with a history of defending paramilitary leaders, drug traffickers and Alex Saab, the Colombian-born Venezuelan businessman who served as Nicolás Maduro’s Minister of Industry and was recently extradited (again) to the US on money laundering charges.

If elected, Espriella will presumably adopt a Plan Colombia 2.0-style security arrangement with the US, as the former Colombian president (and Epstein client) Andrés Pastrana called for last year. Espriella already travelled to Washington to participate in Trump’s Shield of the Americas summit, as Progressive International’s David Adler recounts in the clip below.

If recent developments in neighbouring Ecuador are any indication, any security arrangements signed between an Espriella government and the US would grant de facto control over Colombian territory to US Southern Command and government agencies like the DEA and FBI. Two and a half years after signing its security agreements with Washington, Ecuador is the most dangerous country in Latin America and the biggest transit point for cocaine.

Espriella has already pledged to recommence the mass fumigation of cocaine fields in Colombia as well as the bombing of terrorist guerrilla camps. Like Argentina’s Milei, he seems to thrive off violence and conflict. In the clip below, he admits, quite proudly, of having tortured and killed cats with fireworks for fun as a child…

As Lee Schlenker reports for Responsible Statecraft, the June 21 run-off “pits diametrically opposed visions for Latin America’s third largest country and economy against one another”:

De la Espriella has promised to end Petro’s “Total Peace” negotiations with the country’s guerilla, paramilitary, and criminal groups; unleash lethal military force to fight drug trafficking, and construct ten maximum-security prisons for low-level criminals just has President Nayib Bukele has in El Salvador.

He also wants to cut taxes for the private sector, resume aerial fumigation of coca crops, join the Trump administration’s “Shield of the Americas” consortium, and issue new concessions for fracking and oil exploration.

Cepeda, on the other hand, intends to double-down on the demobilization of armed actors through peace negotiations and intensify the country’s clean energy transition. He promises to center human rights and combat illicit finance as the cornerstone of his counternarcotics strategy, and seeks to deepen Colombia’s leadership role in Latin America, invest in public education, and prioritize anti-militarism and international law in the country’s foreign affairs.

A Multi-pronged Intervention

The US’ overt meddling in Colombia’s elections began with the arrival in Bogota on Friday, just two days before the election, of the Colombian-born US Senator Bernie Moreno, who has close ties with Trump, Marco Rubio and Colombia’s conservative elite. Moreno was accompanied on his trip by 87 US State Department.

The US State Department delegation was there, ostensibly, to observe Sunday’s presidential election, for which it was formally accredited. However, as Progressive International notes in an official statement denouncing the visit, it didn’t take long for the delegation to begin flouting Colombia’s election laws:

The Consejo Nacional Electoral — including but not limited to its Resolución 09458 of 2025 — requires that all internationally accredited observers refrain from any “demonstration in favor of or against parties, movements or candidates.

The law stipulates clearly that observers are prohibited from engaging in activities of “party-political character”, risking permanent expulsion from the country if they are found to have done so…

Senator Moreno appears to have already violated these laws. According to multiple Colombian and international media reports published today, Senator Moreno has planned a meeting with the two leading right-wing presidential candidates — Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella — with the explicit purpose of facilitating their political rapprochement ahead of a possible runoff against the Pacto Histórico on June 21.

This constitutes an active political intervention in the electoral process by a foreign national operating under the cover of an observer mandate.

The intervention follows a pattern that pre-dates the arrival of the US delegation. Senator Moreno is a member of the Republican Party with documented personal ties to Colombia’s conservative elite — and a public record of hostility toward the Petro government.

Prior to his arrival in Bogota, Moreno issued a number of veiled threats including insinuations that “narco-terrorist” groups linked to the government of Gustavo Petro were threatening the freedom to vote in the elections. He even warned that Washington would not recognize the result “if they are going to count votes that are the result of clear intimidation.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s former advisor Roger Stone, who seems to have a thing for Latin America right now, published an article days before Sunday’s election extolling the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who he says “captures the fury, the fear, and the hope of millions of Colombians who want safety restored, national sovereignty reclaimed, and prosperity to finally be unleashed”:

Colombia’s largely disgraced former president, Alvaro Uribe, whose candidate barely scraped together 5% of the total votes, warned that a vote for Cepeda “could lead to an armed action against the country”. Uribe has now lent his full backing to Espriella.

There was also direct meddling from the government of neighbouring Ecuador. Just days before the vote, Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa met with Espriella to discuss future joint collaboration. In the meeting, clips of which were broadcast on legacy and social media, Noboa pledged to remove all of his government’s 100% tariffs on Colombian goods if Espriella wins the elections.

As we’ve noted in previous articles, Noboa seems quite happy for Ecuador to be used as a beachhead for US military and destabilisation operations in the region — essentially the role Colombia has historically played — even after a majority of Ecuadorians voted against the reinstallation of US bases on Ecuadorian soil.

But the most serious allegation regarding these elections — so far unsubstantiated — is that massive electoral fraud was committed during the preliminary count for the benefit of the Espriella campaign.

Both Colombia’s outgoing President, Gustavo Petro, and his political heir, Ivan Cepeda, have claimed that the election count software was modified, to alter the electoral census, increasing it by close to one million voter IDs, as well as the number of polling stations (from 13,742 to 14,438) and tables.

“The so-called count being transmitted is not legally binding,” Petro wrote on X shortly after the election was called. “Its data is not considered official. As president, I do not accept the results of the preliminary count.”

In Colombia, the “pre-conteo”, or preliminary count, is based on officials tallying the ballot sheets and entering them into an online software. But the “escrutinio”, or scrutinized results, usually take several days to be announced and are ratified by judges.

On Monday, Cepeda partially walked back his allegation by acknowledging that compelling evidence has yet to emerge of massive voter fraud. That said, he still wants to wait for the scrutinised results to be announced before accepting the results of the preliminary count.

The domestic and international legacy media have piled on to debunk Petro and Cepeda’s claims. However, as Colombia Reports notes, their fears are not entirely unjustified:

Petro on multiple occasions said that the National Registry failed to comply with a 2018 court order that ordered the nationalization of the software and shield it from fraud.

The software continues to be the property of the controversial company Thomas Greg & Sons, which is owned by two convicted fraudsters.

Because this company has claimed that its software is a trade secret, IT experts of the Historic Pact have not been allowed to conduct audits that would allow them to confirm the software’s code can’t be altered.

“Without a proper audit of the election software, there can be no full confidence in the process,” said the political party in a statement earlier this month.

The Historic Pact sued the National Registry on Thursday in a last-minute attempt to force the election organizer to guarantee the tracking of tally sheets as they are integrated in the total vote count.

More background from The Bogotá Post:

In 2014, the evangelical political party, MIRA, filed a legal petition against Colombia’s Registrar’s Office, claiming a discrepancy between the ballot pre-count (filled out by citizen juries in a form known as E-14) and the digitized tally of the vote (filled out by officials in the E-24 form)…

After a lengthy four-year legal case, the Council of State (Consejo de Estado), the highest court overseeing the government, issued a ruling in favor of MIRA. It found evidence of destruction of electoral material and inconsistencies between the E-14 and E-24 forms.

Crucially, the Council of State said that it could not confirm that voting software had been sabotaged because it did not have access to the source code of the software during the elections.

Without the original code, it was impossible to know if the system had been tampered with.

The body issued a clear recommendation to prevent repetitions of the dispute in future elections: “Direct the Electoral Organization to acquire the necessary vote-counting software for use within the state—that is, software owned by the organization itself—which allows for full traceability of the vote-counting process from the polling stations through to the official declaration of the election results.”

In other words, it recommended that electoral authorities roll out their own software, rather than relying on third party providers.

But 12 years later, Thomas Greg & Sons remains in charge of the electoral software; according to the Registrar’s Office, purchasing proprietary software and operating the corresponding data centers is not feasible.

Also, Colombia is not the only country to have seen complaints of massive electoral fraud in the past year. In Honduras’ December elections, a recount of the votes took weeks to complete. The favourite to win, Salvador Nasrallah, claimed that some disputed votes were still not counted despite the weeks-long review of disputed tally sheets.

Interestingly, the company that managed the ballot count in Honduras, Colombia-based Grupo ASD, was also involved in the preliminary count of Colombia’s first round elections. Despite concerns raised by the Petro government about the irregularities in the Honduran elections, Grupo ASD apparently refused to withdraw fully from the counting process.

If the fraud is indeed real, Petro’s determination to expose it is likely to make him even more enemies in Washington. In testimony to the US Congress today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Colombia’s “current president” as “problematic”:

Another Pro-Israeli Government?

Whoever does the counting, one thing is clear: on June 21, Espriella will face off against Ivan Cepeda, who obtained just over 9.6 million votes. While the result is being presented by the legacy media and many on social media as a crushing defeat for HP, it is actually the best result ever achieved by the Colombian left in a first round of the presidential election.

This is a remarkable achievement for a party that has faced near-total opposition from Colombia’s landed oligarchy and the traditional political parties and media they control. As Elvin Calcaño writes for Canal Red (machine translation), “Elites like Colombia’s, who base their wealth and power on the possession of land, care more about being in command than money itself”:

[W]ith the left in government they have not stopped making money. There is even data that suggests that some Colombian economic conglomerates have increased their revenues over the past four years. But with Petro and the Historic Pact they do not rule. And they cannot has that.

During his last two and a half years in government, Gustavo Petro has made perhaps an even more powerful enemy: Israel. Not only has he been one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s naked criminality in Gaza; unlike most other heads of state or government, he has consistently turned those words into actions, or at least tried to.

Under Petro, Colombia broke ties with Israel in May 2024, banned coal exports, and expelled Israeli diplomats in late 2025. Petro even signed Presidential Directive No. 07, which institutionalized a pro-Palestinian posture across the Colombian state.

Israel, and by extension Washington, would like nothing more than to reverse these commitments. In Espriella, they appear to have found the perfect tool for achieving that.

The far-right candidate has already pledged to re-establish diplomatic ties with Israel as well as move Colombia’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He would also pursue a strategic alliance with Israel and the US — just as all other right-wing governments have in the region.

If Espriella wins, Colombia will not only join the Trump’s “Shield of Americas” security umbrella; it will also join the Isaac Accords, locking Colombia into deep economic, military, and cultural ties with Israel. As we have previously reported, Tel Aviv is rapidly expanding its influence in Latin America, arguably the region of the world whose national governments had taken the toughest stand against its genocide in Gaza.

One other interesting factoid: Espriella is a naturalised US citizen. If he wins the second-round, he will become the second US citizen to currently govern a Latin American country, after Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa. Is this the beginning of a broader trend?

A Brief History of Interventions

Of course, this is not the first time the US has intervened in electoral processes in Latin America. Washington has been imposing, supporting and toppling governments in the region for almost as long as the Monroe Doctrine has existed. But what makes these latest interventions somewhat different is their sheer number scale and brazen overtness.

In the past eleven months, the Trump administration has explicitly intervened in the electoral processes of at least four Latin American countries: Colombia, Honduras, Argentina and Brazil. In the case of Honduras, Trump not only publicly endorsed Tito Asfura, the candidate of the right-wing National Party, in the December 24 presidential election, he also warned of negative consequences for Honduras if his preferred candidate did not win.

The gangster tactics ended up working like a treat: Asfura came from out of nowhere to seize a narrow victory. An investigation from the New York Times concluded that Trump’s interference likely swayed some voters.

A report on the election from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-wing economic think tank based in DC, found that the “electoral process was… affected by overt foreign interference” and that the intervention by U.S. political figures “exerted undue pressure on the electorate and may have influenced voter behavior.”

In July last year, the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on many Brazilian goods and imposed sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice — all in a bid to keep former President Jair Bolsonaro out of jail for plotting an attempted coup.

Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, had reportedly lobbied Washington to impose the tariffs against his own country, all in order to save his father’s skin. He now faces criminal charges of coercion.

Then, two months later, it was Argentina’s turn. As the Milei government faced the prospect of financial collapse and a humiliating defeat to the Peronists in the mid-term elections in late October, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent came to the rescue with a pledge of “large and forceful” American support — but only if the country voted for Milei.

As Charlie Garcia wrote in a recent op-ed for Market Watch, Washington mobilised all its economic power to buy the election, rescued some Wall Street bigshots along the way, many with close ties to Bessent, and left everyone else holding the tab.

The next target will probably be Peru where the social democratic leader Roberto Sánchez comes head-to-head with Keiko Fujimori in Sunday’s run-off elections. Sánchez is heir apparent to the leftist leader Pedro Castillo, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence after trying to dissolve Congress in 2022.

Then it’s the turn of Latin America’s most powerful economy, Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flavio, will be facing off against sitting President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October. The Trump administration is already stirring the pot by designating two criminal groups in Brazil as terrorist organisations.

As we have already seen in Venezuela and Mexico, this can serve as a precursor to intervention. Lula has blasted the move while trying to warn Trump off playing with Brazilian sovereignty. But since returning to office in late 2022, the three-time Brazilian leader has done nothing to defend the sovereignty of other nations in the region, including Venezuela and Cuba.

 

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3 comments

  1. Carolinian

    Of course one must emphasize that encouraging repressive governments in Latin America has been a very much bipartisan project. I believe Jimmy Carter did make some noises about a “human rights” foreign policy in the region–to considerable outrage from others in DC. There’s the famous line that FDR may or may not have said

    “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”

    but even if the latter the policy supported the Nicaraguan leader.

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  2. The Rev Kev

    Colombia may be in for some grim times and we may see a return to violence in that country as fascism is coming back. I suppose that this is the plan for South America by Trump. To have each country ruled by a fascist dictator aided by the Israelis in cracking down on the people. And if countries get to uppity, station a US fleet off their coast and claim that they are smuggling drugs or something. This will not end well.

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  3. El negociador tartamudo

    Also key to note are the ties between De la Espriella and Saab — an additional lever, as if one were needed, for the US to use as leverage over the far-right candidate should he reach the Casa de Nariño. Saab was a client of Espriella and both allegedly participated in a money-laundering network. The case is moving through US courts and the evidence appears incontrovertible. Notably, Espriella relocated from Miami to Florence around the time the case against Saab was gaining traction. For these and other reasons, some commentators have suggested that De la Espriella’s decision to finally enter the presidential race is motivated by a search for immunity — either as president or as a member of congress.

    (In Colombia there is no “electoral college” — the vote is direct. One additional correction: audits did take place, but within a limited timeframe and under the exclusive control of the Registraduría; what Petro was demanding was the release of the source code, as mandated by a high court ruling since 2018).

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