Abelardo de la Espriella, the new president of Colombia, likes to be compared to Donald Trump. He too wants to seal off the borders, pump shale gas and enrage the progressives. He’s rich, narcissistic and macho, all the same. Unknown at Christmas, he led a cannon campaign, firing at point-blank range at the ruling left. He is a populist who denounces caste. A provocateur who horrifies the right-thinking. Cool in front of the cameras, vociferous in meetings in his armored cage, his cynicism worked wonders. Like when he defended drug traffickers and paramilitaries, the source of his fortune, in court.
The former lawyer has a name that evokes conquistadors. The nickname is even fiercer: the Tiger promises to be merciless with cartels and guerrillas. With useless civil servants too: he claims to dismiss 700,000 of them, 40% of the civil service.
He is the Tiger like the Argentinian Javier Milei is the Lion. He also copies Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador. By trimming his beard identically, he looks like two tattooed inmates in the Salvadoran mega-prison look alike in their white uniform. He promises to build around ten high-security penitentiaries and to feed the gangs he locks up there with bread and water. The Tiger is cruel, obviously.
He ended the campaign by donning the jersey of the national football team, something borrowed from the Brazilian Bolsonaro. And like him, gives the military salute in a meeting like a putschist officer. Abelardo de la Espriella is an opportunist, ready for any loan as long as it shocks the media clergy.
Abelardo de la Espriella will have difficulty imposing his liberal and security program
This harlequin outfit would probably not have been enough to get him elected, without the prevailing winds. First the massive rejection of “total peace” with the armed groups in which Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president of Colombia, persisted. This outstretched hand did not disarm them. On the contrary, crime is exploding. Colombia remains the leading cocaine producing country and the sanctuary of guerrillas for sixty years. Bogota, a capital of violence.
In the residential areas of the capital, you have to have seen the army of ragpickers who search the trash every evening pushing their handcarts between the armored cars to have an idea of social injustice. They are hunter-gatherers taken from the forest and put on clothes before throwing them into the megalopolis. Miserable, they survive from day to day. Gustavo Petro never succeeded in implementing his ambitious social and environmental reforms, but he still rescued 800,000 Colombians from precariousness. Abelardo de la Espriella will have just as much difficulty imposing his liberal and security program, because he too lacks a majority in Congress. Unless there is a putsch, the Tiger will have to change its stripes.
The consolation of the Trumpists
Another boon which favored his election, the groundswell sweeping Latin America. After Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru is preparing to move to the right. The recount of the ballots drags on, but victory should not escape Keiko Fujimori, who follows in the footsteps of her father, Alberto Fujimori: liberal recipes in economics and carte blanche to the army to defeat the gangs. Even Cuba is officially turning its back on socialism. Under American pressure, the Party has just approved the establishment of the market economy. A historic break trumpeted, but which remains to be implemented. Enough to console the Trumpists disgusted by the demonstration of weakness constituted by the truce concluded with Iran.
