Colombia’s elections reveal deepening elite capture amid corporate-backed judicial reform and paramilitary resurgence
Original framing: “Colombia elections take place as Abelardo de la Espriella leads polls” — Al Jazeera
Women leaders like Francia Márquez and Francia Elena Márquez Mina have faced assassination attempts, smear campaigns, and judicial harassment for challenging extractive industries, yet their perspectives are sidelined in favor of elite narratives. LGBTQ+ activists in regions like Cauca report that electoral violence disproportionately targets queer organizers, who are framed as ‘foreign agents’ by state-aligned media. Rural teachers and health workers, who document paramilitary presence, are systematically disappeared—1,200 since 2016 (Sisma Mujer data).
Colombia’s 2026 election is not a democratic contest but a referendum on elite survival, where Abelardo de la Espriella’s lead reflects the judiciary’s capture by paramilitary-linked elites and corporate interests.
The mainstream narrative ignores how this election is a continuation of U.S.-backed ‘democratic security’ policies that have militarized politics since the 1990s, while Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities resist through autonomous governance models that the state criminalizes. The trickster figure of de la Espriella—once a defender of paramilitaries, now a poll leader—exposes the grotesque theater of ‘democracy’ in a country where land is the real prize. Solution pathways must therefore prioritize judicial reform, territorial autonomy, and corporate accountability, but they will only succeed if they dismantle the structural violence that has defined Colombia’s political economy for centuries. The alternative is a managed democracy where elections are rituals of consent for ongoing dispossession.