“El Tigre” wins and Latin America shifts right as the Colombia election results are in
Tonight, Sunday June 21, 2026, Colombia election results are sending shockwaves across the Western Hemisphere.
With 99.96 percent of ballots counted, political outsider and criminal defense lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella has won Colombia’s presidential runoff.
He received 12,955,911 votes (49.65 percent) against leftist Senator Iván Cepeda’s 12,706,523 votes (48.70 percent). The margin of under 250,000 votes is the narrowest in Colombia’s recent history.
Results are preliminary, and Cepeda’s camp is contesting 33,000 polling stations across the country.
But De la Espriella has already spoken directly with U.S. President Trump (@realDonaldTrump) by phone. “I spoke with US President Donald Trump just a few minutes ago. He expressed his support and recognition of our victory,” De la Espriella told supporters.
Secretary of State (@marcorubio) congratulated the president-elect on X:
“Colombia’s best days are ahead. The Trump Administration looks forward to working closely with your incoming administration to advance regional security cooperation, end illegal immigration to the United States, and strengthen our economic ties.”
For readers unfamiliar with Colombia: De la Espriella, nicknamed “El Tigre” (The Tiger), is a millionaire lawyer who became nationally known defending high-profile and controversial clients.
He ran on promises of fighting crime and drug trafficking with an iron fist, building megaprisons inspired by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, lower taxes, expanded oil exploration, smaller government through the elimination of entire ministries, and total confrontation of criminal organizations.
He has zero prior elected political experience, modeling himself after Trump in the United States, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Bukele in El Salvador.
His running mate is José Manuel Restrepo, a former finance minister whose institutional experience balances an otherwise pure-outsider ticket.
De la Espriella also holds triple citizenship: Colombian by birth, Italian by descent, and American by naturalization since February 2023.
A legal challenge to his candidacy over the US citizenship went to Colombia’s courts and was allowed to stand.
A fragmented Congress and the alliances De la Espriella will need
Winning the presidency is only the beginning.
Colombia’s March 2026 congressional elections produced a legislature that De la Espriella’s own Defenders of the Motherland movement cannot control alone, since it is a new organization with limited seats.
His most natural and powerful ally is the Democratic Center, the party founded by former President Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s most influential conservative figure, who publicly congratulated De la Espriella and said he believes he will become the country’s next president.
Paloma Valencia, the Democratic Center’s own presidential candidate in the first round who finished third with 6.9 percent, endorsed De la Espriella before the runoff and brought her voter base with her.
A second likely congressional ally is the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador), a centrist-right traditional party with deep institutional roots and a history of backing law-and-order candidates.
Together with the Democratic Center and Defenders of the Motherland, these three forces should provide De la Espriella a working majority in both chambers.
The main opposition will come from the Historic Pact (Pacto Histórico), the newly unified left-wing party that absorbed Petro’s Colombia Humana, the Patriotic Union, the Alternative Democratic Pole, and the Colombian Communist Party into a single entity in March 2026.
The Historic Pact ran Cepeda as its standard-bearer and now represents the dominant opposition bloc in Congress.
In the Senate, De la Espriella’s likely allied parties control approximately 30 percent of seats against the Historic Pact’s 24 percent, with the remaining seats split among smaller parties open to negotiation. In the House of Representatives, allied parties hold roughly 33 percent against the opposition’s 23 percent.
Petro, whose outgoing government called Noboa’s pre-election meeting with De la Espriella “deliberate interference,” has already accused Israel of hacking the election software, a claim that has been broadly dismissed.
Regional implications: Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru
Three neighboring countries will feel tonight’s Colombia election results immediately, and none more so than Venezuela.
De la Espriella has already stated that any future Colombian diplomatic relationship with Venezuela will be channeled through the US State Department, a dramatic departure from Petro’s warm embrace of Nicolás Maduro, who is now in US custody following his capture in January 2026.
De la Espriella welcomed that particular US action against Venezuela, and that already represented a direct democratic counter-pressure on a border that Colombia and Venezuela share for thousands of miles, one of the most porous and cartel-trafficked frontiers in South America.
Drug trafficking organizations that operated across that border under relative tolerance from Petro’s government will now face a dramatically more hostile state on the Colombian side.
On Ecuador: President Daniel Noboa (@DanielNoboa) met personally with De la Espriella on May 29, 2026, committing to “jointly fight narcoterrorism” and announcing the elimination of a security tax.
Noboa won his own election on a tough-on-crime platform but has struggled against deeply entrenched cartel networks, in part because Petro’s government was actively hostile to cross-border cooperation.
He now has a willing conservative partner in Bogotá instead of an ideological adversary.
On Peru: Keiko Fujimori (@KeikoFujimori), who tonight leads Peru’s still-uncalled presidential runoff with approximately 40,700 votes ahead of leftist Roberto Sánchez with 99.69 percent counted, publicly congratulated De la Espriella and thanked him for having endorsed her before Peru’s runoff “in a decisive moment for Peru.”
De la Espriella had backed Fujimori publicly when it mattered most.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (@MariaCorinaYA), who had also been in contact with Fujimori before Peru’s vote, similarly congratulated De la Espriella tonight.
The mutual endorsements among De la Espriella, Fujimori, and Machado signal an emerging conservative solidarity network across the continent.
Mexico’s radical leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum (@Claudiashein) and Cuba’s communist regime lose a key regional ally today, as the conservative wave reshapes South America’s ideological map in real time.
International relations: Israel restored, China recalibrated
The most symbolically powerful foreign policy change De la Espriella will make is the restoration of relations with Israel.
Outgoing President Petro severed diplomatic ties with Israel in May 2024, banned coal exports to Israel in August 2024, and expelled all remaining Israeli diplomats in October 2025 following the Sumud Flotilla incident.
He also canceled Colombia’s Free Trade Agreement with Israel, worth 273 million dollars in annual exports, a move that directly damaged Colombian coal exporters.
De la Espriella has already signaled the reversal in unmistakable terms: in late 2025, he met personally with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and promised to “strengthen the bonds of friendship and cooperation” between the two countries.
He has also pledged to open a Colombian embassy in Jerusalem, breaking with Colombia’s traditional diplomatic position.
These are not symbolic gestures but concrete economic and diplomatic realignments that Israeli and Colombian business communities will notice immediately.
On China: trade ties will likely continue, since China is a significant buyer of Colombian commodities, but Beijing’s political influence is expected to diminish as De la Espriella reorients Colombia’s foreign policy firmly toward Washington.
Notably, unlike most of Latin America where China has displaced the United States as the dominant trade partner, in Colombia, the North American giant still remains the number one trading partner, ahead of China, a fact that gives Washington real economic leverage and makes the De la Espriella alignment with Trump genuinely consequential rather than merely symbolic.
On Europe: no dramatic changes are expected since De la Espriella’s focus will be domestic security and the US relationship above all else.
Trump, Washington, and a new conservative wave for the hemisphere
This is the heart of tonight’s Colombia election results for Chomcho readers.
De la Espriella is not merely a conservative, he is openly and explicitly pro-Trump. He is a Republican Party donor, a personal admirer of the president, and the first Colombian president-elect to receive a direct Trump Truth Social endorsement.
President Trump posted: “Espriella is a man who will fight, work, and care… He will fight Crime, Drug trafficking, Illegal Immigration, and most importantly, BRING IN LAW AND ORDER!”
De la Espriella confirmed the congratulatory call with Trump on election night.
He has vowed to join Trump’s Americas Counter Cartel Coalition and Shield of the Americas regional security initiatives.
His triple citizenship means he has lived the American experience personally, not just observed it from a distance.
Trump’s priorities for Colombia have always been narcotics control, stopping the northward flow of migrants, and regional stability, and De la Espriella has explicitly pledged to deliver on all three.
We at Chomcho.com hope to see De la Espriella build the kind of warm, productive relationship with Washington that Milei in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador have demonstrated is possible when a strong conservative leader and the Trump administration share values and trust.
If Keiko Fujimori is confirmed as Peru’s president-elect, as tonight’s numbers suggest she will be, the continent’s geopolitical picture looks dramatically different than it did under Petro, Boric, Castillo, and AMLO.
A Latin America that is conservative, market-oriented, security-focused, and aligned with Washington is not just good for the region.
It is also good for the United States, and for the cause of freedom, democracy, and prosperity across the entire Western Hemisphere. 🇺🇸 🇨🇴 #AmericaFirst #ColombiaElections #ConservativeWave
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