Colombia: Elections, Internal Crisis & Regional Threat

The first round of the Colombian presidential elections are scheduled for Sunday, May 29. There is a good chance that Colombia will elect its first center-left president in history, and many doubt Colombia’s oligarchy will allow it.

In this dialogue we will evaluate the pre- and post-election environment, the results, the composition of Congress, and threats for Colombia and the region.

In the context of the electoral results, we will evaluate the prospects for peace within a country mired in civil war since 1948, when leftist presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated. Colombia has struggled with social exclusion, paramilitarism, drug cartel violence, and the mass assassination of social leaders in the decades since. We will discuss the effectiveness of the 2016 peace agreements, and the potential for a political awakening in a country plagued by apathy, exhaustion, and inequality.

We will conclude our debate by analyzing the election’s implications for Colombia’s destabilizing role in Latin America and the Caribbean, where it consistently acts in the interests of the United States, which maintains seven military bases in the country. In 2017, Colombia became NATO’s first “partner” in Latin America. Colombian mercenaries participated in the assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and the highest levels of Colombia’s leadership were implicated in mercenary incursions aiming to overthrow or assassinate the president of Venezuela in 2020.

Join us for this discussion on Tuesday, May 31.