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Far-Right Upstart de la Espriella Advances to Runoff in Colombia's Presidential Election
Leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro has refused to accept the preliminary results, claiming there were 800,000 or more additional voter IDs in the nation's election system than in the electoral census.
Jun 02, 2026
Abelardo de la Espriella—a far-right political upstart who promises to wield an "iron fist" against criminals and who emulates right-wing presidents, including Donald Trump in the United States—secured the most votes in the first round of Colombia's presidential election and will advance to a second-round runoff, the country's electoral authorities announced over the weekend.
Leftist Sen. Iván Cepeda, the handpicked successor of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, had been expected to win the first-round contest, based on voter surveys. However, de la Espriella and his running mate, former Finance Minister José Manuel Restrepo Abondano, won 43.74% of the vote, with Cepeda and Aida Marina Quilcué Vivas, a senator and Indigenous leader, garnering 40.9%, according to preliminary results published by the National Electoral Council.
Addressing a jubilant crowd in Barronanquilla—a city he lost—de la Espriella, who represents the Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland) party, triumphantly declared, "We will punish the enemies of Colombia!"
"Today, the people spoke," said the 47-year-old attorney, who is also known as the Tiger. "For the first time in political history, an independent man, without silencers and with the necessary character, has won."
“Gustavo Petro, do not dare to ignore the results of the elections because the people are going to rise up and they will punish you," he added.
Petro has refused to acknowledge Sunday's preliminary results due to alleged irregularities, claiming there were roughly 800,000–885,000 additional voter IDs in the election system compared with the official electoral census.
Cepeda, 63, addressed the discrepancy during a speech to supporters in Bogotá, saying that "there is a gap we want to verify... We are talking about 885,000 people."
People rallied in Bogotá and elsewhere in Colombia on Sunday in support of Cepeda and the incumbent Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) party.
LAS CALLES DE BOGOTÁ ESTALLAN CONTRA ABELARDO DE LA ESPRIELLA pic.twitter.com/AmVvaOSIYw
— Julian D. Martinez (@jumartinezp) June 2, 2026
The global leftist coalition Progressive International (PI) issued an urgent alert "regarding conduct by US Sen. Bernie Moreno that appears to constitute a direct violation of Colombia’s electoral law" amid reporting that the Ohio Republican traveled to Colombia to try to facilitate an alliance between de la Espriella and establishment conservative candidate Sen. Paloma Valencia with the goal of defeating Cepeda. Moreno and the candidates denied that any such meetings were planned.
David Adler, PI's co-general coordinator, told Colombian National Radio that US corporate media are "orchestrating a smear campaign" looking "for new ways to defame the candidate Iván Cepeda, alleging links to drug trafficking, just as they did" with Petro.
Adler also reported police officers conducting entry checks at polling places, telling voters to "stand at attention for the homeland"—one of de la Espriella's campaign slogans.
De la Espriella—a criminal defense attorney who has represented mass murderers, drug traffickers, money launderers, paramilitary militiamen, and others—ran on a "law and order" platform and promised to wield an "iron fist" against criminals. He has pledged to build megaprisons like the violence-plagued Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) built under Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whom he once called "the best example in the world of what a country must do."
“The 'Total Peace' policy ends with me," de la Espriella previously said, referring to Petro's effort to end Colombia’s long-running internal conflict through a broad, multi-track approach.
"Total Security will begin," he said. "The public [security] forces... must be strengthened through an agreement with the United States. We want to be part of the Shield of the Americas, and we want to build a major policy with the United States to end drug trafficking."
De la Espriella has said he wants to withdraw Colombia from the United Nations and forge closer ties with the United States and Trump, one of the right-wing leaders for whom he has expressed admiration. He has also repeatedly praised Bukele and Argentinian President Javier Milei.
According to El País, American flags and "Make America Great Again" hats were seen at Sunday's victory rally in Barranquilla. Israeli flags were also spotted; de la Espriella has vowed to restore ties with Israel, which Petro severed in 2024 due to the country's annihilation of Gaza. Under Petro, Colombia also formally intervened in South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
De la Espriella's desire for closer cooperation with Washington comes as the Trump administration illegally bombs boats in the Caribbean Sea, including off the Colombian coast, and Pacific Ocean, claiming—without providing evidence—that the vessels were smuggling drugs.
Trump also ordered an invasion of Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro on dubious narco-terrorism charges, and the US is taking part in military operations against alleged drug cartels in Ecuador, where civilians have reportedly been killed and tortured during the campaign.
The US Department of Justice is now reportedly investigating whether Petro has any links to narco-traffickers—a claim that the president vehemently denies.
On the domestic front, de la Espriella has vowed to "put God back in the classrooms" as part of a revival of Christian conservatism. He has also been accused of misogyny for comments—including telling female journalists that he gained many women's votes due to the size of his genitals—and of homophobic harassment of Valencia's running mate, Juan David Oviedo.
In an incident that alarmed many Colombians, de la Espriella laughingly boasted on national television about how, in his youth, he tortured and killed cats by blowing them up with fireworks.
The second round runoff between de la Espriella and Cepeda is scheduled for June 21. Valencia has thrown her support behind de la Espriella, but having won less than 7% of the first-round vote, and with centrist candidate Sergio Fajardo's 1 million votes up for grabs, observers say it's anyone's race to win—or lose.
“As the saying goes," Colombian political strategist Miguel Jaramillo Luján told Al Jazeera on Monday, "whoever makes fewer mistakes will be the winner.”
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After Castro Charges, Critics Ask: When Are Indictments Coming for Trump-Hegseth 'Extrajudicial Murders'?
"Apparently you're not allowed to kill people in international waters now?" said one progressive organizer.
May 21, 2026
Over the last eight months, at the direction of President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the US military has bombed at least 57 boats and killed close to 200 people—among them fishermen, a young man known in his town for his indoor soccer playing, and working people who had recently struggled to make ends meet—in what human rights experts have called "murders" and extrajudicial killings.
But the indictment filed this week regarding unlawful killings by government forces in the Caribbean region had nothing to do with Trump's boat bombing spree, which the White House has claimed it aimed at stopping drug trafficking. Instead, the target of the indictment filed by the US Justice Department was 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro, who was charged with one count of conspiracy for his alleged role in shooting down planes that flew into Cuba's airspace in 1996.
The planes were operated by an anti-Fidel Castro group, Brothers to the Rescue, and four Cuban-Americans were killed in the operation.
In expressing support for the indictment, US Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.), a Cuban-American immigrant, said that "there will be consequences to pay if you harm American citizens in international waters, in international airspace for no reason at all, and believe me, this was no reason at all."
Michael Galant, a member of the secretariat of the Progressive International, commented with feigned surprise: "Apparently you're not allowed to kill people in international waters now? Someone tell Hegseth."
The organization's co-general coordinator, David Adler, added, "I simply do not understand how we, as a country, tolerate the hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro for defending Cuban airspace—while our own government celebrates the extrajudicial assassinations of innocent fishermen sailing across the sea below," while Ryan Grim of Drop Site News noted the indictment also followed the bombing of a school in Iran—an attack that investigators said was likely carried out by the US.
The indictment of Castro, noted the Progressive International, was set to coincide with Cuba's Independence Day and came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who has long desired regime change in the communist country, mused that the Cuban government has "plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people"—echoing his criticism of Iran, another target of the US military under Trump.
The timing of and ramp-up to the indictment was "a piece of political theater calibrated to one audience only: the Miami exile lobby that has spent decades pursuing its commercial and ideological vendetta against the Cuban Revolution," said the group's Cabinet.
"US officials themselves acknowledge they do not believe Cuba is an imminent threat, nor actively planning to attack American interests—and yet in the same breath, the administration has laundered a set of alarming claims about Cuban drone acquisitions, presented with all the breathless urgency of a casus belli," the Progressive International added, referring to Axios' reporting last weekend on claims from an administration official that Cuba is preparing to attack the US with drones—a report that ultimately acknowledged the Cubans are not planning any preemptive strikes on the US but are rather thought to be strategizing on self-defense as the US intensifies its anti-Cuba rhetoric and continues the oil blockade it imposed in February.
The Cuban embassy in the United Kingdom on Thursday said it rejected US claims about the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue plane, which it called "an irrefutable act of sovereign self-defense" that took place after "25 deliberate, calculated violations of our national airspace" by the exile group.
"To criminalize our nation, the US manipulated the official [International Civil Aviation Organization] investigation, deliberately erasing the first six minutes of radar and radio recordings to conceal the territorial incursion," the embassy asserted. "The narrative of an attack in international waters is an absolute juridical fraud."
In a column at Common Dreams Thursday, Codepink co-counder Medea Benjamin added that she was in Cuba in 1996 when the planes were shot down. The leader of Brothers to the Rescue, José Baulto, she said, openly stated that he was "trained as a terrorist by the United States," and said after one mission in which the group dropped leaflets over Havana that the group was seeking "confrontation.”
"The Cuban government repeatedly warned Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and international aviation authorities that these flights were illegal and dangerous. US officials knew the risks," wrote Benjamin. "The hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro nearly 30 years later is staggering, given the long history of anti-Cuban extremists operating from US soil to wreak havoc against the island with bombings, sabotage, and airline terrorism."
Those US-based extremists include the perpetrators of the 1976 midair bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a commercial airliner carrying 73 crew and passengers, many of them teenage members of Cuba’s junior Olympic fencing team.
The Trump administration's boat bombings, meanwhile, have been called likely "war crimes" by some legal experts and "murders" by others. The White House has insisted the US is in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels in Latin America, but no conflict has been officially declared. In at least one instance, US military members were ordered to bomb the survivors of an initial strike—a clear violation of international law.
The US in the past has treated suspected drug trafficking as a criminal issue—not one to be dealt with militarily. Before the boat bombings began, one top military legal adviser warned Pentagon officials, “There is no world where this is legal," and said carrying out the attacks could expose everyone involved, from top White House officials to rank-and-file service members ordered to carry out the strikes, to legal liability.
"The same US government now pursuing charges against Raúl Castro has itself been carrying out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, strikes that have killed at least 193 people since September 2025, with no transparency or due process," wrote Benjamin.
Following the Castro indictment, the Progressive International called on "governments, movements, and peoples of conscience everywhere to call out this escalation for what it is—a naked effort to recolonize Cuba and the hemisphere at large—and to stand firmly against it."
"We have seen this playbook before—in Iraq, in Libya, in Venezuela, and in other sites of manufactured consent for illegal war across the world. The Progressive International will not stand silent as it is deployed against Cuba," said the group. "Hands off Cuba."
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'This Is Insane': Alarm Bells Follow New Report of Looming US Plan to Attack Cuba
"Trump is preparing to take the US into another illegal war against Cuba," warned one progressive critic of the US president. "We must stop him. It’s not too late."
Apr 15, 2026
Is Cuba next in line for a US attack?
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said it could be, and USA Today on Wednesday cited "sources familiar" with the matter who said that the Pentagon is "quietly ramping up" preparations to wage war on the socialist nation if Trump gives the order.
On Monday, Trump flippantly declared that “we may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this," referring to the illegal US-Israeli war of choice on Iran that's left thousands of Iranians dead or wounded, including hundreds of children.
Trump has also said that he believes he’ll “be having the honor of taking Cuba,” language echoing the 19th century US imperialists who conquered the island along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain in another war waged on dubious pretense.
"Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want," Trump said of the island and its 11 million inhabitants.
The USA Today report—authored by Kim Hjelmgaard, Rick Jervis, and Francesca Chambers—sparked widespread alarm among advocates for peace.
"This is not a drill. Trump is preparing to take the US into another illegal war against Cuba to appease the Miami mafia," Progressive International co-general coordinator David Adler said Wednesday on X. "We must stop him. It’s not too late."
Cubans—who have been subjected to generations of privation and hardship due largely to the internationally condemned US economic embargo of their island—have mostly shrugged off Trump's threats, with some observers noting that Cuba's socialist era has outlasted a dozen American presidents.
Responding to a question about a possible US attack on his country, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said Sunday on NBC News' "Meet the Press" that “if that happens, there will be fighting, and there will be a struggle, and we will defend ourselves, and if we need to die, we’ll die, because as our national anthem says, ‘Dying for the homeland is to live’.”
Numerous observers expressed shock, but not surprise, that Trump—the self-proclaimed "peace president" who has bombed 10 countries, more than any other US president—is setting his sights on Cuba, which American presidents since Thomas Jefferson have coveted.
Trump has been threatening Cuba since his first administration, when he systematically rolled back the Obama administration's diplomatic normalization with the island's socialist government. He also activated a provision of the Helms-Burton Act allowing lawsuits over property confiscated after the Cuban Revolution.
On the last day of his first term, Trump re-designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, a move critics slammed as absurd given that Cuba has never carried out any acts of terrorism—unlike the United States and the militant Cuban exiles it harbors, who have a decadeslong record of terrorist bombings and other attacks, as well as numerous failed or aborted attempts to assassinate former revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.
Since returning to office, Trump has ratcheted up military threats and economic pressure on Cuba, which was already reeling from decades of US sanctions and the inefficiencies of centralized state control. Trump tightened the embargo by severely restricting fuel imports, exacerbating an energy emergency characterized by blackouts and deadly suffering among the most vulnerable Cubans, including sick people and children.
Last month, US Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) introduced a war powers resolution aimed at preventing Trump from attacking Cuba without congressional authorization as required by law. Numerous war powers resolutions related to Iran, Venezuela, and Trump's extralegal high-seas boat bombings have failed to pass.
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