A Graffiti that reads: “Bilateral Ceasefire” and “No More War-Related Displacement." Photo: Telesur.
By Silvana Solano – Jun 19, 2026
De La Espriella’s aggressive political project risks reversing decades of fragile social progress and transitional justice.
The history of Colombia is defined by a continuous cycle of structural violence, in which the ruling political elites have long used armed repression to suppress popular social movements and protect concentrated land ownership.
Whenever marginalized sectors of society have attempted to demand democratic inclusion or agrarian reform, the traditional oligarchy has responded by closing democratic channels, driving the nation back into conflict.
This historic cycle faces a critical and dangerous turning point in the June 21, 2026, presidential runoff election. Far-right multimillionaire lawyer Abelardo De La Espriella, running under the “Defenders of the Homeland” movement, won the first round of voting with 43.7%.
Popularly known as “The Tiger”, De La Espriella has built his campaign on an aggressive platform of iron fist policies. His explicit campaign promises, including dismantling the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), resuming the aerial fumigation of peasant lands with glyphosate, and withdrawing Colombia from the United Nations, present a direct risk of regression to the country’s bloodiest historical eras.
1948: ‘El Bogotazo’ and the Decapitation of Popular Hope
To understand the current threat to the peace process, it is necessary to examine the foundational rupture of modern Colombian political history: the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948.
Gaitán was a charismatic leader within the Liberal Party whose platform directly challenged the traditional, bipartisan oligarchy composed of the Liberal and Conservative elites.
His speeches criticized the concentration of wealth, demanded extensive land redistribution for the peasantry, and mobilized millions of marginalized working-class Colombians who had been excluded from economic advancement.
On the afternoon of April 9, Gaitán was shot and killed outside his law office in central Bogotá by Juan Roa Sierra. The assassination triggered an immediate and massive popular insurrection known as El Bogotazo.
Enraged citizens, realizing that the primary institutional avenue for peaceful, democratic change had been violently destroyed, took to the streets. Riots, looting, and arson destroyed much of the capital’s center, while similar uprisings erupted in cities and rural municipalities across the country.
The President Mariano Ospina Pérez responded with immediate military repression. Police and army fired directly into crowds, and the wave of violence resulted in an estimated 3,000 deaths in Bogotá in a few days.
The physical elimination of Gaitán and the heavy-handed state response closed possibilities for institutional reforms, effectively locking the working-class and peasant sectors out of the formal democratic process.
According to historical investigations by the National Center for Historical Memory and other documentation, El Bogotazo was not an isolated riot, but the catalyst for a dark historical epoch known simply as The Violence.
This period, lasting roughly from 1948 to 1958, was characterized by brutal sectarian warfare between armed factions of the Liberal and Conservative parties. The conflict resulted in the death of over 200,000 people and forced more than two million rural peasants to abandon their lands.
The Rise of Liberal Peasant Guerrillas
The aftermath of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s assassination accelerated rural displacement and structural violence across the Colombian countryside. During the decade of La Violencia, Conservative governments deployed symmetric and asymmetric violence against Liberal rural communities.
In response, displaced agrarian workers, smallholders, and peasants began organizing independent armed self-defense enclaves. These rural populations retreated into isolated agrarian frontiers, most notably in regions such as Marquetalia, El Pato, Riochiquito, and Guayabero, to establish zones free from state-sponsored cleansing and institutional abandonment.
Historic documentation indicates that these initial agrarian organizations were not offensive military forces, but defensive structural mechanisms. Lacking formal backing from the traditional Liberal elite in Bogotá, rural communities formed cohesive local governments to manage land production, establish community security, and survive economic isolation.
The state infrastructure chose to treat these autonomous rural communities as a sovereign threat to central authority rather than addressing the underlying inequalities of land tenure.
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By the early 60s, traditional media and Conservative politicians began labeling these peasant enclaves as “Independent Republics” that supposedly undermined the national sovereignty of Colombia.
This political framing served to justify explicit military interventions. Some investigations show that the structural transition from peaceful self-defense to organized guerrilla warfare was a direct result of these aggressive military campaigns.
When the central government launched Operation Marquetalia in May 1964, deploying thousands of soldiers to destroy the peasant communities, the surviving rural leaders formally abandoned defensive strategies to permanent, mobile guerrilla warfare.
The Emergence of Leftist Insurgency
The systemic closure of peaceful political participation became institutionalized in 1958 through the creation of the National Front. This formal power-sharing agreement between the Liberal and Conservative parties was designed to end the sectarian civil war of La Violencia, but it did so by legally establishing a duopoly.
For sixteen years, the two traditional parties alternated the presidency every four years and divided all legislative, judicial, and regional public positions equally between themselves. This structural pact effectively barred any third-party, progressive, or left-wing political movement from participating in legal electoral democracy.
This absolute institutional lockout, coupled with the violent military destruction of agrarian communities, provided the catalyst for the birth of modern Marxist insurgencies. The survivors of the Marquetalia assault, led by Manuel Marulanda Vélez, founded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1964 as a Marxist-Leninist peasant movement demanding radical agrarian reform and the destruction of the oligarchic state.
Concurrently, students and intellectuals inspired by the Cuban Revolution established the National Liberation Army (ELN) in the department of Santander, seeking a structural transformation of Colombian society through armed resistance.
The total criminalization of social protest and peaceful political opposition reinforced the narrative that the state could only be altered through armed means. This dynamic expanded further in 1974 with the rise of the 19th of April Movement (M-19), an urban guerrilla group formed after widespread allegations of fraud in the 1970 presidential elections.
Throughout the late twentieth century, every attempt by marginalized groups to organize independent social movements outside the National Front was met with institutional exclusion or direct military repression, cementing a long-term conflict driven by the structural denial of democratic pluralism.
Paramilitarism and the Narcopolitics
The structural violence of the twentieth century entered a deadlier phase in the 80s and 90s with the emergence of right-wing paramilitary organizations. Originally authorized by state legislation under the guise of rural civil defense networks, these groups consolidated into the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC).
Formed by large cattle ranchers, traditional landowners, and emerging drug trafficking cartels, the paramilitaries acted as a counter-revolutionary military force. Instead of targeting active guerrilla combatants, the AUC systematically launched an asymmetric war against unarmed civil society.
Paramilitarism functioned as a structural tool to maintain the economic status quo and physically eliminate political opposition. This proxy force executed a systematic genocide against the Patriotic Union, a progressive left-wing political party formed in the 80s, resulting in the assassination of thousands of elected officials, union leaders, and presidential candidates.
Furthermore, data demonstrates that paramilitary violence facilitated massive agrarian cleansing. Through targeted massacres and selective terror, these groups forcibly displaced millions of rural peasants from their lands, which were subsequently acquired by elite landowners and agro-industrial conglomerates.
The relationship between paramilitary structures and traditional Colombian politicians became known institutionally as the parapolitics scandal. Extensive investigations revealed that dozens of congressmen, governors, and regional elites were directly allied with the AUC to secure electoral victories and protect their economic dominance
Media investigations have frequently highlighted that presidential candidate Abelardo De La Espriella first gained significant national prominence as a defense attorney for high-profile paramilitary leaders during their demobilization process.
Critics and human rights organizations, such as the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), note that his past activities, including founding the Initiatives for Peace Foundation (FIPAZ), which advocated for political status for paramilitary actors, exemplify the historic alignment between far-right legal structures and the armed actors used by the elite to suppress social transformation.
Peace Processes vs. The Neo-Fascist Threat of “The Tiger”
The 2016 Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC fundamentally transformed the nation’s social and political landscape by establishing transitional institutions like the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP).
Designed to uncover historical truth, secure victim reparations, and hold both state military personnel and guerrilla fighters accountable for war crimes, this framework opened vital democratic spaces for social movements, rural collectives, and progressive groups to organize publicly without being criminalized as armed subversives.
However, this transition toward structural democracy faces an immediate threat of regression in the June 2026 presidential runoff election due to the rise of far-right candidate Abelardo De La Espriella.
Running under the “Defenders of the Homeland” movement, De La Espriella utilizes a polarizing discourse that targets human rights defenders and seeks to dismantle Colombia’s human rights architecture by defunding the JEP by 90%, restoring aggressive aerial glyphosate fumigation, implementing mass incarcerations, and withdrawing the country from the United Nations and the OAS.
By attempting to systematically erase the judicial and social progress achieved, a De La Espriella victory would demonstrate that the traditional ruling structures are prepared to close peaceful democratic channels once again, risking a complete return to the cyclical violence that has defined modern Colombian history.
(Telesur)
