Abelardo de la Espriella, the candidate of the Colombian right, won the presidential runoff election this Sunday, yet the left-wing administration refuses to acknowledge the result.

It’s true that he surpassed Iván Cepeda Castro — the candidate backed by the former leftist terrorist Gustavo Petro (the current president) — by nearly a percentage point. It’s also true that the vote-counting margin of error is a mere 0.05%, so even after accounting for that margin, victory would still belong to the Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland) movement.

Petro, however, seems to love conspiracy theories as much as he enjoys transgender company, and he refuses to see what has actually happened. Yesterday, on his X account, he claimed — without evidence — that Israel was behind alleged electoral fraud targeting him via the voting software.

In his delusions, the Colombian president denies the transparency of the very electoral process his own government is organizing.

You might ask: why all the fuss? Why does he refuse to accept the result? The apprehension is not unfounded. Political analyst Agustín Laje believes that if Cepeda Castro is not elected, the former M-19 guerrilla fighter would face imprisonment on charges such as corruption and drug trafficking.

De la Espriella — a businessman who has founded everything from a clothing brand to one of Colombia’s most successful law firms — has promised a hardline approach against the narco-terrorism of groups like the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN, in Spanish). This is a path Petro has not chosen, nor has Cepeda Castro promised to take.

In October 2025, Petro stated that U.N. monitoring had reported 262,000 hectares of illicit crops within Colombian territory. That figure represents a 3.6% increase over 2023, when the same report recorded 253,000 hectares and a 13.9% increase compared to the 230,000 hectares reported in 2022.

If we compare this to the 204,000 hectares recorded at the end of 2021 — the final full year of the previous administration under President Iván Duque — we see growth of 28.4%, representing 58,000 new hectares of illicit crops. In short, drug traffickers have operated freely and expanded at will under the leftist government.

Petro believes that under a friendly, continuity-focused administration — such as that of Cepeda Castro — he could evade an arrest warrant issued by the United States. Essentially, he feels that these elections will determine not only who succeeds him at the Nariño Palace but also whether or not he will join his friend, the narco-socialist Nicolás Maduro, in a New York prison.

Last October, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Petro, his wife, his son, and a close associate.

“Since President Gustavo Petro took office, cocaine production in Colombia has skyrocketed to its highest level in decades, flooding the United States and poisoning Americans,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time. “Petro has allowed drug cartels to thrive and has refused to halt this activity. Today, President Trump is taking decisive action to protect our nation and make it clear that we will not tolerate drug trafficking into our country.”

For now, Petro’s strategy focuses on challenging the results from 33,000 polling stations — as announced by Cepeda Castro a few hours ago — representing 27% of the more than 122,000 stations set up for the June 21 runoff election.

The ruling camp hopes that this recount will allow them to overtake De la Espriella. Thus, long days likely lie ahead before the judges of the Republic of Colombia have the final say regarding the vote recount.

In the meantime, Argentine President Javier Milei was among the first to congratulate Abelardo de la Espriella. “The lion and the tiger are roaring in Latin America,” Milei wrote on X, alluding to his own nickname, “The Lion,” and that of the presumptive president-elect, known as “The Tiger.”

For his part, Chilean leader José Antonio Kast also drew upon an element of the Colombian’s presidential campaign — the slogan “Firm for the Homeland” — to congratulate the candidate.

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa also joined the celebration, stating on social media that he and De la Espriella share “the conviction that our region deserves security, progress, and governments that confront crime without excuses.”

President Donald Trump did the same in a phone call, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that Washington “looks forward to working closely” with the new government “to boost regional security cooperation, put an end to illegal immigration to the United States, and strengthen our economic ties.”

Setting aside the heady rush of euphoria, two things can be true at once. De la Espriella won the election, yet the margin is certainly narrow, and the ruling establishment is exploiting this to conjure up specters of alleged fraud.

This offers a lesson: victories over the Left must be overwhelming to leave no room for their all-too-common chicanery, as seen in Peru, or for the sowing of suspicions that almost inevitably lead to political violence, as recently witnessed during the electoral process in Honduras.

Recent victories against the Left — with Keiko Fujimori in Peru and now “El Tigre” in Colombia — may have been narrow, but they signal a hopeful trend across the Americas. The axis appears to be Washington, not Havana.

The trend points to a decisive shift toward governance models aligned with patriotism over globalism, tradition over revolution, and the free market over statism.