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\u201cI will wipe out narcoterrorism and those who I’ve declared a military target like cockroaches, like rats. I will unleash upon them the wrath of God never seen before ,\u201d De la Espriella said in an interview with The Associated Press in the final stretch of the campaign, where he promised to open 10 mega-prisons to fight crime.<\/p>\n
He joins a growing number of leaders across Latin America \u2013 from Chile to Honduras \u2013 seeking to latch onto the \u201cBukele model\u201d as voters across Latin America are increasingly ditching leaders that pitched progressive policies aimed at addressing the root issues of conflict, such as lack of opportunities for young people and corruption.<\/p>\n
De la Espriella’s supporters come from a wide range of backgrounds. Yolanda Per\u00e9z, a 64-year-old women serving coffee in the downtown of Colombia’s capital of Bogot\u00e1 who smoked a cigarette and said with a wink the day before the election: \u201cI’m thinking of voting for El Tigre.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Miguel Maheca, a 20-year-old first time voter flashed a paper showing that he voted to his mom while he strolled out of the voting station on Sunday, saying with a grin, \u201cLove isn’t what’s going to make us safe in Colombia.”<\/p>\n
But experts say El Salvador’s security successes will be nearly impossible to replicate in a place like Colombia, which is more than 50 times larger than the Central American nation and has many more armed groups warring for territory.<\/p>\n
The polarized vote comes as the Trump administration is playing a more aggressive role in Latin America than any U.S. government in decades, placing mounting pressure on countries like Colombia, Mexico, and Ecuador to crack down on crime.<\/p>\n
De la Espriella, 47, made a name for himself as a lawyer defending high-profile clients such as former President \u00c1lvaro Uribe (2002\u20132010), as well as controversial figures like Alex Saab, a close ally of Venezuela\u2019s ousted president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro who faces legal issues in the U.S. and whom he stopped representing about seven years ago.<\/p>\n
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A blow to Cepeda<\/p>\n
De la Espriella’s rise as a presidential candidate spells trouble for progressive Cepeda, who consistently led polls in the lead up to Sunday’s election, though his competitor quickly gained speed in the weeks ahead of the vote.<\/p>\n
Cepeda is a progressive senator who has promised to carry on his ally Petro’s fraught plan to achieve \u201ctotal peace\u201d by negotiating peace pacts with guerrillas and criminal gangs.<\/p>\n
Their political movement was born from a fierce rejection by many Colombians of a militarized offensive by Uribe in decades past used to beat back the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which ended in thousands of civilians being killed by Colombian forces in a scandal known as \u201cfalse positives.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Mr. De la Espriella \u201crepresents a return to the paramilitary politics and drug-trafficking, \u2013 a mafia-run, plutocratic, and corrupt past that the country experienced during \u00c1lvaro Uribe\u2019s two administrations,\u201d Cepeda said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Petro, a former rebel, won Colombia’s presidency in 2022 in a historic election that ended decades of right-wing domination by leaders from Uribe’s political movement. He gained massive support from rural-dwelling, indigenous and poorer Colombians who felt they had never been directly spoken to by Colombian leaders.<\/p>\n
Now, that movement is backed into a corner.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is De la Espriella\u2019s election to lose,\u201d wrote Renata Segura, director of International Crisis Group’s Latin America and the Caribbean Program. \u201cCepeda thought he could win appealing squarely to the left, and that proved to be a massive mistake. How he pivots in the next month will determine if he has any chance to win.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Follow AP\u2019s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/latin-america<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella of the Defenders of the Motherland movement depart a polling station after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[16035,16040,389,194,16036,363,16037,16042,4380,1561,2317,2314,11673,4741,16038,16039,1760,95,16041],"class_list":["post-32758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-valencia","tag-aberaldo-de-la-espriella-trump-colombia-petro-cepeda-election-crime-bukele","tag-alex-saab","tag-colombia","tag-donald-trump","tag-el-salvador","tag-gustavo-petro","tag-miguel-maheca","tag-nayib-bukele","tag-nicolas-maduro","tag-package-100024-ap-online","tag-package-100373-mc-complete-state-national","tag-product-30598-ap-national-news-report-a-wire","tag-product-32501-ap-online-latin-america-and-caribbean-news","tag-product-46986-ap-online-top-stories","tag-renata-segura","tag-sergio-guzman","tag-south-america","tag-valencia","tag-yolanda-perez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}