# Colombian Influence > [!note] Scope > This page covers **Colombia's influence operations directed at the United States** — lobbying, funding, information operations and elite capture. > For the country itself see [[Colombia]]. Colombia is the United States' oldest and deepest military partnership in South America, and as of August 2026 it has a new far-right government — installed three weeks before this page was written, in the middle of an American regime operation in the country next door. ## The 2026 election [[Gustavo Petro]], elected in 2022 as Colombia's first left-wing president, was constitutionally barred from a second term. The race to replace him was extraordinarily close and ideologically polarized: - **31 May 2026 — first round.** Thirteen candidates; no majority. **Abelardo de la Espriella** (right) led with **43.7%**, followed by left-wing senator **Iván Cepeda** with **40.9%**. - **21 June 2026 — runoff.** De la Espriella won **49.7% to 48.70%** — a margin of roughly one point, with 99.9% of results reported. - **7 August 2026** — de la Espriella sworn in at the Battle of Boyacá memorial. De la Espriella is a celebrity litigator rather than a career politician, and is widely described as running to the right of Colombia's traditional conservative establishment. The margin matters as much as the result: a country of roughly 50 million split almost exactly in half between a hard-right lawyer and a left senator, with no centrist bloc left in between. ## Why the timing matters Colombia's turn to the right landed inside a specific regional situation, and the sequence is worth stating plainly: - **3 January 2026** — US forces capture [[Nicolás Maduro]] in Caracas; Washington states it will run [[Venezuela]] pending a transition. - **January 2026** — the US cuts off [[Cuba]]'s Venezuelan oil supply and threatens tariffs against third-country suppliers. - **June–August 2026** — Colombia elects and inaugurates a government of the hard right, on Venezuela's western border. Colombia hosts the largest Venezuelan migrant population in the world and shares a 1,300-mile frontier with the country the United States is currently supervising. A friendly government in Bogotá is worth more to Washington's hemispheric position than it was six months ago, and de la Espriella arrives with an incentive structure pointing toward alignment. > [!warning] Not verified here > Whether de la Espriella has taken concrete positions on the Venezuela operation, US drug-war certification, or migration cooperation was **not verified** for this page. His government is three weeks old. Do not infer his policy from his ideological label. ## The structural relationship Colombia's importance to this vault predates any single administration. **Plan Colombia** — the $1.3 billion military aid package launched in 1999, nominally counter-narcotics — made Colombia the largest recipient of US military assistance outside the Middle East and the template for two decades of drug-war-framed security cooperation. It is the case study in how counter-narcotics funding functions as counter-insurgency funding, and how the [[War on Drugs]] operates as an instrument of foreign policy rather than a drug-control program. The country is also a persistent node in the vault's **private-military** material: Colombian former soldiers are among the most heavily recruited mercenary labor pools in the world, appearing in contracts from the UAE's foreign legion onward. A long US-trained officer corps plus a peace process that demobilized thousands of combatants produced an exportable supply of experienced fighters. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It completes the hemispheric picture.** [[Venezuela]] documents an intervention; [[Cuba]] documents its downstream energy effect. Colombia is the third leg — the country whose politics shifted *electorally* toward the same alignment the other two are being moved toward by force. Read together, the three describe a hemisphere being rearranged by a mix of military, economic, and electoral means within a single year. **2. A one-point far-right win is a data point for the vault's comparative work.** The [[Nativism]] and far-right comparative material tracks how hard-right parties convert plurality support into governing power. Colombia is a fresh case: not a plurality-to-power story but a genuine coin-flip in a fully polarized electorate, with the traditional conservative party displaced by an outsider. **3. Plan Colombia is the drug-war template.** Any account of American security assistance in the hemisphere runs through it. ## Open questions - De la Espriella's posture toward the Venezuela transition and toward Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. - Whether the Petro-era peace process implementation survives the transition. - Whether US security assistance expands under the new government, and under what framing. ## See Also - [[Venezuela]] — the intervention next door - [[Cuba]] — the third leg of the 2026 hemispheric picture - [[Nicolás Maduro]] · [[Monroe Doctrine]] - [[War on Drugs]] · [[War on Drugs Timeline]] — Plan Colombia's frame - [[Banana Republic]] — the older US-Latin America economic pattern