Colombia's 2026 presidential race intensifies with violence, scandals, and polarization

Two weeks before Colombia votes for its next president, the campaign has descended into a landscape of violence, scandal, and accusation that threatens to overshadow the democratic process itself. On Friday night in Cubarral, a municipality of six thousand people seventy kilometers from Villavicencio in Meta state, Rogers Mauricio Devia was shot dead as he drove home after a day of campaigning. Devia was the local coordinator for far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella. His advisor, Eder Fabián Cardona, was killed alongside him. Less than twelve hours earlier in the same town, armed men had opened fire on a vehicle carrying Julián Cardona, a former mayoral candidate aligned with senator Paloma Valencia. That car was armored; Cardona survived. The violence in Cubarral is not random. The municipality sits in a region where dissident factions of the defunct FARC maintain territorial control, and they have made their electoral preferences known—or so audio recordings suggest.

Those recordings have become the election's most corrosive controversy. In leaked audio, a man identified as Rogelio Benavides, a commander in the Calarcá Córdoba dissident faction, expressed a preference for leftist frontrunner Iván Cepeda to win. "I hope the comrade Cepeda wins," the voice says, "because then we're going to squeeze things for another four years." The implication—that armed groups are pressuring civilians to vote for Cepeda—has ricocheted through the campaign. Cepeda has categorically rejected any such support, calling it a "desproportion" to suggest he owes his victory to criminals. The Defense Ministry later stated the voice in the recordings did not belong to Benavides at all, but rather to an extortionist imprisoned in Tolima. Yet the damage was done. Cepeda demanded that every candidate and media outlet that amplified the false claim retract it—a list that includes former president Álvaro Uribe, Valencia, de la Espriella, and others. The recordings also revealed the extent of armed group control in the south: mandatory ID cards for civilians, extorted payments, "coexistence manuals." Democracy, it seems, operates in the shadow of guns.

Meanwhile, de la Espriella has become a lightning rod for a different kind of scandal. In back-to-back media appearances, the far-right lawyer made sexually demeaning comments toward female journalists. On Noticias Caracol, he called journalist María Lucía Fernández ignorant for questioning him about the relationship between ethics and law, dismissing her as someone who "didn't study law or philosophy of law." Days later, on a radio comedy show, he made crude sexual innuendos toward another journalist, Laura Rodríguez, in front of a studio audience. He later apologized, framing the remarks as humor in a comedic context. But the damage extended beyond the moment. Sergio Fajardo, the centrist candidate, called him "a buffoon, a chauvinist, violent, authoritarian, aggressive." Paloma Valencia, his rival on the right, criticized him without naming him directly, saying women journalists deserve respect. Even Uribe, Valencia's mentor, weighed in obliquely: "Women of my country, Paloma will make you respected." The sexism revealed something about de la Espriella's temperament—his contempt for scrutiny, his willingness to demean those who question him—that may matter more than any single comment.

The election's landscape is otherwise dominated by Cepeda's lead. Polls show him at thirty-six percent, de la Espriella at thirty-one and a half, and Valencia at sixteen. In a hypothetical runoff between Cepeda and de la Espriella, the far-right candidate edges ahead by four points. Yet Cepeda's campaign has been marked by opacity. In a filing to the electoral authority, his team reported spending zero pesos on more than one hundred public events, despite receiving fifteen billion pesos in loans from the financial sector. Other candidates—de la Espriella has spent over fourteen billion, Valencia nearly six billion—have disclosed their expenditures. The lack of transparency from the frontrunner sits uneasily with calls for democratic accountability. Cepeda has also faced questions about armed group interference. He has rejected it firmly, and the government has backed him up. But the perception lingers.

Cepeda's coalition, called the Alliance for Life, has been building. Dissident liberals—members of the traditional Liberal Party estranged from its leadership—have formally joined his campaign. Former Interior Minister Juan Fernando Cristo, himself a liberal, has become a key ally. Even former president Ernesto Samper, a liberal who governed in the 1990s, has endorsed Cepeda, citing shared commitments to social reform, multilateralism, and irreversible peace. The family of Carlos Gaviria, a historic leftist leader who died in 2010, has endorsed Sergio Fajardo instead, the centrist candidate, praising him as an alternative to both the left's corruption scandals and the right's history of human rights violations. These endorsements matter in a polarized country, but they also reveal how fragmented traditional politics has become.

Violence and disinformation have become the campaign's defining features. Paloma Valencia has alleged that her phone is being hacked, with her security-related messages in someone else's hands. De la Espriella has claimed that intelligence officials were plotting to kill him with a sniper, a charge the National Intelligence Directorate flatly denied. A woman councilor in Cubarral reported suspicious people surrounding her home. The governor of Meta convened an emergency security council and deployed troops to the municipality. The electoral authority has received audits questioning the methodology of Atlas Intel, the polling firm whose surveys have shaped perceptions of the race. One audit found the firm's approach was not a true probability-based survey but rather a non-probabilistic digital recruitment sample, casting doubt on its margin of error.

With two weeks until the May thirty-first vote, Colombia's democracy faces a test. The country has held elections amid armed conflict before, but the combination of territorial control by dissident groups, the spread of disinformation, the violence targeting campaign workers, and the erosion of institutional trust creates an unprecedented challenge. Cepeda appears positioned to win the first round, but a runoff remains likely. De la Espriella's campaign, despite the scandals, has gained ground. Valencia struggles to consolidate the right. And beneath the polls and the endorsements and the accusations lies a deeper question: whether Colombians can choose their next president freely, or whether the guns in the countryside will have the final say.