In the soundtrack of Abelardo de la Espriella, the far-right candidate in Colombia who has made his campaign with an elaborate light show in every city, there are Joe Arroyo, Totó la Momposina, Christian music, some hip-hop, and at least one song by Shakira. At his campaign closing in Barranquilla on Saturday night, all the Colombians in the country’s musical history played, but there was also fireworks, drones that drew a tiger in the sky, and a boat on the Magdalena River that docked next to the city’s iconic boardwalk carrying a huge billboard with the candidate’s face. He arrived on stage dancing the new campaign jingle, which imitates the Argentine accent of the barras bravas in the south of the continent: “¡Vamo’, vamo’ Abelardo! ¡Que en primera tenemos que ganar!”. De la Espriella started his speech with that same optimism: “I am certain that we will win in the first round!”
The candidate who appears second in all the polls now shows himself convinced that he can win in the first round, even if the numbers do not support that forecast. In any case, several of his followers in La Arenosa, the city where he has lived for several years, await him with hope. “I didn’t come to do the usual politics, ours is a structural change, a change of order in every sense,” says the one who prides himself on being an outsider of traditional politics, the representative of “the never,” an echo of the campaign four years ago made by Vice President Francia Márquez, but from the left, appealing to “the nobody.”
“There are no tamales here, Pulgar is not here, nor Name, nor Torres,” said the far-right candidate then, a clear attack on his two opponents. The Torres clan, a family of businessmen and politicians from Barranquilla, supported current President Gustavo Petro in his 2022 campaign. Pulgar refers to Senator Yesid Pulgar, brother of another politician convicted of corruption, who a day earlier accompanied the established right-wing candidate, Paloma Valencia, on stage.
For De la Espriella, that is why she represents the campaign of “the usual.” The criminal lawyer does not mention that there are also traditional politicians who support him. The leader of the powerful Char clan, for example, the most powerful political and business group in Barranquilla, expressed his support for him a few weeks ago. “This is a campaign that is not of the traditional political class,” said his vice-presidential running mate, economist José Manuel Restrepo, who was Minister of Commerce and Finance under the Uribista Iván Duque, at the event.
De la Espriella also insisted that his is not a campaign of “salchipapa or periodicazo,” another jab at Valencia, or rather at her vice-presidential running mate, Juan Daniel Oviedo, who has campaigned under the slogan of hitting with a “periodicazo” those who do not govern well.
The hardest blows, as expected, fell on Petro’s left-wing government. “The supposed world power of life became the power of death,” he added, before mentioning the health crisis and especially the security crisis. “This is a people who trusted in a change that did not come,” he added, acknowledging that Barranquilla voted left four years ago.
De la Espriella mentioned, for example, extortion, a crime that burdens many small business owners in this Caribbean Colombian capital. “I vote for him because he has guts,” said Raúl, a merchant who campaigns for ‘El Tigre’ on TikTok, and who claims to have seen several downtown businesses close due to extortion by criminal groups. Like many, what most attracts him to the criminal lawyer is his discourse on security. “He is not afraid to enforce the law, to pursue criminals, not defend them like Iván Cepeda,” says the Barranquilla native. About his past as a defense lawyer for questioned figures, he responds: “A lawyer is like a doctor, he does not deny a service, that means nothing.”
The candidate, as he has done in other speeches, boasted about the size of his genitals, mentioned the will of God, and asked for a prayer for Colombia. With a conservative flag in one hand, in the other he says he will defend the 1991 Constitution, while Petro has spoken of a constituent assembly. But above all, he says, in La Arenosa, that he will be the Barranquilla native who will bring the Caribbean to the capital Bogotá.
“The hundred years of solitude are over,” he proclaimed, quoting the famous novel that Petro mentions in so many speeches, alluding to the Caribbean’s claim of adding a century without its own president. Like the president, he spoke disdainfully of journalism, “the prepaid media,” which discriminate against him as an “unworthy corroncho,” a derogatory way of referring to Colombians from the Caribbean. “The yellow butterflies will fly again,” he returned to the symbols of Gabo’s novel. Above all, drones flew over the thousands of people who came to see his show, and who fly in the imagination of what he promises: the “miracle homeland.”
