Trump's Man In Colombia: Back to the Future
Abelardo de la Espriella
Abelardo de la Espriella, the man that Trump’s and much other foreign interference helped become president of Colombia, replacing the mildly progressive Petro after winning the election by a very small margin.
His father is a lawyer and close friend of Uribe, a previous far right wing president of the nation who oversaw “Plan Colombia”, the bloody campaign against the left wing rebels that included large scale executions and resulted in thousands of civilians killed with impunity. Fully supported by the Bush elder and Clinton administrations. His mother is from a family of cattle ranchers, and his family is part of the upper class. On a 2014 television show he stated that he enjoyed tying firecrackers to cats when he was young, watching them explode. Children who harm animals and show a lack of empathy and guilt have a high probability of psychopathic traits as adults.
As a lawyer, he has defended people associated with the paramilitaries; some of them childhood friends. He described a former drug trafficker and paramilitary operative linked to more than 300 murders as his friend, and stated that he would have done the same if he had been in his friend’s position. He has also defended sexual predators, including at least one who appeared in the Epstein Files numerous times. He also publicly defended police officers who brutally beat students, resulting in the death of one those students. Recently, he showed pictures of his genitals in the middle of an interview with a female journalist. His campaign stops included many far right wing figures, and he has been endorsed by the narco-trafficking president of Ecuador, Noboa. He has also received endorsements from Milei of Argentina and the right-wing Kast of Chile, as well as Trump. Fujimori (winner of another very close election recently), the new president of Peru and daughter of the ex-dictator, has stated that she looks forward to working with de la Espriella.
He is a classic “macho” strong-man who has stated that he will allow police to shoot protestors, engage in extra-judicial killings and sees the benefits of a Bukele-style El Salvadorian security state and privately-run and publicly unregulated prisons. He is full in on the “war on drugs” (i.e. a war on the general population to subjugate them and facilitate land theft), unregulated capitalism, taking a “chainsaw” to government spending a la Milei, overthrowing the government of Cuba and getting into bed with Israel, and curbing the power of unions. While against abortion and wanting more religion, the opium of the masses, taught in schools. He is married to the daughter of a cattle rancher and a consul general under the right-wing Duque administration that was dogged by scandals and demonstrations.
Jorge Gaitan, a progressive who rose from the general population, rather than the elite, to become Mayor of Bogota, Minister of Education and Minister of Labour was assumed to be the winner of the upcoming presidential election until he was assassinated in 1948. Leading to a decade of violence known as La Violencia, from 1948 to 1958; from 1953 to 1957 under a dictatorship.
Since then, Colombia has been ruled by members of either the Liberal or Conservative wings of the elite, with the exceptions of Betancur (1982 - 1986) and Pedro (2022 - 2026); the latter the first left wing president in modern Colombian history.
The post La Violencia anti-communist repression in rural areas lead to the consolidation of left-wing forces into FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in the 1960s. The ongoing civil war between the state (responsible for 12% of the deaths) and its elite funded paramilitary group allies (45% of deaths), and FARC and other left wing groups (27% of deaths), cost at least 220,000 lives over a more than six decade period; with many millions displaced. Much of the violence stemmed from one of the most extreme inequalities of land distribution in the world, with the powerful using armed gangs to dispossess peasants. The United Fruit Company also paid paramilitary groups to discipline workers and steal land, and its coercive power was demonstrated in the 1928 Banana Worker’s Massacre. In the 1980s the then president Betancur tried to integrate the left-wing groups into the political process, but this just lead to the killing of left-wing leaders by the paramilitaries; between 1985 and 2002, 4,153 left wing party members were kidnapped and murdered - including two presidential candidates and 6 congress members.
The paramilitaries represented the landed, extractive conservative elite that was only interested in the annihilation of the left wing opposition. The liberal part of the elite tend to come from the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie who are interested in a compromise with the left wing and industrial development. The conservatives tend to dominate, apart from the period of Import Substitution Industrialization in the post-WW2 period after the post La Violencia compromise. The ISI policies were fully dismantled in the 1980s and 1990s, as the conservative elite took back power with the aid of the US oligarchy.A general trend within South America in the 1980s and 1990s. What the liberal wing of the elite wants is a bourgeois passive revolution, not rule by the people. Unlike in the US, the bourgeoisie lost the civil war in one country after another during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1989, Galan, a liberal progressive presidential candidate was assassinated by the drug traffickers with the aid of state actors.
From the 1970s onwards, drug trafficking also became a huge problem in Colombia. Unlike how it is depicted in the propagandistic Narcos, drug trafficking requires the involvement of senior state and traditional oligarchic actors to be able to function. The problem with Escobar and others was that they were amassing their own private power while also acting in too public a manner. So they were removed, while the drug trafficking continued in a more carefully governed manner. The death of Escobar and other prominent narco traffickers did not reduce the drug trade. In fact, since the 1990s Colombian cocaine exports have increased dramatically. The Colombian oligarchy do not want to end the drug trade, a trade that many of them are profiting from, they just want to make sure that it is they that are in charge; not some drug cartel that aims for its own political power.
The drug trade has been somewhat atomized since the end of the cartels, with many different independent groups working together across the supply chain; with landowning paramilitary groups significant players. There is much less separation between the state, businessmen and groups within the drug trade than is shown in shows such as Narcos. The peak of the drug-related violence was in the late 1980s and 1990s, before it was reorganized to be less public and better controlled by the traditional elites.
From 2002 to 2010, Uribe launched an all out war against the left wing forces while also enthusiastically working with the US “anti-drug” forces in Plan Colombia.
Both worked to displace and subjugate peasant populations, facilitating land theft and resource extraction activities while also providing new workers to be exploited. They also facilitated the location of US military bases in Colombia that the US military sees as a bridgehead to be used for the general control of South America. Dawn Paley, in Drug War Capitalism documents how the state and corporations use the “Drug War” as a tool of capitalist exploitation, extraction and primitive accumulation.
In the 2010s a peace was worked out between the state, the paramilitaries and the left-wing forces. This was to include land redistribution, working on the underlying economic issue at the core of the conflict, but that was never implemented in any meaningful fashion. This is what Duque (2018 - 2022) tried to unravel, and Espriella has sworn to destroy. Both represent the reactionary landowning and extractive oligarchy that is happy to align with foreign powers for their mutual benefit. Locking the country into a vassal status, exploited by both the national oligarchy and that of the US.
As with Milei in Argentina, Pereira in Bolivia, Noboa (part of the family that may very well be the biggest drug traffickers in the country), Fujimori in Peru, and Bolsonaro (2019-2023) in Brazil before he lost the 2022 election (with his election aided greatly by prior US interference), Espriella represents a move to de-modernize the nation through massive cuts to state expenditures (including universities) and operations, combined with much increased state and paramilitary violence directed at keeping the general population subjugated. With also the use of religion to dull the political awareness of that population. The same in Central America with Bukele in El Salvador, who Espriella has stated his admiration for, Asfuru in Honduras (narrowly winning a highly questionable election), Delgado in Costa Rica and Mulino in Panama. Only the governments of Nicaragua and Mexico, and to some degree Guatemala and Brazil, stand out from the Back to the Future trend. With Venezuela now subjugated by the US, and Cuba under an ever-tightening US economic and financial vice.
The reality is that the landowning and extractive (mining, oil and gas) local oligarchies will always have ready partners in the US to help them stop any move toward even an industrial bourgeois modernity. The US oligarchy does not want strong domestic industrial sectors competing for the domestic resources that it wants to be able to buy cheaply, or competing with its own industrial corporations in the domestic markets. The domestic oligarchy wants free trade with which it can easily sell its raw materials abroad and buy its required machinery and high status goods abroad, while being able to move its money easily abroad and not having an industrial sector competing with it for workers. Many of the children of the oligarchy are sent to study in the US, and the oligarchy maintains residences in the US and other Western nations. What the South wanted in the nineteenth century in the US, but was defeated by the industrial bourgeois North.
In the post-WW2 and post La Violencia period, the industrial bourgeoisie reached a compromise with the other parts of the oligarchy, allowing for Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI); with industrialization peaking in 1980. The Colombian landowning and extractive oligarchies aligned with the US to use the 1980s Third World Debt Crisis to reverse ISI and implement shock therapies in the 1980s and 1990s that destroyed that industrialization.
Manufacturing as a share of GDP, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010; 2020
Brazil: 27.4%; 31.3%; 20.7%; 17.2%; 12.7%; 10.7%
Argentina: 31.5%; 29.5%; 26.8%; 16.5%; 15.8%; 15.4%
Chile: 25.5%; 21.4%; 18.5%; 16.9%; 12%; 9.9%
Peru: 17.7%; 25%; 17%; 15.2%; 15.6%; 12.2%
Colombia: 19.7%; 23%; 14%; 12.8%; 14%; 10.1%
Guatemala, El Savador, Honduras, and Nicaragua all have manufacturing sectors that represent between 12% and 15% of GDP; with Panama at 5%. Mexico stands out as maintaining its share of manufacturing, 22% in 1970 and 21% currently, but its manufacturing sector is dominated by US and other foreign-owned plants; aided by such programs as maquiladora. These tend to be focused on labour-intensive assembly and production activities. Real wages in Mexico collapsed from the 1980s to the 2000s, then stagnated until 2019 when a popular government started to focus on increasing the lot of the majority; but the result has been only a modest 7% rise in real wages
Wages in Mexican manufacturing fell by 25% in real terms between 1980 and 2010, while falling even more outside the manufacturing sector. Together with the collapse in the farming sector (due to the free trade for the heavily subsidized US agri-business sector), this immiseration provided much of the willing recruits for the illegal drug industry. Mexican GDP per capita at PPP did not recover the level of 1980 until 2010, while the income share of the top 1% went from 10% to 20%; with only government transfers helping to reduce the immiseration of the general population. Mexico is not an example of what success would look like for the general population, especially with the drug-related increase in the general level of violence, and has only recently started to take a different path under Obrador and Sheinbaum (next presidential election 2030, legislative elections in June 2027).
Part of Milei’s job in Argentina is to finish off the power of the domestic industrial bourgeoisie and remove the state institutions, such as publicly funded universities, that allow the general population to become better educated and politically aware. Reversing the recovery from 2002 to the mid 2010s under relatively progressive governments that followed the right-wing disaster of the 1990s under Menem. The first job is being done by a massively overvalued exchange rate (to keep inflation down), the slashing of import barriers and massive government spending cuts that have reduced domestic demand. Manufacturing output fell below 15% of GDP in 2024, when its output contracted by 9.4%. There was a weak rebound in the first half of 2025, followed by a further slump in the second half of the year; with manufacturing falling to a 13.7% GDP share in 2025. In 2026, Argentinian manufacturing is experiencing a major crisis with manufactured imports surging. Since coming to power Milei has cut university spending by about 40% in real terms, and spending on science and technology has fallen by nearly 50%; with Milei using every tool he can to reject bills for spending increases passed by Congress. Espriella can be expected to implement a somewhat more violent version of Milei’s policies.
Colombia remains today as one of the most unequal nations in the world with respect to incomes, with hardly any improvement between 1980 and the present day. Wealth inequality is even more extreme. From 1980 to the present, the natural resource sector has boomed to take over from manufacturing as the dominant economic sector; a “reprimarization” (return to dominance of the primary industrial sector) of the economy. With oil and coal exports booming, and the agricultural sector mounting a large recovery post 2020.
Colombia’s main exports are of oil (32%), and agricultural and food products (coffee, bananas, palm oil, cut flowers and cocoa; about 30%). Only 22% of exports are manufactured goods, with much of that being oil derived goods such as chemicals and plastics. 10% of exports are gold and other precious metals. That’s the legal products of course, and cocaine exports have grown to such massive levels that they may be of the same value as the oil trade. Manufacturing as a share of GDP has fallen from 23% in 1980 to about 10% today (even less if the cocaine industry is taken into account). So many things about Colombia are going back to the future. And the macho man extremist right wing president is a symptom of that trend, while he will also be acting as an accelerator of that trend. A symptom of the new reality that is taking control of South America, greatly aided by US and Western political interference.
Ironically, a China committed to political non-interference in other nations has greatly benefitted from cheap access to natural resources and an openness to its manufacturing exports; enhanced in Argentina by a grossly over-valued exchange rate. For Latin America, China is the biggest source of imports excluding Mexico (US is over 50%) and a now US subjugated Venezuela, and will soon become the biggest source in Colombia (where the US is 25% and China 24%). It is also the biggest export destination, excluding Mexico (the US is 83%), Colombia (the US is 25%) the subjugated Venezuela, Ecuador (where it is second) and an Argentina where it vies for first place with Brazil. Latin America may be going back to the future under US tutelage, but the biggest economic beneficiary may well be China.
There is a very simple, almost banal, lesson here. And it applies to north America and Europe just as much as the rest of the world. Reformism does not work if it leaves the economy in the hands of the capitalist ruling class.
Where, as in Latin America, the ruling class is also the direct descendant of the colonising race and class divisions are founded on exploitation seen as part of the natural, God given, order which is defended and nourished by imperialism popular power and democracy can only be established by crushing the exploiting class not just at the ballot box and in debate but in material terms.
Almost every country in the continent is now ruled by insanely violent pro imperialist regimes bent on eradicating all potential resistance.
Just to add to the mix- Israel, now the world leader in repressing populations, is deeply involved in all of these counter revolutions.
In Colombia, as in all of these countries, the process begins with the hobbling of governments elected on reform programmes. Unless they recognise, on election day, that the real work of dismantling the anti-democratic institutions, built up over centuries by the ruling class and its gringo sponsors, remains to be begun. And that before the police and army, the judiciary, the Academy and the state Establishment the commanding heights of the economy, the banks, the land, the ports, the power stations, the media and the means of distribution, including the wholsalers who dominate retail, must be taken over and these sources of power removed from the enemies of the people.
In Venezuela we have seen the most complete demonstration of the limits of reformism in the collapse of Chavez's brilliant, inspiring but always doomed attempt to build socialism without unduly inconveniencing the capitalist class. Sad that Allende died for nothing.
>The US oligarchy does not want strong domestic industrial sectors competing for the domestic resources that it wants to be able to buy cheaply, or competing with its own industrial corporations in the domestic markets
Once again I have to disagree about what group in the USA is driving USA policy in South America (and other vassals/colonies). If the USA elites were truly concerned about industrial competition, then why did USA elites allow USA to deindustrialize while shipping USA industry to China? Why did USA allow Japan, South Korea and EU to industrialize? Maybe you can argue that USA allowed these allies to industrialization during the cold war so they could assist the USA war machine, though that's a weak argument if you think carefully. Much safer to put all the heavy industry in North America and let the east Asians and Europeans focus on lightweight R&D, based on highly mobile human capital that could be quickly transported to USA in event of war.
A better explanation is that the real elite in the USA is not rich individuals (your "oligarchs") but rather the institutions of finance capital ("Wall Street") and foreign policy (including military and defense industries). Cheap bananas and cheap coffee beans and other primary resources are not going to move the needle in an economy the size of the USA, though obviously individual Fruit and Coffee corporations might benefit some (however rentier restriction of competition within USA is probably far more important to profits than costs of commodity imports).
What can move the needle is loss of US dollar privilege. How that privilege arose is too long a story for this comment, but at this point, maintaining USD privilege is largely a matter of military intervention to stop possible defectors from the USD system (and other USA controlled infrastructure related to USD privilege like SWIFT and undersea internet cables). Both Wall Street and USA foreign policy institutions favor maintenance of USD privilege as focus of USA foreign policy, because without USD privilege, USA would somehow have to run a balanced current account, which would cause asset prices to collapse, which in turn would force massive downsizing of Wall Street and the foreign policy institutions (including , military and defense industries), and institutions almost always bitterly resist dowmsizing. This is the real reason USA is concerned about who runs South America: preventive against possible defection from USA financial system that might threaten the USD privilege. It doesn't matter that a socialist government in South America promises to support USD system. The very fact such a government does not embrace Wall Street convention wisdom as to economic policy is by itself threat to USD system. (Drug trade kickbacks, of course, is bonus unaccounted for money for CIA, and possibly juicy bonuses for individuals in the government as USA gradually converts into a true kleptocracy, but access to drug money does not guide USA policy. As long as USA has USD privilege, Congress can simply authorize as much money as CIA wants and Fed will handle "printing" this money.)
Implication of the above theory is that South America will remain under the USA boot until such time as USA loses its USD privilege for reasons unrelated to South America. This is because value of continued USD privilege justifies massive military intervention in South America to maintain the privilege, far more intervention than is occurring currently.