The global left just lost another country. Trump-endorsed right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella — nicknamed "El Tigre" — has won Colombia's presidential runoff election, beating leftist Senator Ivan Cepeda by roughly 250,000 votes and ending the socialist stranglehold on South America's fourth-largest country. The dominoes keep falling, and the left keeps pretending it's not happening.
But sure, tell us again how the MAGA movement is "just an American thing."
With just under 100% of ballots tallied on Sunday, de la Espriella pulled in 49.66% of the vote to Cepeda's 48.70% — a razor-thin margin that somehow feels like a blowout when you consider the entire Latin American establishment was lined up against him. Reuters reported that voters backed "his Donald Trump-endorsed promise of a crackdown on crime and a stronger economy," which is a fancy way of saying Colombians are sick of the same garbage policies that have turned every socialist paradise south of Texas into an economic disaster zone.
El Tigre ran on a platform that would make any common-sense conservative nod in approval: tough on crime, anti-cartel, and explicitly modeled after El Salvador's Nayib Bukele — the president who turned his country from the murder capital of the Western Hemisphere into one of the safest nations in Latin America by doing the radical thing of actually locking up criminals. Revolutionary concept, we know.
What makes this victory especially delicious is the Trump endorsement factor. President Trump backed de la Espriella, and the Colombian candidate wore it like a badge of honor rather than running from it the way squishy Republicans used to do stateside. The left spent the entire campaign trying to make the Trump connection toxic. Colombian voters responded by handing El Tigre the presidency.
Sound familiar? It should. It's the same playbook that's failed the left everywhere from Argentina to Italy to the Netherlands. They scream "far right" and "authoritarian" and "threat to democracy," and regular people who are tired of watching their countries get destroyed by progressive policies walk into the voting booth and pull the lever for the guy the media told them to fear.
This is part of a pattern that the American corporate press refuses to acknowledge. Right-leaning populist victories are stacking up across Latin America like cordwood. The era of pink-tide socialism that had the left popping champagne a decade ago is collapsing under the weight of its own failures — inflation, crime, corruption, and the fundamental reality that socialism has never worked anywhere it's been tried, including the countries south of our border.
Senator Cepeda and his leftist allies threw everything they had at this race. It wasn't enough. Colombians chose the tiger over the socialist, the strong hand over the open palm, the guy who promised to fight the cartels over the guy who promised more government programs.
This is another domino falling against socialist control of South America, and the reverberations will be felt from Bogotá to Washington.
Trump's endorsement magic doesn't stop at the U.S. border. Turns out when you offer people security, prosperity, and a leader who actually means what he says, it polls pretty well in every language.
