标签： South America

Six decades of brutal armed conflict have left indelible, raw scars on the bodies and psyches of Colombians, and that unresolved trauma has taken center stage in the South American nation’s highly contested 2025 presidential runoff, where deep divisions over how to secure lasting peace have split even those who have suffered the most from violence.

For 67-year-old Blanca Nubia Monroy, the trauma lives on in a black-and-white tattoo of the scales of justice etched into her forearm—an exact copy of the tattoo that helped identify the body of her 19-year-old son, Julián Oviedo Monroy, after he was kidnapped and extrajudicially killed by Colombian soldiers in 2008. For Sigifredo López, a 62-year-old former politician and FARC kidnapping survivor, it surfaces in unbidden flashbacks to the seven years he spent captive in guerrilla-held jungle, and the echoing gunshots that still haunt him from the 2007 massacre of his 11 fellow captive lawmakers.

These two conflict victims hold diametrically opposing views on who should claim the Colombian presidency in Sunday’s vote, yet they share one overwhelming core fear: that the outcome will drag the nation back to the dark, violent days of its past.

“Every bit of this leaves a mark, on your body and your mind,” López explained. “Emotionally, there’s a fear that simmers deep below the surface, something you don’t talk about openly—the fear that everything we’ve already survived could happen all over again.”

This election marks the most polarized political contest Colombia has seen in decades, pitting two candidates with fundamentally clashing visions for ending persistent violence against one another. Official government records show the 60-year armed struggle between Marxist guerrillas, state military forces, and right-wing paramilitaries has left more than 10 million Colombians—one in five people across the nation—victimized by killings, kidnappings, forced displacement, and other atrocities. Though a landmark 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) brought a formal end to that group’s insurgency, low-intensity conflict continues to rage across large swathes of the Andean nation, making the future of peace the defining issue of the 2025 campaign.

Elizabeth Dickinson, deputy Latin America director for the International Crisis Group based in Bogotá, noted that societal polarization over how to address Colombia’s violence has been building for generations. “Increasingly, both sides see the conflict as an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic,” she said. “That’s extraordinarily dangerous in a country like Colombia with a long history of political violence. A spark could ignite at any moment.”

On the left stands Iván Cepeda, a longtime peace activist who has pledged to continue outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” agenda. This framework centers on negotiating formal peace agreements with all active armed groups, from insurgent factions to drug trafficking organizations, in a radical departure from decades of military-first policy. But the strategy has failed to deliver on its promises: armed groups have exploited ceasefires to expand their territorial control and recruiting, driving a sharp rise in national violence that has fueled widespread public backlash.

On the right is Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer endorsed by former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has promised an all-out, countrywide military offensive against criminal groups, modeling his plan on Nayib Bukele’s controversial gang crackdown in El Salvador. While Bukele’s policy has drawn regional attention for cutting national homicide rates dramatically, it has also sparked widespread allegations of systemic human rights abuses and arbitrary detentions.

Monroy, who supports Cepeda, is reminded every day of the human cost of unaccountable military offensives. Her son, a young man who dreamed of joining the military to lift his working-class family out of poverty, was one of more than 6,400 civilian victims of the “false positives” scandal, one of the worst atrocities of Colombia’s long conflict. Between 2002 and 2008, under the administration of ex-President Álvaro Uribe, Colombian military officers systematically extrajudicially executed innocent poor civilians, then falsified records to label the victims as enemy combatants killed in combat with FARC. A dozen senior security officers later admitted their role in Monroy’s son’s death and apologized before the special peace tribunal established after the 2016 accord to uncover the truth of the conflict—a court de la Espriella has openly promised to dismantle.

While Monroy has criticized the rising violence that has occurred under Petro’s administration, and acknowledges Cepeda will need to take firmer action against criminal groups, her decision to back Cepeda is driven by a fear of what a de la Espriella presidency would bring. De la Espriella has publicly vowed to wipe out his declared enemies “like cockroaches, like rats,” language that echoes the rhetoric of the Uribe era that led to her son’s death.

“God willing, this man doesn’t come to power, because ‘false positives’ will become a reality again,” she said.

For López, the danger runs in the opposite direction. A self-identified leftist who survived seven years of FARC captivity between 2002 and 2009, he supports de la Espriella out of his own fear of a return to the jungle “hell” he endured. López was a local assemblyman in western Colombia when FARC, which had labeled politicians legitimate military targets, kidnapped him and 11 other lawmakers. He was in solitary confinement in 2007 when he heard the gunfire that killed all of his companions, a memory that still haunts him decades later. He survived to become a national symbol of the trauma of FARC kidnappings, which victimized more than 21,000 people over five decades of conflict. Today, he lives in Cali, the city where he was abducted, under constant state-provided security due to ongoing threats against his life.

Watching rising violence over the past four years has convinced López that the current negotiation-first approach has failed. In the past year alone, armed groups have deployed drones to carry out attacks, bombings have killed dozens of civilians, and one presidential candidate was assassinated in June 2025. In May 2025, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that the impact of armed conflict on Colombian civilians had reached its worst level in a decade. This week, the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s largest remaining guerrilla group, announced a temporary ceasefire to avoid disrupting the election—but other active criminal and insurgent groups made no such promise.

“Colombia is being kidnapped,” López said. “I’m with Abelardo because his priority is to restore safety to Colombians. He understands that ‘total peace’ isn’t won by negotiating with criminals, but by exercising the legitimate force of the state.” López notes that under the current approach, victims of violence are being re-victimized over and over, and he fears for the next generation if current policies continue. “My fear is for the new generation, that the same thing that happened to me could happen to them if the country keeps being handed over to guerrillas and organized crime,” he said.

Just as Monroy fears the return of state-sponsored extrajudicial violence and López fears the continued spread of armed group power, both victims agree that the legacy of six decades of war hangs over this election, with the very future of peace in Colombia hanging in the balance.

Following the recent conclusion of the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, a sharp exchange of words between Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and former U.S. President Donald Trump has brought simmering cross-border tensions to a head, with Lula issuing a clear rebuke of U.S. interference in Brazil’s domestic political affairs ahead of the country’s October presidential vote.

The confrontation was triggered by fresh comments Trump made this Wednesday, in which he claimed Brazil had grown “politically dangerous” and alleged the Lula-led government was seeking to arrest a member of the Bolsonaro family who is performing strongly in pre-election polling. While Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted former lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro — one of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro’s sons — on Tuesday of coercive actions tied to his father’s 2023 coup trial, sentencing him to four years and two months in prison, Trump’s comment was widely interpreted to reference Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s eldest son, who is Lula’s main challenger in the upcoming presidential race and has not faced arrest warrants. The court found Eduardo Bolsonaro guilty of illegally meddling in his father’s trial by lobbying U.S. officials to pressure Brazilian judicial bodies into halting proceedings.

When a journalist shared Trump’s remarks with Lula during a post-summit press conference, the Brazilian leader pushed back firmly. Lula argued that Trump’s comments revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of his country, rooted in his close ties to the Bolsonaro family. “If he knows Brazil through his relations with the Bolsonaro family, he doesn’t know Brazil,” Lula stated. “He can go on liking Bolsonaro — the father, the son, the grandson — that’s not my problem, it’s his. (…) But don’t interfere in Brazil’s elections, because Brazil’s elections are Brazil’s business.”

This public clash is the latest in a series of growing rifts between the Lula administration and the Trump-led U.S. government that stretch back more than a year. Shortly after Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro traveled to Washington D.C. for meetings with Trump and other U.S. officials, the Trump administration took two controversial steps that Lula has openly opposed. First, it designated two of Brazil’s largest drug trafficking organizations, First Command Capital and Red Command, as foreign terrorist groups. On Wednesday, Lula repeated his criticism of this designation, noting that while the groups do inflict violence on Brazilian communities, their core goal is illicit profit rather than ideological political change, disqualifying them from the terrorist label.

Second, the Trump administration has proposed imposing a new 25% tariff on Brazilian imports, basing the move on unsubstantiated claims that Brazil — the world’s 10th largest economy — engages in unfair trade practices. Lula even traveled to Washington earlier this year in a diplomatic push to convince Trump to abandon the tariff plan, making the final proposal all the more disrespectful in his view. Lula restated his grievance over the tariff this week, saying “I think what he did was disrespectful toward Brazil. He knows that. That’s why I said he still behaves like an emperor. We were negotiating an agreement.”

Additional longstanding tensions stem from U.S. sanctions imposed on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a move the Trump administration justified by claiming the judge’s prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro was politically motivated. Bolsonaro, who lost the 2022 Brazilian presidential election to Lula, was convicted of orchestrating a coup attempt to remain in power, a process Lula has repeatedly defended as a legitimate part of Brazil’s judicial system. Lula has repeatedly framed U.S. actions, from the tariffs to the sanctions, as violations of Brazil’s national sovereignty, dating back to last year when Trump first imposed trade restrictions and called Bolsonaro’s prosecution a “witch-hunt trial.”

As Brazil heads toward a highly competitive presidential election, the open confrontation between Lula and Trump underscores the deepening divide between the two countries and the growing risk of external interference in Brazil’s democratic process.

At the opening of the 2020s, Latin America appeared to be on an irreversible leftward trajectory. Fueled by widespread public anger over deep-seated systemic inequalities that were drastically worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, progressive leaders won power across most of the region’s largest economies, from Brazil and Chile to Colombia and Peru. But just a few years later, a sharp conservative political backlash is gaining momentum across the continent.

While overall homicide rates across most of Latin America have fallen compared to 10 years ago, sharp upticks in violent crime in key nations and a region-wide surge in non-violent offending, particularly gang-led extortion, have created a perfect political opening for right-wing populists. These candidates have mobilized voters by leaning into hardline, heavy-handed promises to crack down on both organized crime and irregular migration, borrowing a playbook popularized by El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele. Their inflammatory rhetoric framing migrants as inherent criminals has earned the public backing of former U.S. President Donald Trump, and energized alienated voter bases, even as human rights observers warn these policies risk widespread abuses and undermine democratic institutions.

Enrique Roig, vice president of the Washington-based non-profit Human Rights First and a former U.S. State Department official, notes that a new coordinated cross-regional right wing has emerged, aligned with the U.S. MAGA movement that has also weaponized public anxiety over crime to drive political mobilization. “It’s easier to sell locking people up than it is to deal with the reasons why mainly young men join gangs in countries like El Salvador,” Roig explained.

Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, points out that while populist politics have found traction across the ideological spectrum in recent years, only right-wing candidates have been able to offer short-term security fixes that promise voters they will “feel safer in six months” — even if that requires trading democratic norms and human rights protections. Left-leaning proposals, by contrast, center on long-term, structural solutions such as community violence intervention programs, improved police training, and comprehensive judicial and prison reform that take years to deliver tangible results.

“It’s absolutely what you’re supposed to be doing, but people’s patience runs out,” Isacson said. “So, there come the Bukeles of the world saying, ‘You want to feel better? We got this.’”

Across the region, right-wing candidates aligned with this tough-on-crime agenda have already surged to front-runner status or won office. In Colombia, where large swathes of rural territory have fallen back into armed conflict between government forces and rebel groups, pro-Trump businessman Abelardo de la Espriella has led polls ahead of the upcoming presidential runoff election, modeling his platform explicitly on Bukele’s agenda. In Peru, where extortion cases have grown fivefold over the past half-decade, Keiko Fujimori — daughter of disgraced authoritarian former President Alberto Fujimori — advanced to the June 7 presidential runoff on a hardline law-and-order platform, vowing to deploy the military to prisons and border regions. In Costa Rica, voters reeling from record drug-linked homicides elected conservative populist Laura Fernández in February on the same tough-on-crime platform, while in Honduras, businessman Nasry Asfura won December’s election after Trump endorsed him as a partner to fight “narco-communists.”

Data from InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime across the Americas, shows that the combined average homicide rate for Latin America and the Caribbean dropped by more than 5% in 2025 compared to 2024, with the regional median rate hitting 17.6 per 100,000 people. But the trend masks dangerous exceptions in key cocaine-producing and transit nations. Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, along with neighboring Ecuador, which has become a key trafficking gateway to European markets, have all seen sharp spikes in drug-related killings. In 2025, Peru recorded 2,400 homicides and Colombia reported 14,780, the highest annual totals for both countries since at least 2020. Ecuador saw a staggering 31% year-over-year rise in killings, hitting 9,216 total homicides.

Much of this soaring violence in Ecuador stems from the expansion of transnational cartels from Mexico, Colombia, and the Balkans, which expanded their operations during the pandemic and recruited local gang members to control trafficking routes. Disputes over territory have even spilled into the country’s prison system, where more than 1,000 inmates have been killed in targeted attacks since 2021. While Ecuador recorded 16,100 reported extortion cases in 2025, down from 23,000 in 2024, experts widely note the crime is drastically underreported across the region.

In Chile, long considered one of Latin America’s most stable and safe countries, the shift in political tides has been particularly dramatic. Four years ago, voters rejected ultra-conservative candidate José Antonio Kast to elect Gabriel Boric, a young progressive former student activist who campaigned on addressing Chile’s long-standing social inequalities. But last year, widespread public fear over rising crime — amplified by popular narratives linking the surge to the country’s growing Venezuelan migrant population — handed Kast a historic victory.

Venezuelan transnational criminal groups such as the Tren de Aragua gang have exploited the mass migration wave out of Venezuela to expand human trafficking and extortion networks across the region following the pandemic. In Chile, this has led to an unprecedented surge in carjackings, kidnappings, and gang shootouts. Chile’s Interior Ministry data shows the national homicide rate rose 30% between 2021 and 2022, peaking at 6.7 per 100,000 people. While the rate has declined slightly since, it remains well above pre-pandemic levels, and other violent crimes continue to climb: kidnappings have risen nearly 180% over the past four years.

During his campaign, Kast visited Bukele’s notorious mega-prisons in El Salvador and adopted the Salvadoran leader’s hardline playbook, handily defeating his left-wing opponent in December. He pledged to build a massive border wall, toughen prison conditions for gang members, and deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants. Voters largely overlooked his hardline stances against abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as his public defense of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship, in exchange for his promise of rapid public safety gains.

In Peru, Keiko Fujimori has similarly leveraged public anxiety over rising violent crime to stage a political comeback, four years after she lost the presidency to left-wing leader Pedro Castillo, who is now imprisoned on corruption charges. Campaigning under the slogan “Peru with Order,” Fujimori won the largest share of the vote in April’s first round of voting, and entered the June 7 runoff in a technical tie with Roberto Sánchez, Castillo’s political heir.

Experts warn that growing public support for these authoritarian-leaning security policies — a tradition long tied to 20th-century right-wing dictatorships across the region — has grown alongside collapsing public trust in state institutions and rising disillusionment with democratic governance. Eduardo Moncada, director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, explains the prevailing public mindset: “democracy hasn’t been able to keep me and my family safe, so maybe democracy is part of the problem.”

This shift poses a major existential challenge to the region’s left-wing governments, which have overseen sluggish economic growth, grappled with high-profile corruption scandals, and failed to deliver on landmark promises of social reform in recent years. Even progressive leaders have been forced to shift with the changing political tide: Chile’s progressive Jeannette Jara and Peru’s Sánchez have both softened their stances on security policy, while Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi has called Bukele’s authoritarian security model “worthy of further study.” Guatemala’s center-left government declared a national state of emergency to crack down on gang violence this year and has accepted security assistance from the Trump-aligned U.S. administration targeting drug traffickers.

But for newly elected leaders who campaigned on rapid hardline security change, the realities of governing large, cash-strapped democracies have quickly tempered their ambitions — a reality that stands in stark contrast to Bukele’s El Salvador, where his ruling party holds a legislative supermajority that allows him to enact policy without opposition.

Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, elected in 2023, campaigned on a promise to lock gang leaders in floating prison barges and build a network of mega-prisons. But after taking office, he abandoned the floating prison plan entirely, and it took his administration until November of last year to open the first mega-prison. Beatriz García Nice, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Stimson Center, explained that “Building mega-prisons hasn’t been that easy or that straightforward because the country is in a very bad state financially and because President Daniel Noboa still sees himself as a democrat.”

Nearly three months into Kast’s tenure as Chile’s president, public opinion has grown skeptical: most voters report they cannot see any difference between his security crackdown and the policies of his left-wing predecessor. After promising to immediately round up and expel the country’s more than 300,000 undocumented migrants, his government has only organized two deportation flights. Kast’s public rhetoric has softened noticeably, and he sparked widespread outrage last month when he described his mass deportation promise as “a metaphor.” Even during a June 1 address rolling out new security measures — including a ban on social benefits for people convicted of attacking police — he sought to lower supporters’ inflated expectations.

“Governing, as many of you know, means taking responsibility for reality, especially when it’s difficult,” Kast said. “I’m proceeding step by step because this isn’t something that happens overnight.”