Colombia’s new president brings country back into Trump’s orbit, with some difficulties

Newly elected Colombian President Abelardo Gabriel de la Espriella is eager to retake his country’s position as the U.S.’s foremost partner in Latin America, but the road isn’t easy.Colombia has long been considered the U.S.’s closest partner in Latin America. This partnership faced one of its biggest challenges in 2022, when the leftist former guerrilla Gustavo Petro took the presidency, vowing to take a much different approach to tackling armed groups. Petro’s “total peace” initiative, seeking to focus on negotiations and addressing root causes rather than armed engagement, triggered violence from both leftist guerrillas and drug cartels, exploding across his presidency. This, along with his belligerent approach toward President Donald Trump, led to a nadir in U.S.-Colombian relations.De la Espriella, one of the most Trumpian in style and rhetoric of the right-wing leaders who have swept the region in recent years, made restoring relations with the U.S. one of his central campaign pledges. On Sept. 8, after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, de la Espriella declared, “Colombia wants to re-establish itself as the United States’ primary partner in hemispheric security.” The State Department announced pledges of financial support soon after de la Espriella’s Aug. 7 inauguration, including a $1 billion security package to support the new government, which it called a “cornerstone of this renewed partnership,” which would help its new allied administration achieve their “shared goals.”Colombia joined the Trump-founded, U.S.-led Shield of the Americas, an alliance of like-minded governments across Latin America focused on counter-narcotics and halting illegal immigration, as its 19th member.César Niño, a professor of international relations at Nueva Granada Military University in Bogotá, told the Washington Examiner that the turn marked a “qualitative leap,” evolving from a “predominantly bilateral model of capacity building toward a hemispheric security architecture with greater levels of strategic and operational coordination.”“The change is real because strategic priorities, institutional commitments, and political willingness to expand cooperation have been modified. But its effectiveness remains a hypothesis that must be empirically tested,” he added.Jason Marczak, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, argued that the realignment was both real and bipartisan, despite de la Espriella’s Trumpian focus.“My impression is that things have changed. I think that there’s a much stronger U.S.-Colombia alignment under the De La Espriella administration,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a partisan alignment.”The biggest breakthrough in the new relationship came in September, when Rubio met directly with de la Espriella in Barranquilla, where they signed the “Barranquilla agreements.” The two have a history, which has no doubt helped the U.S.-Colombia relationship. De la Espriella lived in Miami for over a decade, coinciding with the future secretary of state’s time in the Senate. Marco Rubio said after their meeting that Colombia “elected someone I know very well.”The Barranquilla agreements pledged cooperation on critical minerals, trade, and civil nuclear cooperation, but their key element was opening talks for future security cooperation. De la Espriella has made known his ambitious goals for expanded U.S.-Colombian cooperation.But it was on the security side that he had the most requests. De la Espriella presented Rubio with a security initiative he called “Plan Patriota Siglo XXI,” a central pillar of his vision for the new aggressive stance against guerrillas and cartels. As part of the plan, he asked for U.S. investment to modernize Colombia’s military and intelligence apparatus, specifically aircraft, radars, drones, helicopters, anti-drone systems, air defenses, mobility, intelligence, cyberdefense and special forces.The most ambitious suggestion was the establishment of a joint Colombian-U.S. base on Colombian soil. Rubio said Washington was open to the possibility, though it needed a formal invitation from the Colombian government, and no decision has been made.De la Espriella has been quick to tout his results from the new aggressive approach, announcing on Oct. 12 that government forces had arrested 32,503 criminals of various types, 33 ringleaders, and destroyed 679 drug production sites since taking office on Aug. 7.He gave an estimate of 12,575 arrests at the beginning of September, 4,151 in just one week. The numbers were viewed as so shocking by some critics that they assumed they must have been made up altogether. But as La Silla Vacia pointed out, the numbers were at or below the average during the Petro years. The pace has remained about the same through October, according to de la Espriella’s statistics.The disconnect between perception and results reflects how close the U.S.-Colombian relationship has remained across disparate administrations. Though much was made of the tensions between the two countries during Petro’s reign, some experts cautioned against making too much of the fallout. Juliana Rubio (no relation to the secretary of state), associate director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner in an interview that despite the public clashes, she believes Colombia remained the U.S.’s biggest partner in Latin America throughout the Petro years.“I maintain that [Colombia] was and is the greatest partner [of the U.S.], and I think it will remain as much,” she said.Juliana Rubio saw the main changes after de la Espriella assumed power as mostly rhetorical, saying, “Even though there may have been spats at the top, things at the bottom kept working.”Sergio Guzmán, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a Bogotá-based political risk consultancy, struck a middle ground, though largely concurred with Juliana Rubio.“It’s changed a lot, and not very much at the same time,” Guzmán said, noting a “night and day” difference between de la Espriella and Petro, especially regarding their views of U.S. influence, but stressed the continuity between the two countries’ armed forces, intelligence agencies, and private sectors.Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella witnesses the demolition of a building once owned by the late drug trafficker Elmer Herrera in Cali, Colombia, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Santiago Saldarriaga) The pace of arrests may not tell the whole story, however. Tiziano Breda, Latin America Senior Analyst at ACLED, a conflict data monitoring firm, said in a post on the website that de la Espriella’s approach marked a sea change in Colombia’s approach.“In just three weeks, President De la Espriella completely buried all the remains of his predecessor Gustavo Petro’s Total Peace policy. In its stead, he has set the stage for an all-out war against armed groups, offering only two options to members of armed groups: prison or death,” Breda said.Breda said the most immediate consequence of de la Espriella’s change in strategy was triggering a spike in the lethality of security forces’ operations. In the first month of his term, ACLED recorded at least 84 deaths in clashes between security forces and armed groups, making August the deadliest month of clashes between armed groups and security forces in Colombia since the group started covering the country in 2018.Most experts now agree that it will take some time before the effectiveness of the new strategy can be readily assessed.Part of this lag in change is due to the systematic neglect of Colombia’s police and security forces under Petro. According to Semana, the National Police operations budget fell by roughly three-quarters under Petro.The neglect from Petro’s “Total Peace” agenda has allowed drug cartels and left-wing guerrillas to take control of entire swathes of the country. Taking back control of this territory is the most difficult task ahead, and has already triggered battles in several cities. De la Espriella also increasingly leaned on the military, personally ordering at least seven airstrikes on guerrilla camps with warplanes. These airstrikes have been critically assisted by U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones.Most of all has been the radical shift in optics — Petro’s queasy handling of violence contrasts sharply with de la Espriella’s habit of filming videos alongside the corpses of dead guerrillas, contained in body bags.Growing pains Though it’s too early to tell what results a more aggressive approach will yield, the new relationship has already seen its fair share of problems.At the multinational summit in August, after meeting with Colombian Defense Minister Jorge Eduardo Mora, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Bogota had authorized “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terrorist networks,” including direct U.S. strikes.His announcement came before any word from Bogota, and when Bogota did speak on the matter, it contradicted Hegseth’s claim of direct U.S. strikes. This mismatch in messaging would become a theme of the new relationship, and an enduring problem.The primary reason for the lag in change seems to be a combination of institutional resistance and popular taboos. Guzmán stressed the role of institutional resistance to change. Any move to change the level of U.S. involvement must pass Colombia’s Congress, which is known for political gridlock. Guzmán argued it isn’t even necessarily opposed to an increased U.S. presence, but that current priorities are focused elsewhere.Juliana Rubio argued that a change to joint operations would “become very problematic” constitutionally, and that doing so without congressional approval would lead to major problems for de la Espriella.Rebecca Bill Chavez, president and CEO of Inter-American Dialogue, questioned whether it was a good idea to involve U.S. troops in operations in Colombia, contrasting it with the U.S.’s advisory role in its successful Plan Colombia from 2000 to 2015.“A central principle of Plan Colombia was Colombian ownership. The United States provided intelligence, training, and equipment, while Colombians did the fighting. The moment U.S. forces join the fight, Colombia’s conflict becomes a U.S. conflict, with all the legal, political, and security risks that follow,” she said.The overlap of left-wing guerrilla groups and drug traffickers offers another complication to the equation. If U.S. special forces join the fight, “narcotrafficking operations kind of intertwine with the civil conflict,” Juliana Rubio said, producing “a big mess of different types of operations.”The U.S. Midterm results could also hamper progress, given de la Espriella’s investment in Trump and his vision specifically. The $1 billion in security assistance requires congressional approval, which Democrats could withhold over human rights concerns. Marczak suggested that the assistance was likely to go through — however, given de la Espriella’s more militant approach, it was chosen by the Colombian people.“I think there’s a real recognition that the previous administration in Colombia let not only the drug trafficking and cocaine production increase, but also left criminal groups to operate in an unfettered manner,” Marczak said. “I think that there is a demand from the Colombian people for military activities that help to improve long-term safety and security in Colombia.COLOMBIA AND BOLIVIA ‘FAILED DEMONSTRABLY’ TO COUNTER ILLEGAL DRUG PRODUCTIONWhether or not the assistance goes through, Colombia’s new strategic positioning looks set to hold for the foreseeable future.“Strategic alignment is already changing,” Niño said. “What has not yet been demonstrated is whether this change will produce superior results compared to previous policies.”