In April 2026, weeks before Colombians first went to the polls, Jenny Pearce and Juan David Velasco published ¿Quién manda en Colombia? Élites, poder y nación (Bogotá: Media Pluma), an exhaustive study of who holds power in Colombia. Drawing on an original database of elites from 1991 to 2022, it finds that wealth, political influence and social status rest with some 932 individuals from 119 families: about 0.002 per cent of a nation of more than 51 million.
Then Colombians voted again. Abelardo De la Espriella — a Trump-endorsed far-right lawyer who made his name defending paramilitary leaders — won the run-off, beating the leftist Iván Cepeda by less than one per cent, in one of the closest and highest-turnout elections in Colombia’s history.
Pearce has spent 50 years studying violence and peace in Latin America. Now a Visiting Professor at LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, she was previously Professor of Latin American Politics at the University of Bradford (1992–2016) and Research Professor at LSE’s Latin American and Caribbean Centre (2016–2023). She is a winner of LASA’s Martin Diskin Prize and the author of Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth, published by LAB in 1990. I spoke to her days after the run-off.
LAB will review ¿Quién manda en Colombia? Élites, poder y nación in a forthcoming article. The book can be ordered through Buscalibre, which ships internationally.
Before we sat down today, you told me that last Sunday’s result confirms the book’s argument. De la Espriella cast his win as a revolt against the establishment, an election that, in his own telling, is a new model for Colombia. How does a result he frames as rupture actually confirm your argument about who holds power?
It’s a critical question. We didn’t write the book to claim the total explanation for Colombia; one of its aims is to open a serious debate. The book challenges what many Colombianists have called the paradox of Colombia: that it escaped the long dictatorships of the Southern Cone, has sustained electoral democracy and high macroeconomic stability, yet has some of the highest inequality and violence in the world. The paradox reading treats that stability as the country’s saving grace. We prefer to see a singularity. There is a connection between its two sides, between the commitment to liberal democracy and stability on one hand and the inequalities and violences on the other. You cannot understand it without asking about the role the elites play, which is why we analyse the architecture of power, not one concentrated elite but something more complex.
De la Espriella’s victory confirms part of that. He began fiercely anti-elite, casting himself as wholly outside traditional politics, refusing even the established parties’ support. But the elites have rallied to him, as they once did to Uribe. He chose a technocrat, José Manuel Restrepo, as his running mate, and the head of the ANDI, the industrialists’ association, declared that a vote for him was the only way to protect liberal democracy, which his own statements flatly deny. And it speaks to some of his voters, particularly in conservative places like Antioquia. Here our debt to Pierre Bourdieu matters. He has a lovely term, méconnaissance, when you take as given what is in fact open to question — the principles of domination the elite normalize, through education, culture and family capital, until we experience them as natural.
It is one reason the word elite conjures the idea of the best. So a candidate can present himself as anti-elite while still wanting to be considered the best, and still reproducing the same principles of domination. When he rallies los nunca (the never-haves), against los de siempre (the usual suspects), he speaks for people who think they are voting against the elite, but not against power as it is structured. There is hypocrisy in it, too: he attacks Petro as ‘Castro-Chavismo’, yet he himself once worked alongside Alex Saab, who was close to Chávez and was recently extradited to the United States.
If los nunca were voting for something in their interests, security was the most concrete of it. The hallmark of his campaign was a Bukele-style iron fist: mega-prisons and a militarized crackdown. In your previous work, you describe ‘authoritarian citizenship’, the way a yearning for safety can slide into acceptance of quick fixes and state violence ‘in whatever form’. Is that what’s driving his appeal, and can a politics of fear ever produce real security?
I don’t think we understand the impact of violence without an interdisciplinary conversation, with biologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, historians. The phrase ‘revenge is sweet’ exists in every language in the world. I once gave a lecture in Spain where people from Afghanistan said, we have that phrase too. It is the sense that if someone hurts me and then is harmed in return, I feel satisfied.
The right is astute at harvesting that punitive emotion, and social media lets it do so even more effectively. Hence the constant construction of enemies: communists, then terrorists under Uribe, now narco-terrorists. It allows people to blame a particular group for their insecurity, including real violence in their lives.
Any progressive project has to take this seriously. This is what I mean by authoritarian citizenship, which I think has grown across Latin America: if you offer people something apparently quick, they feel a sense of security against the many insecurities they actually live with. Violence, extortion, and displacement are the most visible forms of insecurity, for which criminal actors as well as state and non-state actors may be held accountable. And, in exchange for that promised security, people will give up a portion of their own citizenship, part of their commitment to rights.
Take El Salvador, which I know well — I was there during the war and I’ve been back many times since. To understand why Bukele’s approach took hold, you have to understand why the gangs grew in the first place, why people had so little trust in the state, how politicians used the gangs for votes and then abandoned them, and how unbelievable the homicide levels became. Now he has used his prisons to seize the justice system and the congress, and to style himself ‘the world’s coolest dictator’. The trick is the either/or: blame the criminals for everything, and you stop seeing what the state does. I stood on the outskirts of San Salvador with a mother whose son, a gang member, had just been executed in his bed by the police. We don’t see that. We see Bukele, instead, telling an interviewer in Chile that those who defend human rights care more about rapists and murderers than about victims. It is untrue, but it gives a clean, black-and-white story, and we have to respect why that story works, because for those living it the reality is horrendous.
That is exactly why ‘security from the left’ matters. The left cannot simply take the right’s security agenda, nor offer nothing in its place. It has to link security to sustainable change in the criminalities and violences people live with, and to building alternatives for the young people who are drawn into that world.
You ended on ‘security from the left’, which is really the question Colombia now faces from the other direction. The next president inherits the worst violence since the 2016 peace accord, and ‘Total Peace’, the attempt to end the conflict through negotiation, has faltered. You’ve written that violence here is ‘not an anomaly within an otherwise stable democracy’ but a constitutive feature of its order. Was the idea itself flawed, or overwhelmed by the structures you describe?
It is hard to defend Total Peace even among progressives, because it is widely judged a failure. But I hope that, in time, we will look harder at what it was trying to do.
We don’t treat violence only as homicides. I draw on what I call chronic violences: the lethal and the non-lethal violences that reproduce across generations in Colombia. And it is vital to acknowledge state violence, not only the violence of guerrillas and criminal groups. The political party that emerged from the FARC, the Unión Patriótica, set out to show that change could come through elections, and faced what is now internationally recognized as a political genocide: more than 6,000 of its members were assassinated. Violence has been part of the order, accepted by the country’s elites as necessary to defend it. It took the 2016 accord and its transitional justice mechanism to begin to recognize the ‘false positives’, when the army picked up young men, killed them, dressed them as guerrillas and counted them as casualties of the conflict, while their mothers went looking for them. None of this justifies the violence of guerrillas or criminal groups. All violence, for me, is wrong. But you have to understand why, for many, armed struggle came to be seen as the only route to change, and how, as the drug trade grew, that violence became entangled with criminal economies.
The 2016 accord was a remarkable moment that could have opened a real debate about change. The problem is that some of the elites thought it was simply the demobilization of the guerrillas, and nothing more. They did not commit to the changes that were needed. When Petro began a new approach with Total Peace, the founding document recognized, rightly, that peace is a generational process: armed groups will not disappear in a single four-year presidency. That doesn’t mean the implementation was well thought through. It wasn’t. As it became harder, armed groups calculated that they were better off seizing territory, which is why much of the violence under Petro has been violence between armed groups.
And the process did not take urban peace seriously enough. I saw NGOs and groups that had little faith in it begin to engage over time, around the prisoners in Itagüí, around the giving-up of arms, and above all around stopping child recruitment. Which is part of how violence reproduces across generations. So I don’t put Total Peace in the box of simple failure. There is a great deal to learn about its implementation.
That brings us to Petro himself, since Total Peace was his project. In the wake of this election he stands accused of undermining democracy, claiming without evidence that the vote was hacked, reaching for one of the autocrat’s preferred weapons. He’s far from alone — Trump and Bolsonaro have both denied losing the same way — but it’s unusual to see it wielded from the left. What does that do to a country?
You have to understand the character of the man. I have interviewed him, and in the book we go into some detail. He is very intelligent, an intellectual rather than an ideologue. But he has carried personal burdens: he was imprisoned, he was tortured, and he came into power feeling he could finally make change. He is not a great team-builder, as we saw when he was mayor of Bogotá, and there is no technocratic elite on the left for him to draw on. He came to power with a great vision, but without the teams to realize it.
One has to be careful, though, about the way the media cast Petro as the threat to the constitution. I don’t think that is fair. The 1991 constitution, which many consider the most progressive advance in Colombia’s history, itself came about through an assembly that students had to push for. Petro’s own view, drawn from Antonio Negri, is that mobilizing people to overcome obstacles to reform is not in itself anti-democratic, especially in a country as unequal as Colombia.
His frustration overcame him at the election. And it is not so strange to harbour a doubt: Colombia has real histories of clientelism, vote-buying and manipulation, and his frustration is partly that the media don’t pick up on any of it. It is not for nothing that we write about the elites buying up the press. Semana, for example — once the journal we all read to understand the country — was bought by Gilinski and now firmly backs the right. People no longer have a source that lets them feel they know where the truth lies.
So yes, Petro opened up doubts too quickly, and given his history I understand it, though it was not wise politically. But he stepped back, as did Cepeda, and both accepted the result. Whether we will ever have evidence of vote-rigging is hard to say, and I would not personally rule out that something went on in certain regions. That said, Colombia generally respects its election results, and it matters that it does.
Petro was one of the region’s last progressive administrations, and De la Espriella’s election is further evidence that the pink tide which swept Latin America in the 2000s has all but receded. Having watched the region’s politics for decades, how do you read this shift to the right?
We are in a historic moment in Latin America: a hard-right turn in which violence and security play the central role, run by politicians who exploit the deep insecurities people feel. What worries me is how many presidents are now on the same page of hardline, prison-building security, Milei, Bukele, Noboa in Ecuador, Kast in Chile. This is the territory of the ‘War on Drugs’, which formally began in Mexico in 2006 under Calderón, 20 years ago this year. We want to use that anniversary to do work with colleagues in Colombia and beyond, including a paper on what we can learn from Mexico, because the War on Drugs does not work: it does not stop trafficking or production, it does not touch demand or addiction, and it does not stop the violence. It has simply allowed armed groups to adapt, moving into illegal gold mining, extortion and new markets, becoming, in effect, the entrepreneurial capitalists of a criminal order.
The other part of this is global. Trump is funding and investing in candidates he wants to win. We know he did it with Milei, and there is little doubt he did it with De la Espriella, though we may only learn the details later.
What worries me most is the message Trump sends about the rule of law. He released Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president known for his links to drug trafficking, so the signal is that some traffickers are acceptable and others are not. That hollows out the whole category of ‘narco-terrorist’. And he is giving the region permission for actions like the bombing of fishing boats, the killing of mostly young men who may or may not be trafficking, with no trial and no rule of law. It is a profound undermining of the idea that justice matters, and a major threat to Latin America.
I’ll finish with your own title. After this election, and after all your work on the book: who is really running Colombia — and what would it take for the answer to change?
That is the key question. The heart of ¿Quién manda en Colombia? is that the elites have always been able to make pactos faccionales (factional pacts), whenever their interests are threatened by reform. We have the histories: Alfonso López Pumarejo, a great reforming president of the 1930s; Carlos Lleras Restrepo, another reformer whose agrarian reform was halted when the elites closed ranks in the Pacto de Chicoral. Which is partly why he had helped create ANUC, the peasant organization, to push reform through from below. Again and again, the factional pacts of the elites have closed ranks to stop reform.
That is why, with De la Espriella, we see a harder form of the singularity. The elites have made a new pact, believing they can influence him, keep him from the far-right extreme he has talked about, and by appointing another LSE-trained technocrat, he has signalled that he too will offer technocratic stability. We don’t yet know which way he will go. But the pattern, elites uniting behind a far-right candidate who threatens parts of the singularity, who then backtracks and accepts their support, tells us a great deal about this moment.
The biggest question hanging over everything is how the left responds. My great worry is that if it mobilizes — and some mobilization is already happening — De la Espriella has made clear he will use violence, and the violence of the state could return, as under Uribe and the paramilitaries, to deal with a left that is now a political force rather than an armed one, with a very large vote. In Congress, where De la Espriella is weak and the left has solid support, we will see what tools he uses, and whether the elites accompany him down the route of violence.
Our hypothesis, the singularity, we put out as a draft for debate. I would have preferred it to be questioned, for a new possibility to open. But Cepeda was not able to overcome the singularity: the right has returned, the elites have pacted, and the great threat is that the dominant principles of domination continue, including the one that makes the United States vital to the elites. De la Espriella is, very clearly, aligned with Trump, and the elites are comfortable that this will not be challenged. And yet, there is now a progressive left in Colombia with a significant political base that was not there before. The question is whether the elites will ever recognize that the country needs real reform. That, I suspect, is what this period of government will test.
Main image: Jenny Pearce and co-author Juan David Velasco Montoya introducing ¿Quién manda en Colombia? in Bogotá, 2026. Photo: Mediapluma
