Colombia election sees pro-Trump lawyer lead first round
There is a man in Bogotá whose vote has just been weighed against the heavy, invisible machinery of a new political doctrine. He is not a politician, nor a general, nor a man who speaks in the polished cadences of international summits. He is a farmer, or perhaps a small shopkeeper, or a teacher who knows that the price of coffee beans does not rise because a decree says it should, but because the rain failed or the market shifted. His energy - the specific, finite capacity to plan his week, to tend his crop, to raise his children - is now being asked to flow in a direction determined not by his own judgment, but by the gravitational pull of a “Donroe doctrine.”
The news from Colombia is that Aberaldo de la Espriella, a lawyer known for his alignment with Donald Trump, has pulled ahead in the first round of the presidential race. The headlines speak of political shifts and regional realignments. They speak of strongman leadership as if it were a weather pattern, something that simply arrives and must be endured. But this is not weather. This is a redirection of human energy.
When we speak of a “strongman,” we are speaking of a central point of gravity. In a free society, energy is distributed. The farmer decides when to plant; the merchant decides what to stock; the worker decides whether to strike or to bargain. These decisions are millions of tiny acts of creation, each one drawing on the individual’s knowledge of their own circumstances. This is the hydraulic truth of liberty: energy flows where it is allowed to flow, and it finds the most productive course when it is not blocked by a dam of administrative control.
But the strongman model requires a different kind of flow. It requires that energy be collected, centralized, and then dispensed. It asks the individual to surrender their judgment to the judgment of the leader. The cost of this is not merely political; it is existential. It is the cost of a life lived in waiting. When the state becomes the primary actor, the individual becomes a recipient. And a recipient has no energy of their own; they have only the energy that is given to them, or withheld from them.
De la Espriella’s rise is not an accident. It is a symptom of a deeper exhaustion. People are tired of the complexity of freedom. They are tired of the responsibility that comes with the ability to choose. The promise of the strongman is simple: I will decide for you. I will protect you. I will make the hard choices so you do not have to. It is a seductive offer, particularly in times of uncertainty. But it is a lie. The strongman does not make the hard choices; he merely makes them for himself, while the consequences are borne by everyone else.
The “Donroe doctrine” is not a policy; it is a psychology. It is the belief that order can be imposed from above, that chaos can be tamed by force, that the messy, unpredictable energy of free individuals can be harnessed like a river behind a dam. But human energy is not water. It does not sit still. It does not wait to be released. When it is blocked, it does not disappear; it turns sour. It becomes resentment, or apathy, or a desperate search for any outlet that is not controlled.
I have seen this before. I have seen it in the American Midwest, where the New Deal programmes were designed to help farmers but ended up directing them. I have seen it in the way that well-meaning officials in Washington believed they knew better than the man on the land what his farm needed. The result was never prosperity. It was dependency. It was a slow draining of the spirit, a gradual acceptance that one’s own judgment was inferior to the judgment of the planner.
Colombia is now standing at this same precipice. The election is not just a contest between candidates; it is a contest between two visions of human agency. One vision sees the individual as a source of creative energy, capable of building a life through their own efforts. The other sees the individual as a problem to be managed, a variable to be controlled.
The stakes are high, not because of the geopolitical implications, but because of the human ones. If de la Espriella wins, and if the “Donroe doctrine” takes root, the energy of the Colombian people will be redirected. It will flow toward compliance, toward loyalty, toward the center. It will not flow toward innovation, toward community, toward the quiet, daily work of building a life.
This is not a prediction of doom. It is an observation of mechanics. Energy must go somewhere. If it is not allowed to go into the soil, into the shop, into the home, it will go into the streets, into the protests, into the anger. The strongman may hold power for a time, but he cannot hold energy. He can only consume it. And when the energy is gone, there is nothing left but the shell of the state, empty and cold.
The man in Bogotá knows this, even if he cannot name it. He knows that his vote is a transfer of power. He knows that by choosing the strongman, he is choosing to stop choosing. And that is a price no amount of stability can pay.