It is a peculiar thing to watch a British reporter stand in a Bogotá polling station, trying to explain to a disinterested electorate how the outcome of this presidential runoff ‘matters to London’. The voters, queuing under the thin mountain sun, are not thinking about the UK. They are thinking about the price of bread, the security of their neighbourhood, and whether the next president will finally bring the peace that their parents’ generation never knew.
But we in the British press cannot help ourselves. For decades, we have narrated Latin America through a lens of our own making: as a chessboard for Cold War manoeuvres, a supplier of cheap commodities, a stage for ‘interesting’ social experiments. And now, with a leftist former guerrilla, Gustavo Petro, facing off against a pro-Trump populist, Rodolfo Hernández, the narrative is being written once more. The UK, observers whisper, has ‘lost influence’ in the region. But did we ever really have it?
The Human Cost of this election is not about geopolitics. It is about the woman selling arepas on the corner of Carrera Séptima, who told me she will vote for Petro because ‘at least he’s not the same old faces’. It is about the young man in a polo shirt who said Hernández is ‘the only one who talks like a normal person’, and nodded when I mentioned the former president’s fondness for Donald Trump. ‘Trump does well by his people,’ he said, and I did not have the heart to explain the difference between rhetoric and policy.
The Cultural Shift is palpable. Colombia, once the most loyal US ally in the region, is now a bellwether for a broader dissatisfaction with the ‘establishment’. The UK, which has tried to position itself as a benign partner in trade and investment, is largely irrelevant to this conversation. Our ‘influence’ is a ghost we chase through diplomatic cables and trade delegations, while the real power lies in the hands of the TikTok feeds that made Hernández a viral sensation and the grassroots networks that propelled Petro’s campaign.
Class Dynamics are the unspoken key. Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla who became mayor of Bogotá, speaks the language of the poor and the marginalised. Hernández, a millionaire businessman, taps into the anger of the middle class who feel left behind by both the left and the right. Neither is a standard-bearer for British interests. Neither cares about the ‘special relationship’ with London. And why should they?
The result will be close. It will be messy. And afterwards, British journalists will file their analyses about what this means for ‘our’ place in the world. But the Colombians will go home, turn on the television, and wait to see if the price of milk will rise tomorrow. That is the real story. The UK’s influence in Latin America was always a fiction we told ourselves. Now, the fiction is being put to rest. And all that remains is the quiet, stubborn hope of a country trying to decide its own future.
