It is a peculiar and disheartening spectacle. A nation that has spent half a century perfecting the art of self-immolation now asks its citizens to choose between two men who represent not hope, but merely different shades of the same inferno. Colombia’s presidential election, a contest as knife-edged as the machetes that still define its internal conflict, is a grim reminder that the wheels of history turn slowly, and often backwards.
Let us dispense with the polite fictions. The “war on drugs” is a term that belongs to the same intellectual dustbin as the “war to end all wars.” What we are witnessing in Colombia is a brutal, internecine struggle for control of resources, territory, and the very soul of the nation. The candidates, Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, are not statesmen. They are symptoms. Petro, a former guerrilla, offers a vision of redistributive justice that would make a Victorian moralist blanch. Hernández, a billionaire populist, promises a technocratic clean-up, as if corruption were a stain to be scrubbed away with data.
But the real story, the one that the liberal press will tiptoe around, is the decay of the state itself. Colombia’s internal war is not a remnant of the Cold War or a simple crime problem. It is the natural outcome of a society that has abandoned the very idea of a commonweal. When the government cedes territory to armed groups, when the rule of law becomes a suggestion rather than a command, the social contract is shredded. And what fills the void? Not democracy, but a Hobbesian free-for-all where the only law is the law of the strongest.
This election is a charade, a theatrical performance designed to convince the international community that Colombia remains a functioning democracy. In reality, the country is a laboratory for what happens when the state retreats: warlords, paramilitaries, and narco-traffickers become the de facto governors. The politicians in Bogotá are mere figureheads, their authority extending no further than the range of a helicopter’s fuel tank.
Consider the irony. The United States and Europe pour billions into “peacebuilding” and “development aid,” yet the conflict endures. Why? Because the pathology is not economic or geopolitical. It is civilisational. Colombia, like so many of its Latin American neighbours, has never fully internalised the idea that the state exists to serve the citizen, not the other way around. The result is a perpetual cycle of violence and instability, a tragic echo of the Roman Republic’s late stages, where the “optimates” and “populares” tore the state apart to satisfy their own ambitions.
I am not suggesting that Colombia is doomed. But the election’s knife-edge outcome will change little. Whether Petro or Hernández claims the presidency, the machetes will still swing in the countryside. The cocaine will still flow. The internally displaced will still swell the shantytowns. The only difference is the rhetoric. One will speak of peace and reconciliation, the other of efficiency and order. Neither will address the fundamental rot: a nation that has never agreed on what it means to be Colombia.
The intellectuals will wring their hands and call for more dialogue. The diplomats will issue statements urging calm. But history, that unsparing judge, offers a simpler verdict. Empires fall when they lose faith in themselves. Nations collapse when they forget why they exist. Colombia’s war is not a problem to be solved. It is a mirror. And in it, we see the face of a modern civilisation clinging desperately to the illusion of progress while the jungle reclaims its own.
So watch this election with a weary eye. The winner will be a man. The loser will be the idea that order can be imposed from above. And the rest of us, smug in our own stability, should take note: the knife-edge is always closer than we think.