The peculiar spectacle of Anglo-American diplomacy has reached its latest, most absurd nadir. The UK and US, those twin pillars of post-war globalism, have dispatched a joint plea for an immediate ceasefire in Colombia. Not a ceasefire between warring drug cartels or Marxist guerrillas, mind you. No, this is a plea for peace between two presidential candidates in a runoff election. The offender? A pro-Trump populist who threatens to dismantle the very regional consensus that Washington and London have spent decades constructing.
Let us contemplate the sheer historical irony. The United States, a nation that has spent a century interfering in Latin American elections by bomb, coup, and covert funding, now begs Colombians not to vote too enthusiastically for a candidate who might annoy the neighbours. The UK, a former imperial power whose own electoral system has been reduced to a farce of revolving door prime ministers, lectures Bogotá on the virtues of measured democracy.
The pro-Trump candidate, one Rodolfo Hernández (or is it Federico Gutiérrez? The details blur in the endless soap opera), threatens to shift Colombia away from the cautious, establishment-friendly policies that have made it Washington’s most reliable South American ally. He dares to propose something radical: peace talks with the remaining guerrilla groups, a loosening of the punitive drug war, and a foreign policy that might actually put Colombian interests first. For this, he is labelled a risk to regional stability.
But what is this stability, really? It is the stability of the narco-state cartel that has turned Colombia into a perpetual supplier of cocaine and a training ground for paramilitary violence. It is the stability of a political class so detached from reality that it can barely govern its own capital. The US and UK now speak of a ceasefire as if the Colombian electorate were a pair of brawling drunks. They have missed the point entirely. The real instability is not the democratic choice of a people weary of the status quo. It is the crumbling edifice of Western influence itself.
One cannot help but draw parallels to the fall of the Roman Republic. As the empire decayed, Rome’s clients grew restless, independent, and eventually unmanageable. The UK and US are now in the position of a tired patrician class, desperately trying to manage their provincial satraps with bribes, threats, and the occasional request for calm. It will not work. The intellectual and moral decadence of the West has produced a vacuum that populists from Colombia to Hungary are only too happy to fill.
Consider the language of the joint statement: 'We urge all parties to exercise restraint and respect the democratic process.' Respect the process? The process is the problem. Democracy has become a euphemism for managed outcomes. When the people vote the wrong way, the establishment demands a ceasefire. It is a farce worthy of Evelyn Waugh but with considerably higher stakes.
Colombia is a crucial test case. If a populist can win there despite the full weight of Anglo-American disapproval, the dominos will fall across the region. Mexico, Brazil, and even Argentina might follow. The Monroe Doctrine is dead; it is now the Mad Man doctrine of erratic tweets and futile peace pleas.
So let us be honest. The UK and US are not urging a ceasefire for the sake of Colombian peace. They are urging it for their own geopolitical convenience. The candidate threatens to disrupt the carefully managed chaos that keeps Colombian elites in power and drugs flowing to the North. That is the real threat. That is the threat to stability.
And as a contrarian intellectual, I must note: Perhaps instability is exactly what Colombia, and the West, needs. A good crisis, after all, has a way of clearing out the dead wood. But then, I am paid to annoy you, not to offer solutions.
