Well, well, well. The world’s historians, still picking over the embers of what was once the Pax Americana, have another entry for their catalogues of decline. A Trump-backed populist has won the presidency in Colombia.
A man who speaks like a caudillo from a García Márquez novel, but with the rhetoric of a Fox News anchor. The result? A seismic challenge to the regional order, a blow to the tired establishment that has governed Latin America with the same failing prescriptions for decades.
Let me be blunt: this is the Fall of Rome happening in slow motion, but with better television coverage. The liberal elite, both in Washington and Bogotá, are weeping into their chardonnay. They should be.
The victory is not merely an electoral upset; it is a repudiation of the entire post-Cold War consensus. Remember when Colombia was the shining star of Plan Colombia, the darling of the War on Drugs, the reliable ally in a sea of leftist instability? That narrative is dead.
The new president promises a foreign policy of national interest, not subservience to gringo diktats. He will kiss Trump’s ring, yes, but on his own terms. The local press, ever the handmaidens of the progressive establishment, are calling him a danger to democracy.
They fear him because he speaks to the working man, the one whose taxes funded their salaries. The real danger, my dear reader, is that the elites have learned nothing. They have seen Brexit.
They have seen Trump. They have seen Bolsonaro. And still they believe their virtue is enough to hold back the tide.
They cannot. This is the intellectual decadence of our age: the belief that the masses must be saved from themselves. But the masses have spoken, in Colombia as elsewhere.
They want order, not cosmopolitan chatter. They want sovereignty, not lectures on intersectionality. So what now?
Expect a realignment of South American politics. The pink tide is gone; the national tide is rising. The old parties will wither.
The new strongmen will proliferate. And the historians, they will marvel at how we managed our own destruction with such bureaucratic elegance. The only question is: who will replace us when the barbarians arrive?
They have already voted.