Photo of military operation on Colombian border, posted by the Ecuadorian Minister of Interior’s account.

As voting polls close, Colombians face either the continuation of the progressive Pacto Histórico government, which in a single term delivered the largest poverty reduction the nation’s ever seen, or a return to the right-wing doctrine of Plan Colombia— the US-Colombian security alliance and counterinsurgency campaign of the 2000s, under which 6,402 poor and disabled Colombian civilians were murdered by US-funded military forces, then dressed in guerrilla uniforms to inflate body counts and satisfy combat quotas. But their election season has been riddled with interference by Washington officials.

Pacto Histórico, the left-wing party that gained mass popularity through a historic general strike only months before its 2022 presidential election, is leading the tight race, with candidate Iván Cepeda ahead by an estimated 3 points. Cepeda, a Colombian senator and co-founder of the National Movement for Victims of State Crimes, and his running mate, indigenous human rights advocate and senator, Aida Quilcué, campaigned on strong economic and agrarian reforms; in particular, the promise to redistribute 1 million hectares of land to communities displaced by the paramilitary violence that has terrorized Colombia’s working-class for decades.

In contrast, Cepeda’s closest challenger, Abelardo de La Espriella, is a millionaire business executive and far-right attorney running on a militarized law-and-order agenda. His campaign, favored by Trump, proposes reviving aerial fumigation programs long criticized for their impact on rural communities and renewing military cooperation with the Israeli Occupation Forces, which were central to the formation and arming of the fascist AUC paramilitary who accumulated an estimated 211,000 reports of human rights violations during Colombia’s armed conflict.

Should Cepeda win, it will be in spite of sustained U.S. efforts to tilt the playing field against his party. Leaked audio, originally released by El Pais, reveals a U.S. embassy plot to halt the extradition of drug traffickers in exchange for implicating sitting President Gustavo Petro, of Ivan Cepeda’s party, in their case. Furthermore, the recording, authenticated by Colombian intelligence experts and reviewed by Petro’s office, suggests that Washington officials and Ecuadorian Interpol collaborated to form a group of confidential informants along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border with the intention of framing and entrapping Colombia’s first left-wing head of state in history. The parties in the recorded conversation also state that “the gringos” have factions within the Colombian military that they’ve bribed to flip on the ruling party.

Recorded audio released by El Pais and authenticated by Colombian intelligence experts.

This alleged plot surfaces just as the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice have opened an investigation, which many legal experts denounced as baseless, into President Gustavo Petro’s ties to alleged drug trafficking. The move mirrors a strategy of political lawfare that the United States has used to justify taking Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro hostage— only to later walk back key sections of their indictment against him— and to issue an arrest warrant for Bolivia’s former indigenous president, Evo Morales.

In an exclusive interview, David Adler, co-founder of Progressive International who’s serving as an election observer in Bogota this weekend, tells me, “The United States has a very schizophrenic relationship to the drug trade. On the one hand, we pretend at least in theory to be very vocal and vicious about our approach to the war on drugs. On the other, there's a really rich history well documented in the annals of the National Security Archive about how that same government and the three-letter agencies that populate our deep state have been instrumental in setting up that same architecture and in using it as a political instrument wherever it's convenient to realign Latin American governance in service of U.S. American interests. We've seen that schizophrenia play out in the case of Honduras, where at first we indicted and convicted Juan Orlando Hernandez, and on the second hand, Trump issued him a presidential pardon to reinstall a national party in Honduras that was more favorable to U.S. military and economic interests. So what these leaked audios do is that they fit that broader pattern where the U.S. government has been leveling charges against President Petro and also trying to align the figure and the reputation of Ivan Cepeda with armed paramilitary groups and their narco-trafficking. And on the other, we'll see evidence of the instrumentalization of the drug issue to basically earn political favors wherever it's convenient.”

This is not the first instance of a concerted US-Ecuadorian aggression towards Colombia. In March, an undetonated American-made bomb was discovered along the Colombian border following a joint operation between the U.S. Southern Command and the Ecuadorian state— a U.S. proxy which rules by martial law, U.S. boots on the ground, and a Miami-born billionaire as president. Acting on Pentagon intelligence, the Ecuadorian military conducted an airstrike on what they claimed was a Colombian FARC-dissident drug camp; taking the targets hostage, waterboarding them, and torturing them via electric shock. A New York Times investigation later proved the drug camp was in fact a simple dairy farm, with no proof of illicit activity.

In early 2026, Ecuadorian president Noboa launched a trade war with Colombia and threatened military confrontation. While there’s no evidence of Petro’s involvement in drug trafficking, Noboa’s family shipping company was found trafficking $26 million worth of cocaine— a detail that has not deterred the State Department from considering him a top ally in the “War on Drugs”.

It’s also not the first allegation of a U.S. embassy’s involvement in bribing and coercing cartel members to frame left-wing politicians. In April, the only living witness in the infamous 2023 assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, claimed he had a USB recording of a U.S. ambassador, presumably Michael Fitzpatrick, and Ecuadorian Attorney General, Diana Salazar, offering him U.S. residency, witness protection, and compensation from the FBI in exchange for testifying to the involvement of Revolución Ciudadana —party of former democratic socialist president Rafael Corea— as architects of Villavicencio’s murder. A public statement by the U.S. embassy confirms it advertised a 5 million reward for information on Villavicencio’s murder, an offer that FBI documents verify was also provided to detained witnesses during the interrogation process.

In 2024, Drop Site News published leaked messages from Attorney General Salazar that revealed her politically-motivated efforts to construct a narrative linking Revolución Ciudadana to the case. The report also stated that Villavicencio was a U.S. government asset, seeming to explain why the FBI took a special interest in the case.

The state’ witness, José Patricio Aguas Muñoz, was a former member of the Los Lobos cartel, which Ecuador’s judiciary system has named as the guns-for-hire of the assasination and was indeed provided witness protection for several months. Muñoz told journalists that Attorney General Salazar presented him two options: take the deal or be sent to the Los Lobos-controlled Latacunga prison where the cartel would kill him for snitching on them. 48 hours after publicly coming forward about the coercion, he was detained by Ecuadorian authorities and sent to that very Latacunga prison. The transfer drew scrutiny from the public over why the state would send their key witness in an open case to a prison it has publicly condemned as controlled by the organized crime unit he was informing on. Political lawfare analysts suspect it was retaliation for speaking to the press.

While Washington’s lawfare and coups against progressive governments in Latin America is nothing new, aggression towards Petro is surprising considering he’s played ball with the Yankees far more than the staunchly anti-imperialist presidents of the Pink Tide. Petro’s administration continued to collect $450 million in annual U.S. security aid throughout the Biden administration, deployed Uribista-era tactics in their war on guerrillas including the bombing of children as young as 10 years old in the Catatumbo (a violation of the Geneva Convention), maintained the FBI office in Bogotá—a stark contrast with left-wing governments that expelled U.S. intelligence bases—and echoed State Department narratives portraying Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as an “illegitimate dictator”. In 2025, the State Department even reaffirmed Colombia’s status as a “major non-NATO ally”.

Nonetheless, Petro’s governance ushered in landmark reforms comprised of a labor policy that raised the minimum wage and working conditions for night-shifts, financial assistance programs for households in extreme poverty, and an aggressive tax hike on mining conglomerates. For a nation that’s been repressed by fascism for so long Hugo Chávez even called it “the Israel of Latin America,” Petro kindled hope for a more equal and sovereign society.

And Washington appears unsatisfied with anything short of a nation’s full surrender to its imperial political agenda.

Relations soured after Petro publicly condemned the Trump administration’s indiscriminate and extrajudicial airstrikes on boats in the Pacific and Caribbean– which to date have killed 202. Tensions escalated further when Petro took to the streets of New York to denounce U.S. complicity in the Palestinian genocide, calling on American soldiers to “Disobey the orders of Trump. Obey the orders of humanity.” and to “Not point their rifles at humanity”.

This latest development in the lawfare campaign against Pacto Histórico underscores the futility of attempting to find middle ground with Washington at the expense of solidarity with neighboring allies.

A lesson that Brazilian head of state, Lula de Silva, also learned the hard way on Friday. Just days after President Lula sent aid to the US-puppet regime of Rodrigo-Paz, directly undermining the general strike that Bolivian trade federations and their indigenous members have led for almost 30 days now, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio slapped the “global terrorist” label on two of Brazil’s largest gangs. A move often used to manufacture consent for U.S. military intervention. President Lula condemned this designation as a threat to Brazil’s sovereignty, saying “We refuse to be treated like a Banana Republic” and reiterated his domestic agencies ability to combat Brazil’s organized crime crisis. However, Lula had no issue supporting U.S. intervention elsewhere. Between 2004 and 2007, he deployed 37,000 Brazilian troops to Haiti to assist MINUSTAH, a US-led “peacekeeping” mission in Haiti that began with George W. Bush ordering U.S. troops to kidnap President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, commencing a coup d’etat and de-facto military occupation.

This is where Ivan Cepeda stands apart. His public record has been defined by years of solidarity with campesino collectives resisting North American mining corporations and their hitmen, pursuing judicial investigations into U.S. assets like former President Álvaro Uribe and his U.S.-backed paramilitary war, recognizing Nicolás Maduro’s presidency, defending Venezuela’s right to self-determination, and denouncing the January 3 incursion and abduction. Cepeda’s campaign reflects a fidelity to the Pink Tide’s anti-imperialist politics.

Albeit, through a model of “social capitalism” that has drawn criticism from the more revolutionary and proletarian sectors of the Colombian left, many of whom were instrumental in Pacto Histórico’s ascend to power.

For centuries, Colombia’s working class have waged militant rank-and-file labor and land struggles from the southwest of El Cauca to the northern tip of La Guajira. In fact, campesinos in the Cesar region of Colombia are currently mobilizing strikes to expropriate the land they’ve worked for years from Colombian banks and aristocratic plantation owners. These revolutionary movements, which gave everything to successfully topple decades of fascism, have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Petro administration’s preservation of capitalist land relations, neoliberal policies, and failure to push through more radical economic reforms that other presidents from Rafael Correa to Hugo Chávez achieved in their first term.

Still, given the choice between fascism and social democracy, Colombia’s working-class voters —whose memories of decades marked by right-wing bloodshed are still painfully fresh— have made clear Cepeda is the candidate that best represents them in this race.

Video of Campesina del Cesar demonstration, posted to the collective’s instagram account @Integracioncampesinadelcesar

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Camila Lourdes Galarza is an Ecuadorian investigative journalist and labor organizer with a decade of experience on the frontlines of general strikes, tenant organizing, political prisoner campaigns, and international brigades. Her work has been featured by Drop Site News, the Communist Party of Cuba’s newspaper Juventud Rebelde, KPFA News, and Resumen Latinoamericano. Camila’s recent report with Drop Site uncovered that U.S. forces bombed, kidnapped, and tortured 36 Ecuadorian fishermen, holding them hostage for 8 days without food. Camila’s report was referenced in an interrogation of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth during a congressional hearing. A Marxist and Popular education practitioner, Camila has led workshops in Cuba, France, and Colombia, and, despite not having a degree, she’s been invited to lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Smith College, Amherst College, and UMass Amherst. Her organizing began as a teen during the Ferguson rebellion and continued by supporting the historic Ecuadorian and Colombian general strikes. She now dedicates her time to documenting the U.S.-backed dictatorship in her motherland, Ecuador, where her own family members, leaders of the communist party, survived torture and persecution by the CIA.