Colombia’s runoff election expected to trigger shift in decades-long armed conflict

Colombians go to the polls on Sunday in a presidential runoff expected to trigger to a dramatic shift in the country’s decades-long armed conflict, now at its most violent point since the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). Polls show the frontrunner is the Trump-admiring far-right lawyer and millionaire businessman Abelardo de la Espriella, who has vowed to abandon President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” plan of negotiating the disarmament of all criminal organisations and instead return to full-scale military confrontation with armed groups. De la Espriella’s opponent in the ballot will be Petro’s chosen successor and the main architect of “total peace”, the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda, who argues for the continuation of the plan, with “necessary changes” . Cepeda led the polls throughout most of the campaign but was defeated in the first round three weeks ago and has since struggled to attract centrist voters. The election, in which more than 41 million Colombians are eligible to vote, is expected to deliver another victory for a far-right candidate advocating an iron-fist approach to crime, after the examples of Keiko Fujimori, who is leading the vote count in Peru , and José Antonio Kast, who won last year’s election in Chile . …