When Abelardo de la Espriella stood on a stage in Barranquilla after winning Colombia's presidential election, he wore the yellow jersey of the national football team and saluted cheering supporters. Yet the right-wing lawyer and wealthy politician was not really close to the people: a cage of bulletproof glass separated him from the crowd.

De la Espriella had received death threats and had every reason to take them seriously. In June 2025, conservative candidate Miguel Uribe was shot during a campaign event and died two months later. The political murder is telling for the catastrophic security situation across South America — and one of the main reasons for the right-wing comeback on the continent.

De la Espriella is the latest in a string of triumphant politicians who are united by being far to the right of centre. There are nuances between radical libertarians, conservatives and law-and-order populists. But all of them have profited from the spectacular failure of left-wing governments in recent decades.

Key facts

• Right-wing or far-right leaders now govern most of South America's largest countries.
• The turn began with Javier Milei's victory in Argentina in late 2023 and spread to Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Colombia.
• Left-wing governments failed to reduce inequality, industrialise raw-material economies or contain drug-related violence.
• Brazil remains an exception, with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expected to win re-election.
• The new right leaders follow free-market prescriptions and emulate El Salvador's authoritarian anti-gang model.

A blue wave washing away the pink tide

Latin American observers speak of a blue wave sweeping away radical or moderate red governments. It began in late 2023 with the victories of Javier Milei in Argentina and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. In 2025, Bolivia ended its long socialist era after the conservative Rodrigo Paz won the election. This year, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Keiko Fujimori in Peru and Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia came to power.

Much of South America's political map, which was dominated by red only four years ago, is now coloured blue. The new right leaders see themselves on a mission to eradicate what they call the plague of communism on their continent. They are helped by a voter backlash against the glaring failures of the left.

After the turn of the millennium, left-wing parties governed many South American countries: Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Because at least some of these governments were moderately social-democratic, observers spoke of a pink tide. The economic conditions were extremely favourable for these progressive forces. From 2003 onward, prices for raw materials such as oil, soy and copper rose sharply. Huge amounts of money flowed into the continent, and left-wing governments distributed it generously. The welfare state was expanded, unemployment fell, poverty rates declined, and education and health systems received more resources.

Persistent inequality and economic fragility

These reforms were hardly sustainable. The extreme inequality that has shaped the continent for centuries remained untouched. Many social transfers were tied to formal labour contracts, excluding a large part of society working in the informal economy. At the same time, elites grew richer thanks to the export boom.

The forced exploitation of natural resources led to ecological problems and resistance among local communities and indigenous groups. Some progressive leaders responded with repression. Building a manufacturing industry that would generate higher value added was not a priority. After 2013, when commodity prices collapsed, the bonanza was over. State coffers emptied, several countries experienced high inflation, and more and more people fell into poverty and lost hope of upward mobility.

The corona pandemic from 2020 made things worse. But even more devastating was the decay of political culture. Latin America expert Hans-Jürgen Burchardt wrote that societies had become spoils communities. The state had, for the first time, given almost all citizens a share of the exploitation of nature. But this encouraged nepotism, clientelism and corruption, and democracy eroded. A drastic example is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who governed Argentina from 2007 to 2015. She was sentenced to six years in prison in 2022 for embezzling public funds.

Identity politics and foreign policy distractions

Progressive governments also lost themselves in woke symbolic politics. Argentina introduced a transgender quota in 2021 under President Alberto Fernández, requiring at least one percent of public-sector positions to be filled by transgender people. Gabriel Boric in Chile tried to push through a new constitution that would have required gender parity in all state organs.

Such projects mobilised right-wing culture warriors like Milei and Kast. Their attacks on an out-of-touch left-wing establishment that deals with pseudo-problems are popular in generally value-conservative South American societies, especially among devout Catholics and the rapidly growing evangelical community.

Left-wing leaders also harmed themselves with persistent Israel-bashing and genocide accusations. Colombia's former president Gustavo Petro and Brazil's Lula were particularly prominent. The continent has enough crises of its own that leaders should attend to. Instead, they intervened with enthusiasm and antisemitic undertones in a distant conflict.

The security catastrophe

Then there is security. For more than ten years, the continent has suffered an explosion of violence. Even countries that used to be relatively peaceful have become playgrounds for brutal drug gangs.

This is partly a consequence of sharply rising demand for drugs. Europe is experiencing a cocaine and crack boom, and coca cultivation in the Andean countries has reached record levels. For cartels, this opened lucrative new markets, with devastating consequences for producing and transit countries such as Ecuador or Peru. Their ports, through which drugs reach overseas markets, have become combat zones for rival gangs. Murder rates have risen steeply.

Progressive governments proved incapable of stopping cross-border gangs. It is not enough to point out that poverty is the root cause of crime and hope for improvement while doing nothing effective. Murder, extortion, corruption, inflation and left identity politics help explain why citizens long for a political change.

Left-wing governments now remain only in Venezuela, Uruguay, Guyana and Brazil. In the largest country, the left is likely to keep the upper hand even after elections in October, with Flávio Bolsonaro probably too weak to beat incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The right's economic and security prescriptions

The tragedy of South America is that there are few strong, moderate and compromise-ready figures. Politicians offering liberal solutions to the continent's problems instead of increasing polarisation are rare. The region has always lacked broad, well-educated middle classes that could form the base for such a politics of reason.

Instead, runoffs usually pit radical left against radical right. Because of the left's failure, the right currently has the more convincing arguments. Many are populists closely aligned with Donald Trump, or macho reactionaries who rail against women's rights, homosexuals and critical journalists. At the same time, the new right governments are pursuing economically and fiscally promising approaches, not only in Milei's Argentina. They rightly promise to fight the bloated state and its debt addiction. Market-liberal reforms may well spur economic growth.

In the fight against organised crime, de la Espriella and Fujimori are looking at the recipes of El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele. Through a brutal crackdown on gangs, Bukele has made his country significantly safer. There are far fewer murders and extortions, and the president enjoys broad support. But the price is high. Bukele built mega-prisons and put 85,000 people behind bars — two percent of the population. He has largely suspended fundamental rights, the separation of powers and democratic processes.

The danger of authoritarian order

Such authoritarian politics is dangerous. An order that sacrifices the rule of law is neither stable nor just in the long run. South Americans chose people like de la Espriella, Fujimori or Kast in desperation over left-wing mismanagement. These right-wing leaders must now prove that they can do more than deliver sharp rhetoric. They need to restore the state's monopoly on violence within constitutional frameworks and create prosperity in which broad segments of the population participate. Otherwise, the next red wave may arrive soon.

Source: Neue Zürcher Zeitung News