Andean Group - July 2026

The far-right populist Abelardo de la Espriella scraped a narrow victory over left-wing continuity candidate Iván Cepeda in Colombia’s 21 June presidential run-off, setting the stage for a sharp U-turn on many of the policies of outgoing President Gustavo Petro. First and foremost, De la Espriella is planning to scrap Petro’s flagship ‘total peace’ initiative, which entailed negotiations with illegal armed groups. He has pledged a crackdown reminiscent of the ‘democratic security’ policy of former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). This, he says, will be bolstered by direct military support from the US, where President Donald Trump’s administration has welcomed the change of direction in Bogotá. The first article in this July 2026 edition of the Latin American Regional Report: Andean Group explores the security implications of De la Espriella’s victory.

De la Espriella’s rise to the presidency also marks an abrupt economic shift, only four years after Colombia elected Gustavo Petro as its first left-wing president in modern times. De la Espriella espouses aggressive deregulation and a dramatic reduction in the size of the state, as the next article explores.

We then turn to Venezuela, where a US air strike which took out the leader of the transnational organised crime group Tren de Aragua on 12 June is unlikely to have dealt a fatal blow to the group, which President Donald Trump’s administration designated as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) in February 2025. However, the operation, which was carried out in coordination with the Venezuelan authorities, did raise questions over whether the country could become a new frontier in Washington’s efforts to combat criminal groups in Latin America.

A second article on Venezuela discusses a glaring problem following the mining reform that was promulgated by President Delcy Rodríguez on 16 April – namely, that much of Venezuela’s mineral wealth is in areas under the sway of illegal armed groups. These groups, ranging from Colombian guerrilla forces such as the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) to Venezuelan organised crime groups known as ‘sindicatos’, have established a wide-ranging presence in Bolívar state, which is home to Venezuela’s richest mineral reserves and extends from the Colombian border in the west to the Guyanese border in the east.

The final article looks at Peru, where Keiko Fujimori will take office on 28 July after winning the narrowest of victories in the 7 June presidential run-off. This was fourth time lucky for Fujimori and marks the culmination of a 15-year march towards the presidency. As she becomes Peru’s ninth president in 10 years, the main question is whether she can arrest the country’s chronic political instability.