He calls himself “The Tiger” and posts sweaty Instagram workout videos. He promises to “disembowel the left” and says that Colombia needs a president with male grit, though he uses a more colorful Spanish term.
Abelardo De La Espriella, a 47-year-old criminal defense lawyer who was endorsed by President Trump ahead of a June 21 runoff, has run a testosterone-fueled campaign, pitching himself as an iron-fisted Latin American strongman, with a streak of the manosphere.
Along the way, he has stirred debate about how tough he really is — one official in Colombia’s leftist government accused Mr. De La Espriella of receiving butt implants, which he denied.
But with polls showing him ahead of his left-wing rival, his candidacy has also raised a serious question: Is a nation that pushed aside entrenched machismo to enact some of the region’s most progressive policies for women now prepared to elect a defiantly macho leader?
It is a question that is relevant across the region, rights groups say. As right-wing populists win elections from El Salvador to Chile, many are drawing on a new — and similar — playbook, said Catalina Calderón, the Latin America director of the Women’s Equality Center, a U.S.-based reproductive rights nonprofit.
Rather than attack women’s rights directly, she said, they promise to purge “gender ideology,” and to slash spending in the name of austerity — gutting agencies and services for women and girls along the way. “These similarities are not accidental,” Ms. Calderón said.
Mr. De La Espriella has said he respects Colombia’s laws and constitution but personally opposes abortion — raising concerns that he could revisit a landmark 2022 Constitutional Court ruling that legalized the procedure up to 24 weeks — as well as same-sex adoption.
He has also said that families should be responsible for sex education, not schools. “I do not accept that our children should be conditioned, contaminated with ‘gender ideology’,” he has said. Copying Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, he has pledged to drastically shrink the state — starting with shuttering the Ministry of Equality.
He has also faced accusations of sexism after assailing a well-known female journalist’s “ignorance” mid-interview, and for making lewd jokes on the campaign trail. But he has remained largely unbowed, wearing his old-fashioned ways as proudly as his ever-present Panama hat.
Mr. De La Espriella did not respond to a request for comment.
With military-style salutes, he’s gained a fervent base of male supporters who say they do not think Mr. De La Espriella is particularly anti-woman.
“He’s the great hope of all Colombians,” said Carlos Alberto García Palau, a 54-year-old tour guide and former police officer in the city of Medellín. He represents “security, family, respect,” he said.
Women voters are divided.
“The perception among women is not great,” said Katherine González, 40, who drives for Uber in Bogotá, the capital. “The perception is that he’s a machista.”
Florence Thomas, one of Colombia’s foremost feminist intellectuals and a central voice in the decades-long push to decriminalize abortion, put it more forcefully, saying, “I am really, really afraid of Abelardo.”
Colombia is among the most advanced nations in Latin America when it comes to women’s rights, she said, “but we feminists in Colombia have learned that all these hard-won rights are incredibly fragile.’’
“I can assure you,” she added, “women who understand what is at stake for their rights will vote for Iván Cepeda,” the left-wing senator and human-rights activist opposing Mr. De La Espriella this month. Mr. Cepeda has explicitly called out “patriarchy” and has promised women greater support and inclusion in public life.
But there are also plenty of Colombian women who do not agree that the right-wing candidate poses a threat, or do not care. They consider security and tackling drug trafficking groups — Mr. De La Espriella’s central campaign promises — to be more important.
“We want his iron fist against criminals,” said Jennifer Orozco, a 32-year-old graphic designer, at a rally in Medellín last month.
Susana Mejía González, the coordinator of the National Women’s Network of Colombia, a feminist advocacy organization, said, “What we believe is that in general, not just for women but for Colombian society as a whole, the rights agenda is not a relevant factor in people’s decision-making in this election.”
Still, gender has become a major undercurrent of the campaign.
Before the first round of voting, Mr. De La Espriella was running against several prominent women, including a conservative senator who had the backing of a powerful former president.
Women’s issues have also been key to capturing votes: more than 46 percent of Colombian households are now headed by single women.
Mr. De La Espriella has called on women to join his movement — tigresas, to his tiger — and announced a slate of proposals geared toward working-class women, including 24-hour mobile units for domestic abuse victims and life sentences for child sex abusers.
He also enlisted his wife, Ana Lucía Pineda, in events and interviews and described himself as a “traditional family man” — father, husband, gentleman, and straight-talking son of Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, or costeño.
Calling himself an “old school feminist,” he joked that women should stay in their proper place: “the throne.” When he was asked why he did not want to debate his main political rival on the right, the conservative senator Paloma Valencia, he said he preferred to treat their relationship “like a little teacup.”
At rallies, he drew thunderous applause with lines like, “I have never failed a woman. I am going to protect you.”
The machismo debate exploded last month after Interior Minister Armando Benedetti accused Mr. De La Espriella of being, in his words, “so, so fake” — citing hair implants, makeup and, memorably, “silicone in his butt, implants in his pompis.”
Mr. De La Espriella, who has joked about his hair implants and his 5’7” stature — saying that his large testicles would not let him grow taller — brushed off the butt-job claim.
But days later, on a political talk show, he pressed the only woman reporter at the table, Laura Rodríguez, to look at a photo of him in a sweatsuit. While he might be “lacking in the rear,” he said, the photo showed something else that had won him “some awesome votes from the female electorate.”
He later apologized to Ms. Rodríguez, who said she had felt harassed, and defended himself by pointing to his work as a lawyer on landmark women’s cases, including Colombia’s femicide law, which designated gender-based lethal violence against women as a specific crime.
But the episode refused to fade away. Prominent journalists and politicians denounced his behavior. The family of the woman for whom the femicide law was named, Rosa Elvira Cely, accused him of exploiting her name for political gain and of taking credit for their work.
This month, after Mr. De La Espriella advanced to the runoff, a judge ruled that he had committed “political violence based on gender” when he called into question women’s judgment as voters, and ordered him to apologize to Colombian women.
Female supporters railed at the left, characterizing the reaction as part of a global plague of cancel culture.
To María Jimena Duzán, a prominent Colombian journalist, Mr. De La Espriella is a political opportunist sampling from other far-right campaigns, a man who found God and his masculine persona just to win the presidency.
But that does not make him — and his growing following — any less alarming, she said.
In some Latin American countries where right-wing leaders have recently targeted gender-focused policies, activists and journalists have had to flee after receiving death threats.
Last month, Ms. Duzán’s was on her popular YouTube channel reading her column denouncing Mr. De La Espriella, when the channel was flooded with cryptocurrency content. The hack triggered an automated system that took her offline.
While YouTube did not remark on the episode, Colombia’s main press freedom group formally condemned it as part of a broader pattern of press intimidation by Mr. De La Espriella and his followers.
“His followers took it down,” Ms. Duzán said.
