Progressive International@ProgIntl
LIVE FROM BOGOTÁ 🇨🇴 Transmission from the @ProgIntl Observatory.
The polls are now open in Colombia.
Today’s presidential election brings bright hopes for Colombia’s transformation — but with them, acute fears of illegal intervention to halt its progress.
In this sense, Colombia’s election cannot be understood an ordinary choice between left and right candidates. It has been framed, instead, as a crossroads between the politics of life — a vision of popular prosperity and ecological harmony — and the politics of death, and the return of civil conflicts that have haunted the country for a century.
But the risk reaches beyond the borders of Colombia. The country’s far-right candidates promise to construct in Bogotá a new node in the Reactionary International — organized already in Miami, Washington, Tel Aviv, Quito, and Buenos Aires — that has demonstrated its willingness to use any means necessary to defend its interests.
That is why we have mobilized to Bogotá: to track, trace, expose, and denounce the diverse tactics of the Reactionary International to undermine the popular will of the Colombian people.
The Observatory of the Progressive International has deployed a delegation of more than thirty parliamentarians, jurists, and data scientists, who will spend the coming hours investigating and interrogating the integrity of the Colombian democratic process.
And in the days since we arrived, we have identified three principal threats.
The first is political. More than 700 polling stations across Colombia have been identified as operating under the direct territorial influence of illegal armed groups. In departments such as Antioquia, Cauca, Chocó, and Norte de Santander — where narco-paramilitary structures remain most active — the freedom to vote is circumscribed long before a citizen enters the booth. Local witnesses are deployed to these zones precisely because the most vulnerable communities are the ones whose votes most urgently need protection from these forms of naked coercion.
The second threat is technological. Colombia’s vote-counting software is operated in part by Thomas Greg and Sons, a private company whose source code has been shielded from full public scrutiny throughout this process. The Consejo de Estado called for a sovereign, publicly owned electoral technology — that recommendation was not implemented. We have seen in Honduras and Ecuador how the opacity of digital tallying systems can become the terrain on which electoral outcomes are contested and manipulated. Data scientists are monitoring the preliminary count in real time and will cross-reference official results against the data emerging from polling stations on the ground.
The third threat is mediatic. The convergence of Colombia’s corporate press with the communications infrastructure of the US right — amplified by Senator Moreno’s presence in Bogotá and the broader apparatus of the 86-member US delegation — creates the conditions for a pre-fabricated fraud narrative: one that could be activated the moment results do not swing in the direction of right-wing interests. We have seen this playbook before. Its goal is not to contest a specific count but to delegitimize the entire process — and with it, the institutional foundations of Colombian democracy.
We are here precisely because these threats are real, and because the Colombian people deserve witnesses with the independence and rigor to tell the truth about what unfolds today. We will be reporting throughout the day.
Stay with us.
