As Colombians prepare to return to the polls, they are choosing more than a president. They are deciding whether peace can survive, whether democracy can still protect the vulnerable, and whether the next generation will inherit a nation defined by reconciliation or renewed conflict.
Magazine, The Immigrant Experience
Carmen Velasco did not set out to become the face of Colombia’s unfinished story.
Like countless mothers across the country, she dreamed of something remarkably ordinary—that her daughter would grow up, build a future, and come home safely each evening. Instead, Floralba Tumbe became another name added to Colombia’s long ledger of loss, killed during a violent confrontation in the southwestern department of Cauca only weeks before Colombians prepared to vote in one of the most consequential presidential elections in the nation’s modern history.
Nearby, María Inés Cuchillo was mourning her husband, Jaido Rodrigo Tumbala Morales, whose life was also claimed in the same violence.
Their grief is intensely personal. Yet it also tells the story of an entire nation.
Outside Colombia, election coverage often reduces the country to familiar images of political division, drug trafficking, or ideological conflict. Television panels debate whether voters are moving left or right. International headlines frame the runoff as another battle in Latin America’s shifting political landscape.
But Colombia’s election cannot be understood through ideology alone.
To understand what Colombians will decide when they return to the polls on June 21, one must first understand the weight of the history they carry.
For more than sixty years, Colombia has lived through one of the world’s longest internal armed conflicts. Guerrilla organizations, paramilitary forces, state security agencies, drug trafficking networks, and organized criminal groups have fought over territory, political influence, and control of vast natural and economic resources. Entire communities have disappeared. More than eight million people have been displaced from their homes, making Colombia one of the countries with the largest populations of internally displaced people anywhere in the world.
For millions of Colombians, violence has never been an event.
It has been a way of life.
The 2016 Peace Accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) promised to change that trajectory. It represented not simply the end of a war but the beginning of an ambitious national effort to restore land, strengthen democratic institutions, recognize victims, and rebuild trust between citizens and a state that had often failed to protect them.
Peace, however, proved far more complicated than signing an agreement.
As former guerrilla forces demobilized, new armed criminal organizations quickly moved into abandoned territories, competing for control of drug trafficking routes, illegal mining operations, forests, and strategic corridors stretching across rural Colombia. The violence changed shape rather than disappearing altogether.
Today, those unresolved realities have become the defining questions of Colombia’s presidential runoff.
The contest between Iván Cepeda, representing Pacto Histórico, and Abelardo de la Espriella, of Salvación Nacional, has evolved into a national debate over how Colombia should confront insecurity, implement the peace accords, restore land to displaced communities, manage migration, and define its democratic future.
The implications reach well beyond Colombia’s borders.
As one of Latin America’s largest democracies, Colombia occupies a pivotal position in the hemisphere. It is home to millions of internally displaced citizens while simultaneously hosting one of the world’s largest populations of Venezuelan migrants and refugees. Decisions made in Bogotá inevitably ripple outward, influencing migration, regional security, economic stability, and democratic governance throughout the Americas.
Recognizing those broader consequences, American Community Media recently convened a conversation with ethnic journalists across the United States to examine what is truly at stake. Rather than offering campaign analysis or electoral predictions, the discussion brought together leading voices whose work spans political science, anthropology, investigative journalism, and field research.
Among them was Dr. Beatriz Magaloni, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford University, Director of the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab, and Co-Director of the Democracy Action Lab. Joining her were Alex Sierra, an anthropologist with the Centro de Estudios Sociojurídicos Latinoamericanos (CESJUL), and Manuel Ortiz, sociologist, documentary photographer, journalist, and audiovisual consultant with Stanford University’s Democracy Action Lab.
Together, they challenged one of the most persistent misconceptions about Colombia’s election.
According to Magaloni, describing Colombia as merely “polarized” obscures more than it explains.
Polarization suggests citizens are divided over ideas—over taxes, markets, ideology, or political philosophy. Democracies have always contained such disagreements.
What Colombia is experiencing, she argued, is something more profound.
Its citizens inhabit entirely different realities.
For families living in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and other urban centers, insecurity often means extortion, robbery, gang activity, and the constant fear that the state cannot guarantee public safety. They understandably seek leaders who promise decisive action against crime.
Travel into Colombia’s rural departments, however, and insecurity assumes another form altogether.
There, Indigenous communities, Afro-Colombian populations, and small farming families confront armed organizations battling for territorial control, illegal mining, forests, and narcotics corridors. Community leaders defending ancestral lands are threatened or assassinated. Entire villages remain vulnerable to displacement despite formal peace agreements.
These are not competing versions of reality.
They are parallel realities.
And because they rarely intersect, Colombians increasingly vote according to the world they personally inhabit rather than the nation as a whole.
That observation echoed throughout the discussion.
Having spent more than a decade documenting Colombia’s forgotten regions, Manuel Ortiz offered a perspective rarely captured in election coverage.
When national media reported deadly clashes between the Nasa and Misak Indigenous communities in Cauca, the story appeared straightforward: two communities fighting over land.
Ortiz spent days living among both communities.
What he discovered was something profoundly different.
Neither community believed the other was the enemy.
Both traced the conflict back to decades of forced displacement, historical land dispossession, and unresolved government failures. Families who had been driven from their territories during earlier periods of violence returned years later only to find their ancestral lands occupied, sold, or transformed into large agricultural enterprises.
Without legal titles, proving ownership became nearly impossible.
For these communities, land represents far more than economic survival.
It is identity.
It is memory.
It is language.
It is the place where ancestors are buried and future generations learn who they are.
To lose the land is to lose a piece of themselves.
Ortiz encountered similar realities in Montes de María, where Afro-Colombian farming communities continue seeking restitution for lands seized during previous waves of conflict. Many residents acknowledged that progress has been slow, but they also expressed hope that ongoing efforts to implement peace agreements and restore property rights might finally interrupt the cycle of displacement that has defined their lives.
Those hopes now feel uncertain.
Anthropologist Alex Sierra expanded the conversation by describing how many communities fear that a return to purely militarized security strategies could deepen existing humanitarian crises without addressing the structural causes of violence. He noted that Colombia’s expanding network of armed criminal organizations now exercises influence across hundreds of municipalities, profiting not only from narcotics but also from illegal mining, environmental exploitation, extortion, and territorial control.
Such realities expose one of democracy’s greatest challenges.
Citizens understandably demand security.
But security without justice rarely produces lasting peace.
Throughout Latin America, that tension has become increasingly familiar.
From Argentina to Ecuador, Peru to El Salvador, voters have turned toward leaders promising swift solutions to insecurity, corruption, and institutional paralysis. Although each country’s political circumstances differ, the underlying frustration remains strikingly similar: people want governments capable of protecting them.
The danger, Magaloni warned, emerges when democratic societies begin believing that rights, due process, and legal safeguards are obstacles rather than protections.
Democracy ultimately survives not because elections occur, but because institutions continue protecting the dignity and rights of every citizen—including those with the least power.
For immigrant communities watching from the United States, Canada, Europe, and across the Latin American diaspora, Colombia’s election is far from distant political news.
Migration has always followed violence.
Every family forced from its home because of conflict, land dispossession, or insecurity carries consequences that extend across borders. Colombians have built vibrant communities throughout North America, while Colombia itself has become a refuge for millions fleeing neighboring Venezuela.
The country’s future will influence not only those who remain but also those who left—and those who may yet be forced to leave.
Long after campaign rallies have ended and election maps disappear from television screens, Carmen Velasco will still wake each morning without her daughter.
For her, democracy has never been measured by campaign promises or political slogans.
It is measured by whether families can remain on their land without fear.
Whether communities can bury loved ones without burying hope.
Whether peace can become something more enduring than an agreement signed on paper.
On June 21, Colombians will cast their ballots.
The world will count the votes.
History, however, will judge something far more important: whether Colombia’s democracy can finally deliver the peace its people have spent generations trying to build.
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