The first round is on 31 May. Fifteen days remain. Many Colombians will arrive at the polling stations without conviction, weighing abstention the way one weighs a debt one does not want to pay. This text is not written for those who have already decided, but for those who still doubt, and who have the right, before marking a ballot, to a cold reading of what this candidacy represents. Iván Cepeda is neither a saint nor a saviour. He is something rarer and more useful, a politician who has built his entire career on a verifiable methodology that can be called, without rhetoric, the pursuit of truth as political act.
What the Right’s Terror Reveals
There is a fairly effective way to measure the real danger that a candidate poses to those who have governed Colombia for decades, and it consists of reading what the traditional press does to him. The magazine Semana has just published a column calling Cepeda’s government programme “a gospel of hatred and division” and warning that, if he reaches the presidency, “it will be the last time we elect in freedom.” The same argument was used against any left-wing candidate who has seriously threatened the established order. The content of the attack matters less than its existence. When the economic and media right deploys its heaviest artillery, it does so because something hurts where it counts.
Cepeda’s trajectory is the story of that impunity in action, and then stumbling. From 2011, he presented to Congress testimonies on the links between former President Álvaro Uribe and the Bloque Metro of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia. Uribe sued him for defamation. The Supreme Court dismissed the charges against Cepeda and opened an investigation against Uribe himself for bribery and procedural fraud; in July 2025, a judge sentenced the former president to twelve years of house arrest. The sentence was annulled on procedural grounds, but the historical fact holds. The most powerful man in Colombia was found guilty of the acts Cepeda had documented for thirteen years; that is not activism, it is journalism.
Public Reason in a System of Private Reasons
Cepeda studied philosophy at the University of Sofia, in Bulgaria, and returned to Colombia in 1987 as a critic of the Soviet model, convinced that the left only had a future if it was democratic and pluralist. This is not a minor biographical detail. The philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguished, in the eighteenth century, between two ways of using reason in public. The first, which he called private use, consists of speaking from an institutional role to serve one’s own interests, disguised as the common good. The second, public use, means speaking to humanity as a thinking citizen. Colombian politics has historically functioned on the first model. What Cepeda does is verifiably different.
His government programme, which he titled “El poder de la verdad” (The Power of Truth), runs to 433 pages built from his speeches across the country’s 32 departments. No presidential candidate had previously based their strategy on programmatic texts written and read before organised communities; in Colombian politics, this practice has no precedent. The decision to document the campaign as text, to make argument rather than spectacle the axis of electoral competition, reveals something about Cepeda’s conception of power. A government is not improvised. It is thought through, written down, debated, and placed before the public before anyone takes office. The format itself is a declaration of principles.
At the Pacto Histórico internal consultation in October 2025, Cepeda obtained 65% of the vote, defeating former minister Carolina Corcho. At the Frente Amplio inter-party consultation in March 2026, his candidacy mobilised more than two million voters in a non-concurrent election involving a single political grouping.
Truth as Subversion
The central axis of the programme is what Cepeda calls the ethical revolution, and the name is not a slogan. It draws on a tradition of thought as old as Socrates, who was condemned to death precisely for maintaining that truth cannot be an instrument of power but must be its permanent examiner, that questioning and challenging is not a civic defect but an obligation. In a political system where lying, denying, and manipulating are normalised behaviours that are functionally profitable, someone who proposes truth as a method of government is not being idealistic. He is being subversive.
The programme’s diagnosis is precise. Public morality in Colombia has not merely suffered damage; it has been destroyed, by decades of institutionalised paramilitarism, corruption elevated to the status of norm, and impunity transformed into a guarantee that power grants itself. The ethical revolution he proposes is not a values campaign nor a call to individual conscience. It is a concrete political strategy against macrocorruption, the large-scale structural corruption that diverts public resources into private hands, based on the idea that without truth there is no possible reconciliation, without truth there is no justice, and without justice there is no peace that is not a surrender dressed up as an agreement.
The We That Is Not Populism
Over twenty years of political life, Cepeda’s vocabulary has been consistent on one detail that seems minor and is not. The pronoun. Most candidates speak in the first person singular, of the I who will fight, the I who will transform, the I who will in practice arrive at power and administer it for his network. Cepeda speaks in the plural. And it is not the rhetorical plural of the tribune who says we to say I with greater volume, which is the mechanics of traditional populism. In Cepeda, the we designates a position; he does not embody the people, he is part of the people. The distinction is philosophical and political at once.
That position has a concrete embodiment in this candidacy. His running mate is Aída Marina Quilcué Vivas, an indigenous leader from the Cauca and human rights defender. That the second person on the most-voted presidential ticket in Colombia should be an indigenous woman from the Cauca is not multicultural marketing. It is the application of a principle that Cepeda takes from the thought of the indigenous communities of Chiapas, who formulated the concept of governing by obeying. Power as service, not as accumulation. Government as a mandate from organised majorities, not as the property of whoever won an election.
A Historically Necessary Force
There is a word that describes Cepeda with exceptional precision, and that word is repaired. Not in the sense of compensation for his losses, but in the sense of someone who has passed through damage without being defined by it, who has survived violence without becoming it. He spent thirteen years documenting the complicity of the most powerful man in his country and arrived at the top of the electoral ballot without the martyr’s gesture or the avenger’s pose. In Latin American politics, that is anomalous. He wrote it in his own programme. “We, the victims, know what long-duration struggles are; we never surrender and we always ensure that truth and justice prevail. Ours is the moral victory, the memory and the history, not the prison nor the vengeance.”
The Unión Patriótica, the political movement of which Manuel Cepeda Vargas, the candidate’s father, was a member, was the subject of what the National Centre for Historical Memory has classified as a “political genocide.” From 1984 onwards, more than three thousand of its militants were assassinated by paramilitary groups with the complicity of the State.
Colombia arrives at this election carrying a history of violence, of guerrilla conflict, of prolonged subjugation to the interests of the right and of neoliberalism, with the structural and economic pain that this has produced in millions of lives. Given these antecedents, the appearance of an academically trained, politically honest, personally repaired, and programmatically serious candidate is neither a miracle nor a coincidence. It is almost a logic. It is almost as though Colombia, after everything it has lived through, has produced the figure it needs to attempt, for the first time, to govern itself differently.
The Fifteen Days That Remain
Convincing an undecided voter is not a matter of faith. It is a matter of calculation. And the calculation leads to the same conclusion. Iván Cepeda is the candidate who represents most clearly the break with the system that has produced violence, structural poverty, and impunity in Colombia. It is not a campaign promise. It is a thirty-year trajectory verifiable in public records, in parliamentary debates, in judicial files, in books, in the documented history of a man who chose truth as his political method in a country where truth has been, systematically, dangerous.
Nobody is asking the undecided voter to love Cepeda. They are being asked something smaller and more honest, to look at what Colombia has been, to look at who fears this candidacy, to look at what the real alternative is, and to decide. On 31 May, the ballot has fourteen presidential tickets. The one bearing number one has a philosopher’s name. It is no coincidence that those who have governed this country for decades do not want that number to reach the Casa de Nariño…
G.S.
Sources
- Iván Cepeda Castro (Wikipedia)
- CNN en Español: ¿Quién es Iván Cepeda?
- El Espectador: Propuestas de Iván Cepeda
- Cambio Colombia: Viabilidad del programa de gobierno
- Registraduría Nacional: Posición en tarjeta electoral
- Programa de Gobierno 2026-2030: El Poder de la Verdad
- Iván Cepeda Castro: Noveno mensaje programático
- Semana: El evangelio según Iván
