Others feared a return to a more active conflict.
“I don’t want the country to fall back into a spiral of war that ends up taking the lives of our children and grandchildren,” said Cepeda voter Abigail Pacheco, a 65-year-old pensioner.
More than 41 million Colombians are eligible to vote. Polls were open for eight hours starting at 8 a.m. local time (1300 GMT). Initial results are expected within hours.
REGIONAL SHIFT
Voters in Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Ecuador have elected right-wing presidents in their latest presidential races, while Bolivia ended two decades of leftist rule by electing center-right Rodrigo Paz last year.
In Peru, where votes from a June 7 contest are still being counted, conservative Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who served 16 years in prison for human rights abuses, is poised to win the presidency after three failed attempts.
Most of those elections, like Colombia’s, were driven by concerns over rising crime and a weak economy.
In Colombia, peace talks initiated by Petro have largely failed as armed groups have grown in power and numbers, and drug trafficking gangs have expanded, leading to spikes in murders and extortion along the Caribbean coast.
De La Espriella has cast Petro and Cepeda, the son of a murdered communist leader, as allies of criminals, though Petro’s government says it has seized more cocaine than any other government. Cepeda has rejected the accusations, saying there is no evidence for them.
Cepeda has critiqued De La Espriella’s work as a lawyer for people tied to right-wing paramilitary groups and corruption cases, including Alex Saab, who faces U.S. charges for allegedly laundering money for ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. De La Espriella says his professional relationships do not involve any complicity or crime.
U.S. President Donald Trump has moved to increase his country’s presence and influence in the region, including by arresting Maduro, conducting deadly strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and creating the Shield of the Americas, a military alliance of right-wing leaders pledging to fight drug trafficking.
