“Friends, I will be participating in the V Regional Meeting of the Madrid Forum – Santiago de Chile 2026. I will be sharing our experience in the 2026 electoral campaigns, the victory at the polls of the ‘Tiger List’ and Tiger Abelardo.” With this post on August 24 on his Facebook account, the Colombian senator and key figure in the campaign that brought Abelardo de la Espriella to the Casa de Nariño, Enrique Gómez Martínez, announced his attendance at the event promoted by the Disenso Foundation, the think tank of the Spanish party Vox, which takes place this Thursday and Friday in the capital.
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Lawyer, businessman, and politician born in Bogotá in 1968, Gómez is the leader of the National Salvation Movement, a right-wing political party with a conservative ideology, founded in 1990 by Álvaro Gómez Hurtado as a dissidence from the Colombian Conservative Party. The parliamentarian, who currently presides over the Senate’s First Constitutional Commission, was a presidential candidate for his party in 2022.
During the last presidential campaign, Gómez was the debate chief for candidate Abelardo de la Espriella. And his family holds a prominent role in the current Colombian administration. His brother, Miguel Gómez Martínez, was appointed Minister of Finance and Public Credit, while the senator’s son, Nicolás Gómez Arenas, 28 years old, serves as Chief of Staff of the Presidency of the Republic.
Gómez, who was scheduled to participate this Thursday in the panel “Freedom Block: the victories of the Ibero-American patriotic forces” of the Madrid Forum, where he would talk about the electoral strategy of the current Colombian president, spoke with La Tercera about the meeting that brings together leaders and references of the conservative right in Ibero-America.
What are your expectations for this V Regional Meeting of the Madrid Forum?
The Madrid Forum has been occupying an important space to somewhat break the cancellation, the censorship of right-wing ideas in Latin America, replicating other processes in other parts of the world, where after almost five or six decades of the social-democratic consensus, which was a consensus with some achievements, undoubtedly, and with much support, there was also a format of systematic cancellation for different views regarding economic issues, security issues, societal issues. So, for me, as director of National Salvation and having been the debate chief for Abelardo de la Espriella, I think it is very motivating to be here in Santiago and meet with very prominent figures of this new wave of the right that brings traditional thought but also brings innovative solutions, modern communications, and obviously addresses the feelings of more and more countries throughout Latin America.
With your experience in the campaign of now president Abelardo de la Espriella, how do you explain the advance of the conservative right in several countries in the region?
There are different origins, each national situation has its own pains, its own failures, but undoubtedly, it is a trend that somehow implies a correction in relation to socialist doctrines disguised as social-democratic consensuses, many of them affecting citizen security, disregarding criminal policies and relegating them not to the back burner, but removing them from the kitchen of State action.
And that is one of the mega-pains in Latin America and many other parts of the world. There are important coincidences in terms of economic doctrine. Control the size of the State, a State that grows incessantly, consuming enormous resources from the productive sector, increasingly ineffective, increasingly tied by special and minority interests.
The issue of migration is a problem that has brought an increase in organized crime throughout the continent. And there are other issues as well. When talking about the concept of homeland, the breakdown of nationalisms, in the Colombian case that I know better than others, a breakdown of territorial control is being fostered, agendas that are no longer minority but territorial control, undermining the validity of norms and the Constitution and generating micro-spaces that end up being capitalized by illicit economies and criminal organizations.
I believe these are the common paths of the phenomena with the particularities of each country regarding its social and economic situation.
The issue of security is a central theme that crossed several campaigns of the current presidents in the region. Do you consider that this imposes the concrete challenge of achieving rapid progress and, to the extent that it is not achieved, does it put pressure on these governments?
I see it from a slightly different perspective than yours. I believe insecurity is one of the great achievements of socialism. A society that lives in anarchy, that builds institutions to benefit crime individually and organized crime, generates an environment of chaos, and chaos serves left-wing politicians. So the challenge of a right-wing politician’s process, as in the case of Abelardo de la Espriella, as in the case of President Kast in Chile, is nuanced and tied to institutions that are already perverse in themselves.
The socialist judicial doctrine, in which the resocialization of punishment quickly evolved into impunity, where the action and use of force by public authorities began to be restricted by layers of legislation, more layers of jurisprudence, more interested activism, sometimes activism of criminal groups, activism of small causes, ends up generating a huge, very costly, and almost totally inoperative State. So yes, it is a challenge, a practical challenge, a political challenge, an urgent institutional reform challenge for almost all countries that have seen their violence rates worsen today.
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President Kast defended his participation in the Madrid Forum, against criticism from opposition sectors questioning the head of State attending a meeting with a marked “ideological” tone. What do you think of these criticisms?
When the Latin American Marxist left met day after day in Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, those same wailers of the Chilean opposition kept cordial silence and rather fawned, that is, sought to be given the ticket to go applaud those outdated totems of the Latin American left. They melted, they got wet in their pants to see a Castro, a Chávez, a Menem.
So, I think there is a lot of cynicism in that criticism. I believe ideology is decisive in the entire history of political ideas. Pretending that image of ideological sepsis in State action is what leads to uncommitted rulers, rulers I call tutti frutti, who please everyone and end up harming everyone. Welcome President Kast, we will be gladly awaiting his closing remarks this Thursday.
The Americas Shield initiative promoted by Donald Trump has already resulted in the authorization of several allied governments for joint operations or the presence of US forces in their territories to fight drug trafficking and organized crime. Do you think that such military interventions call into question the sovereignty of Latin American countries regarding Washington?
No, that is a sophism. What most calls into question the sovereignty of democracies in Latin America is transnational organized crime, international terrorist organizations, incredibly financed by cocaine trafficking, gold trafficking, human trafficking, which have also generated enormous corruption phenomena, in many cases with local authorities in the areas where these illicit economies develop.
US support, on the contrary, what it mainly emphasizes through the intelligence resources of the northern ally, allows effective action, allows the fight against corruption, allows the development of military and police operations with great precision in the nodes that in Colombia we sadly call coca enclaves and mining enclaves. So it is a reversal of values. Everything the left-wing forces come to do here, which are smeared with coca, smeared with illegal gold, smeared with the blood of terrorism victims, is to look for excuses and wailers to stop this hemispheric cooperation that is decisive and urgent.
Upon taking office, President De la Espriella launched a frontal and tough offensive against organized crime and illegal armed groups. But just three days after coming to power, the earthquake of August 10 occurred. How much will the government move away from its original agenda as a result of this tragedy?
No, not at all. A complete parallelism must be maintained. The retaking of territorial control after the disaster of Gustavo Petro’s government, the withdrawal of the high mountain battalions, the handing over of more than 450 municipalities to all kinds of terrorist organizations, reconstruction is impossible without effective territorial control. It is useless to attempt these humanitarian efforts of housing and infrastructure reconstruction if citizens remain exposed to these very powerful forms of criminal action in our country. That is why I believe the president has multiplied himself on all fronts successfully, maintaining the offensive morning, afternoon, and night against terrorist groups and maintaining and deploying humanitarian aid efforts.
The Madrid Forum takes place amid strong political controversy over the alleged links of the detained Argentine digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo with several conservative governments in the region. In your opinion, can this case put some presidents at risk?
No, I believe judicial activism is part of the combination of forms of struggle of the Judiciary in Colombia, Bolivia, many places in Latin America. It has a flag, it is biased, it is a source of systematic persecution. Lawfare as a political tool was built by the Sao Paulo Forum more than 50 years ago and how it works. So, obviously, I cannot comment on a judicial case that is ongoing, but I think not. I think those who have been instigating and manipulating networks with the help of drug trafficking money, corruption, and terrorism are the left-wing candidates.
It is the case of Senator Iván Cepeda, defeated in the June 21 elections in Colombia, whom I call the senator of the rifle vote. The man who not only obtained more than half a million votes in populations subjected to guerrilla scorn, but after the elections endorsed, condoned, even, I would say, fostered revenge in rural areas of Colombia, in those paths or districts where they voted for “The Tiger” Abelardo de la Espriella.
So, I repeat, we are sadly at war against an enemy not only heartless but shameless, unscrupulous, and we clearly hope that these judicial actions seeking to stop digital activism, which has been one of the tools with which precisely these ideas have been able to spread massively, do not continue their course.
