Do we like them?

Do we like Iván Duque?

Our score: 5 out of 10. A big migrant-protection call and clean-cut statesman image on one side, a bloody 2021 protest crackdown and socially conservative stances on the other.

Duque was Colombia's youngest elected president in modern times, winning in 2018 at 41 after beating Gustavo Petro. He came up as a senator in the party of his mentor, former president Álvaro Uribe. Since leaving office in 2022 he has turned into a fixture of think-tank and conference circuits, running a centre at the Wilson Center in Washington.

The big stain is the 2021 national strike. Duque ordered the maximum deployment of security forces, and the National Strike Committee said he had declared war on the strike. Rights group Temblores reported more than 2,100 cases of alleged police brutality, and the opposition's Iván Cepeda sent the International Criminal Court a complaint alleging crimes against humanity against Duque and others. Duque told PBS his government had zero tolerance for any wrongdoing by police or army.

On the harm check, he is socially conservative. He rejected Colombia's Constitutional Court decision to decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks, arguing only Congress should decide and warning it must not become a contraceptive mechanism. That is a contested position rather than a campaign of hate, but anyone who wants reproductive rights protected will mark it down.

On migrants he did something genuinely big. In 2021 his government announced temporary protection for nearly a million Venezuelan migrants, a ten-year pathway to legal status. He told PBS that Colombia was granting protection to 1.8 million Venezuelans, and the UN refugee chief called it a humanitarian gesture of unprecedented scale. That deserves real credit.

The Israel trip is where politics gets sticky. In August 2025 he met Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and Petro condemned the meeting on X. Cepeda announced a criminal complaint against Duque alleging an apology of genocide; nothing in our sources shows that going anywhere. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a diplomatic friendship or as cosying up to a government accused of wrongdoing in Gaza.

Lately he has been telling anyone who'll listen that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua need free elections and that they fuel organised crime. Whether he takes a government post under De la Espriella is still only a report, so that part is for later.