Whoever wins Sunday’s presidential runoff vote in Colombia, the country’s next leader will have a personal history intertwined with one of the criminal forces at the heart of a decades-long armed conflict that claimed nearly half a million lives.
The lives of Iván Cepeda and Abelardo de la Espriella have, in very different ways, been shaped by their relationship with Colombia’s paramilitaries – private armies originally established by rightwing landowners, drug traffickers, businessmen, mining magnates and politicians to fight leftwing guerrilla groups.
