On the morning of August 9, 1994, Senator Manuel Cepeda Vargas was shot dead in his car on his way to the Colombian Congress. He was one of the last surviving leaders of the Unión Patriótica, the left-wing party born of a peace process and then systematically destroyed. Thousands of its members were killed, disappeared, or driven into exile while the state looked on, at times taking part.

Thirty-two years later, his son, Senator Iván Cepeda, stands in a presidential runoff against Abelardo de la Espriella, a celebrity lawyer tied to the murky worlds of drug trafficking and paramilitarism. De la Espriella has promised to “disembowel the left,” and now, on the back of a fireworks spectacle of a campaign, he leads the polls for the second round. On a single ballot, Colombia has staged a confrontation between the survivor of a political extermination and a political descendant of the forces that carried it out.

Commentators have reached, almost in unison, for one word to explain de la Espriella’s meteoric rise: populism.