The Purple Finger: Lesson Plan
A teaching guide for parents, teachers, and anyone reading the story with a curious child or student. Colombia votes on Sunday 31 May 2026 under sustained armed-group attacks that include the first systematic use of swarm drones against an electoral process. The most precise historical parallel is the Iraqi parliamentary election of 30 January 2005, which voters defied al-Qaeda in Iraq's "war on democracy" to cast ballots in 58 percent turnout. Both elections are about the same question: does a population vote when armed groups threaten to kill them for voting, and what does the vote produce.
What the story is about
On Sunday 31 May 2026, Colombian voters will choose their next president from a field of fourteen candidates. The front-runner is Senator Iván Cepeda Castro of the Pacto Histórico (the current president Gustavo Petro's left-wing coalition), polling at about 44 percent. His closest rivals are the lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella at 22 percent and Senator Paloma Valencia of the centre-right Centro Democrático at 20 percent.
The election is being held under the worst pre-electoral violence Colombia has seen in a decade. The human-rights monitor Indepaz has documented 48 massacres in the first four months of 2026, with 249 deaths. The Electoral Observation Mission has identified 386 Colombian municipalities (about a third of the country) as being at high or very high risk of armed-group interference with the vote. Drone attacks have multiplied: 333 incidents in 2025, up from 61 in 2024. Armed groups are now carrying out "swarm" tactics: multiple cheap quadcopter drones carrying improvised grenades, launched simultaneously against police stations, electoral commission offices, and (since March 2026) campaign events.
The question the story asks is whether the historical pattern of the 30 January 2005 Iraqi election (voters defy organised armed-group violence to cast ballots, the election proceeds, the result is legitimate, the political settlement nevertheless fails) is the right template for what Colombia is about to do.
The 2005 Iraqi cast
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966-2006) was a Jordanian Salafist who founded al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999, swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden in 2004 (becoming al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI), and was killed by a US airstrike in June 2006. He was the operational architect of the AQI campaign against the January 2005 election. He had filmed and distributed the September 2004 beheading of British engineer Kenneth Bigley. He had attacked the Madrid commuter train system in March 2004. He had become, by the end of 2004, the most operationally feared Sunni jihadist commander in the world. He published a public fatwa six days before the Iraqi election declaring "a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy."
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is the senior Shia cleric in Iraq, born in Iran in 1930 and resident in Najaf since the 1950s. In the months before the January 2005 election he issued a series of religious rulings that effectively made voting a religious duty for Iraqi Shia. The recorded fatwa was played from minarets at polling stations on election day. His tacit endorsement of the United Iraqi Alliance produced its 48 percent winning vote share.
The Iraqi Interim Government, headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, had been in office since the 28 June 2004 transfer of authority from the Coalition Provisional Authority. It organised the election under Coalition Provisional Authority Order 92, which had established the Iraqi Independent Electoral Commission three months earlier.
The 2026 Colombian cast
Iván Cepeda Castro is 64. He was born in Bogotá in 1962 into a Colombian Communist Party household. His father, Manuel Cepeda Vargas, was a senator from the Unión Patriótica when he was murdered in 1994 by paramilitaries acting in concert with elements of Colombian military intelligence (the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in May 2010 that the Colombian state was directly responsible). Iván Cepeda has spent the thirty-two years since his father's murder building the legal and historical-memory infrastructure of the Unión Patriótica political-genocide case. The Inter-American Court ruled in January 2023 that the systematic murder of approximately 3,000 UP members and elected officials between 1984 and 2002 constituted a crime against humanity for which the Colombian state bears responsibility. He is the eldest son of one of the victims and the senator who led the case.
Abelardo de la Espriella is a 56-year-old lawyer and television commentator who has built his political profile on a "law and order" platform aligned with Álvaro Uribe's hard-right tradition.
Paloma Valencia is a 47-year-old Centro Democrático senator and Uribe protégée, advocating for a more aggressive military response to the armed groups.
The armed-group landscape consists primarily of: the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the National Liberation Army, founded 1964, the only major guerrilla group that did not sign the 2016 peace agreement with the state); the Estado Mayor Central and the Segunda Marquetalia (two FARC dissident factions that rejected the 2016 peace agreement); and the Clan del Golfo (Gulf Clan, also called Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, the largest paramilitary structure in Colombia, descended from the AUC paramilitaries demobilised in 2003-06).
What happened on 30 January 2005
The morning began at seven o'clock with polling stations opening across Iraq under a 48-hour driving ban and a 10 PM to 5 AM movement curfew. The international borders had been closed since midnight on Friday 28 January. Every airport in Iraq was closed. Iraqi Army and US Marines battalions held the perimeter of every major polling station.
The threat was credible. In the four weeks before voting day, AQI had launched approximately 260 attacks on Iraqi electoral infrastructure, including the assassination of nine candidates and the bombing of 63 polling-station compounds. Sunni clerics had issued counter-fatwas saying that voting was haram. The Sunni political establishment had called for a boycott. Pre-election polling showed Iraqi voters were terrified and intended to vote anyway.
The day's actual events:
- 9 suicide bombings at polling stations (mostly in Baghdad).
- 101 armed attacks on polling places.
- 44 dead (including the 9 suicide bombers).
- 58 percent nationwide turnout: higher than the UK's 2001 general election, lower than the US 2004 presidential.
- 89 percent turnout in Kurdish Dohuk; 2 percent in Sunni Anbar.
- The "purple finger" (right index finger marked with indelible violet ink to prevent double voting) became the international image of voter defiance.
What the 2005 election produced
The United Iraqi Alliance (Shia coalition tacitly endorsed by Sistani) won 48 percent of the vote and 140 of 275 seats in the Transitional National Assembly. The Kurdistan Alliance came second with 26 percent. The drafting of the 2005 Iraqi Constitution was conducted almost entirely by Shia and Kurdish representatives, with effectively no Sunni Arab input because of the boycott. The Sunni Arabs subsequently boycotted the October 2005 constitutional referendum as well.
The exclusion of the Sunni political class from the constitutional moment is widely identified by historians as the structural cause of:
- The Sunni insurgency of 2005-08.
- The Sahwa ("Awakening") councils of 2007-09, where US forces armed and paid Sunni tribal leaders against AQI.
- The Maliki government's anti-Sunni purges of 2010-13.
- The Islamic State capture of Mosul on 10 June 2014.
The 30 January 2005 election worked as an election. It did not work as a settlement. The purple-finger photograph aged less well than the voters who provided it.
What 31 May 2026 might produce
If Cepeda wins the first round outright (above 50 percent), he will be inaugurated on 7 August 2026 as Colombia's second consecutive Pacto Histórico president, the continuation of the Petro project, and with a mandate to continue paz total ("total peace") negotiations with the armed groups.
If no candidate exceeds 50 percent in the first round, a runoff will be held on Sunday 21 June 2026 between the top two finishers. The current polling suggests this would be Cepeda versus de la Espriella, a left-vs-right runoff in which the central question is whether to continue negotiating with the armed groups (Cepeda's position) or to abandon negotiation in favour of military pressure (de la Espriella, Valencia).
The 386 at-risk municipalities are concentrated in the Pacific coast departments (Chocó, Valle del Cauca, Cauca, Nariño), Catatumbo, Arauca, southern Bolívar, and parts of Antioquia. These are the historic strongholds of the armed groups and the regions where turnout suppression will be most effective.
The structural question (does Colombia produce a settlement that includes the armed-group political constituencies, or does it produce a settlement that excludes them and thereby seeds the next decade of violence) is the same question Iraq answered in 2005, with the answer it gave.
Discussion questions
For an older student:
- Why do people vote when they are credibly threatened with death for voting? The Iraqi voters in 2005 had been warned by AQI that they would be killed for voting; 58 percent voted anyway. What is the political-emotional logic of that defiance? Is it courage, or trust in the rest of the population, or something else?
- The purple finger as a symbol. The ink mark was an anti-fraud measure. It became an image of defiance. How does a piece of administrative infrastructure become a political symbol? What is the modern equivalent in Colombia 2026 likely to be?
- The settlement question. The Iraqi election succeeded procedurally and failed politically. What would it have taken in 2005 to produce a settlement that included the Sunni Arabs? Is that the same question Colombia faces in 2026 about the armed groups (ELN, FARC dissidents, Clan del Golfo)?
- The drone-swarm escalation. The Iraqi violence was suicide bombings and vehicle-borne explosives. The Colombian violence is increasingly autonomous drone swarms. Does the technological shift change the political question, or only the cost of asking it?
- Inheritance. Iván Cepeda's father was murdered by the same armed networks his son is running for president against. He has built his political career on the legal memory of those murders. What does it mean for a country when its election in 2026 is a referendum on a thirty-year-old genocide and its perpetrators?
A note on the politics
Time Rhymes takes no position on whether the Cepeda candidacy, the de la Espriella candidacy or the Valencia candidacy is the better outcome for Colombia. The historical parallel is structural: an election held under sustained armed-group attack to which voters respond by voting anyway, with downstream consequences that may or may not produce a workable political settlement. The 2005 Iraqi case is taught now as a cautionary tale because the procedural success was followed by structural exclusion that produced ten years of insurgency and the Islamic State. Colombia 2026 may produce a different outcome, or it may produce the same one, or it may produce something neither precedent quite covers.
Further reading
For older students or interested readers:
- Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Times Books, 2005).
- Ned Parker, "Machiavelli in Mesopotamia" (Survival, 2009) on the Sunni-Shia constitutional question.
- Anne Garrels, Naked in Baghdad (2003, 2006 paperback): a contemporary American journalist account.
- Iván Cepeda: La memoria como acción política (Editorial Planeta, 2018): Spanish-language biographical study.
- Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Caso Cepeda Vargas v. Colombia (judgment of 26 May 2010): the legal text holding the Colombian state responsible.
- Indepaz, Massacres Report (monthly): the running count of Colombian massacres.
Time Rhymes will publish a follow-up after the Colombian first round, the runoff (if any), and the inauguration of the next Colombian president on 7 August 2026.