Colombia’s Outgoing President Says Israeli Firm Meddled in Election

Colombia’s outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, has accused an Israeli cyber intelligence company of meddling in the country’s recent election, in which a far-right, pro-Israel candidate beat his leftwing rival by a margin of less than 1%.  

The firm, BlackCore, allegedly waged a disinformation campaign against both Petro and his ally Ivan Cepeda, who was running for the presidency against the US and Israel’s preferred candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella.

“BlackCore, the Israeli company, deployed 500,000 bots – fake profiles – to manipulate the Colombian electorate with millions of lies about Ivan and me,” Petro wrote on X last week.

De la Espriella secured 49.66% of the vote in a run-off election on 21 June, narrowly beating Cepeda’s 48.7%. At the time, Petro alleged that foreign actors had accessed the website of Colombia’s National Registry and manipulated polling data. 

“The only entity in the world capable of doing that is the state of Israel,” he said. Colombia’s attorney general Gregorio Eljach dismissed the allegations and said there was “no evidence of fraud”.

Petro is among Israel’s fiercest critics on the world stage. In 2024 he broke diplomatic ties with the country “for having a government, for having a president who is genocidal”. 

French authorities last month accused BlackCore of interfering in elections in Scotland, New York, France, Angola and Togo. 

Viginum, France’s disinformation watchdog, said the firm had coordinated hundreds of accounts to post negative comments about Scottish first minister John Swinney in the run-up to the Scottish parliament elections in May.

Swinney is one of the few UK politicians to have described Israel’s mass killings in Gaza as a genocide.

De la Espriella, who is set to take office on 7 August, is a millionaire and criminal defence lawyer who holds US citizenship and was endorsed by president Donald Trump. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated de la Espriella on his victory last month.

“Israel’s friends continue to win,” he wrote on X. 

Novara Media was unable to reach BlackCore for comment; the firm deleted its online presence after being contacted by Reuters in June.