María Fernanda Cabal: "If it is God's will, I will be president of Colombia. It's my time."

María Fernanda Cabal says things that make the hair stand on end with amazing normality. In the short distance everything in it comes naturally. Their presence neither repels nor bothers and there comes a time during the conversation when one enters their world of sentences without restraint and runs the risk of naturalizing them. The woman who sent García Márquez to hell, the one who believes that climate change is a farce, the one who believes that Álvaro Uribe actually has a left-liberal heart or that the humanities create fanatics of stupid ideas, has grown up in the Petro era. The current senator, 56, is convinced that her time has come and that, God willing, she can be the next president of Colombia.

That day she sent Gabriel García Márquez to hell, Cabal was a novice in politics. She had just arrived from the Democratic Center with a position that Uribe first offered to her husband, the powerful cattle rancher José Félix Lafaurie. It was 2014 and in the presidency was Juan Manuel Santos, already an enemy of Uribe. Cabal ended up at the head of the list to the Chamber of Bogotá because no one else wanted to run. No one, not even the party leader himself, gave a weight for that candidacy. Being an unknown, it was the most voted list. His name spent little time in the shadows, soon becoming a headline machine. She remembers it now and dies of laughter: "It was spectacular, there we started in Congress and they put me in all the farts in the world ...". She refers to the press, although she also did her part.

Gabo's was only the first. The Nobel had just died and Cabal was given a photo of the writer with Fidel Castro, who still had a couple of years to live. He thought it was a good idea to tweet, "You'll be in hell together soon." His words produced an earthquake, not only in the author's country. He had to apologize, but the controversy served him to discover what he now considers his greatest value.

In the following months she began to cross people on the street who had voted for her for saying in public what they did not dare. She realized that a "right-wing provincial" like her had the power to uncover hidden haters. Her followers, she explains, are those who look at her and think: "this is a brave woman, what a bellicose old woman." That has been his recipe these 10 years, to say everything that goes through his head without filters. And what he thinks includes all the clichés of the current far right, including that the far right and the far right do not exist.

—So how do you define it?

"I'm normal.

From their point of view, Latin America is going through a dark night, plagued by communist governments that won because of the cowardice of the traditional right. Including Colombia, which he sees living "a passing nightmare" with Gustavo Petro in the presidency. The two previous governments, that of Juan Manuel Santos and that of Iván Duque, two presidents handpicked by his beloved Álvaro Uribe, he reviles as progressives. He thinks Uribe was wrong about both.

Santos considers him perverse, ambitious, the prototype of evil. With Duque it is more benevolent. He thinks he's a naturally good man who went very young to Washington, "the capital of the mamertos, and was left with all the frenzy: [George] Soros, climate change and all these ideas reprogress." She represents what she considers the true essences of the right: authority, heavy-handedness, love for the military, anti-feminism, no abortion or gay marriage. She wants to be something like a Colombian Margaret Thatcher.

This morning of Bogota storm, Cabal is in a good mood. He walks down the stairs of his apartment filled with portraits and family photos. Before sitting down to tell his life, he asks his collaborators to remember to enter a thousand dollars to sponsor a boy who is in the children's league of Deportivo Cali and his family does not have money to take him to a tournament in Spain. He says a thousand dollars and does not move an eyebrow, with that tranquility with which those who have been rich all their lives talk about money – although it must be recognized that not all rich people give money.

The senator is the youngest of three sisters from an upper-class family in Cali, very conservative even for her, so it's hard to imagine. His mother was an artist and a rigid woman. His father, on the other hand, was liberal and a fan of opera and America. When he came of age, he went to Bogotá to study Political Science. There he met Lafaurie, 11 years older, a well-connected man who had long been moving in the capital's circles of power.

Maria Fernanda Cabal.NATHALIA ANGARITA

Cabal could have spent her days in the gym and restaurant at Club El Nogal with what she calls, with some contempt, the "Bogota revolutionary elite," but she thinks she would get depressed. Before his political adventure, he created a successful company that his children manage today and led several social projects. Receive EL PAÍS with the time measured, just before having lunch with a "gringo" who is a "great admirer" and taking a plane to tour the country. Just a few days ago he returned from Spain, where he participated in the campaign of Vox, the far-right party that made fashionable the mantra of the "cowardly right" to refer to the traditional conservative parties. Cabal, an unknown in Madrid, earned a place in the media with some of her rally phrases: "Imbeciles vote and put us all at risk", the left creates "early anxieties" in children or "women became enemies of men; They made us anti-feminine, they want us to come out naked and hideous."

The current senator is nothing like those politicians who in interviews try not to say anything. Those who are asked if they have presidential aspirations and resort to classics such as that they will be where the party wants them to be or that the important thing is that the country does well and not one's role. Cabal is not like them. She imagines a near future with José Antonio Kast in the presidency of Chile, Javier Milei in that of Argentina and she in that of Colombia. "And Trump in the United States," he adds. He sees all the visible heads of the most radical and populist right reigning in America in the coming years. She is preparing to try it in 2026.

In Colombia, the right has left it a huge hole that it is trying to fill by multiplying its presence. It is the voice of opposition to the left-wing government of Petro that is most heard. The conservative parties were knocked out in the 2022 elections, where they did not even reach the second round, and now lack a clear leader. She is taking advantage of that weakness. "I'm not going to say that you don't generate jealousy in your own, because that's natural. I quote Churchill a lot when I am asked about the enemies of other parties, those are adversaries, my enemies are in my party."

Against all odds, the marriage formed by her and Lafaurie has regained visibility with the Petro government. A few months ago, one of the president's first moves knocked them out of the game. Petro was still taking his first steps in the Government and had an idea that must have seemed brilliant. He was going to propose to Lafaurie, president of the cattle association, to participate in the agrarian reform. Sign an agreement together, shake hands and pose for the cameras. Cabal directly said no, José Félix said yes and, since they could not agree, they decided to call their political boss. Uribe was clear: it was a good idea to collaborate with the president.

Uribe is much more democratic than people think. As I say, and he laughs, he has a little heart mamerto. He is liberal in origin, but liberal of those who go more to the left than to the center.

It was not the only approach. Petro also invited Lafaurie to be part of the government delegation in the peace negotiations with the ELN, the last guerrilla group in the region. It seemed that the leftist president wanted him as an ally, with that spirit of his to approach the different with which he started the mandate. The rancher agreed, Uribe willing, but Cabal was categorical: "The ELN seems completely absurd to me because they are sociopaths. What can you discuss with a sociopath? But I cannot supplant him, he is different from me in many things although we have ideological affinity. He is seeing that this is an opportunity to be, to know what is happening with the country, how they think. There you can contribute. But it affects my presidential image because I have followers who don't forgive."

His supporters are still unclear how many they are or the electoral power they could have, but they are increasingly visible supported by the ultra-right echo that grows in other Latin American countries, including the Bukele phenomenon in El Salvador. Cabal was the first who began to show her admiration for the Salvadoran in Colombia. He likes his heavy hand, his authoritarianism, which he sees as necessary in a situation of violence like the one El Salvador went through. "It does happen, but it deserves what it does. Although I think there has to come a time when there has to be a balance, because otherwise there will be pure and hard dictatorship."

Cabal thinks that Colombia has a need for authority that she proposes to recover by "fighting" with the armed forces. He wants to return to the country Uribe left after his two terms. "With him we began to believe, he made us sensitive to what we no longer liked, like the national anthem. People started wearing the bracelets from Colombia. He taught us to love a country that everyone said I'm going to leave now. We loved the army and the police again." The former president, in his lowest hours and cornered by justice, remains one of his references and ignites with anger at what he considers a political persecution to end him and his legacy.

The senator's philosophy is that life is too short to be taken so seriously, so the critics don't care. She laughs at being called a racist for her insistence on criticizing Vice President Francia Márquez, and points to her collaborator Andrés Arcos, a black guerrilla victim, as proof that she is not. "I don't have discrimination problems. I've worked with gays, not because I choose them, because they come and I'm not going to take them out because they're gay. What I don't like is activism that ends up being predatory, I don't like children being indoctrinated. It seems to me a higher level of schizophrenia."

These words are said with a naturalness that impresses while drinking a zero coke. "People who don't know me think I'm a hysterical neurotic, but I have a humor that sometimes makes me keep quiet because I get into trouble." With all that he speaks, it is hard to imagine what is silent. The conversation drags on and she gets nervous because she doesn't want to be late, although she enjoys remembering her most controversial phrases. On the way to the elevator and as a farewell he launches the last one: "Like that time I said: study, lazy people!", aimed at the young people of the protests in 2021. She is heard laughing when the doors close. He likes to provoke and observe what his words provoke in others. The formula is not new. It was successfully used by Trump in the United States or Bolsonaro in Brazil. She is running to enter that club.

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