The decree, issued by the Ministerio de Defensa Nacional (Ministry of Defense), ends the additional special authorization that holders of an individual carrying permit had to obtain on top of their existing license during the suspension. It does not create new rights, authorize unrestricted or indiscriminate carrying, or alter the licensing requirements, restrictions and controls set out in Decree Law 2535 of 1993, Colombia’s foundational arms statute, according to the decree’s text. The state’s constitutional monopoly over weapons, war ammunition and explosives under Article 223 of the Constitution remains in force.

“For years, the citizen who obeys the law was restricted, while criminals kept arming themselves illegally to the teeth. That has to change,” de la Espriella wrote on his X account. He added that the change “does not mean indiscriminate carrying” and that strict controls, requirements and permits from the competent authorities remain in place. “What ends is the general suspension that turned the prohibition into the rule,” he wrote. “To the law-abiding citizen who strictly complies with the law, guarantees within the law. To the criminal illegally armed, the full weight of the law and the full legitimate force of the State.”

Firmé el decreto que levanta la suspensión general de los permisos para el porte de armas de fuego en Colombia.

Durante años se restringió al ciudadano que cumple la ley mientras los criminales siguieron armándose ilegalmente hasta los dientes. Eso tiene que cambiar.

Las cifras… pic.twitter.com/dsZAshWMWS

— DE LA ESPRIELLA STYLE (@DELAESPRIELLAE) September 8, 2026

The suspension traces to Decree 2515 of 2015, signed by then-President Juan Manuel Santos on December 24, 2015. “Colombians deserve a calm and safe Christmas and New Year,” Santos wrote on Twitter at the time, according to El País, which reported the measure was meant to guarantee tranquility and security for Colombians over the holiday season. It initially ran through January 31, 2016, but Santos’s government kept extending it, and every administration since has renewed it in turn. The measure was formalized into a standing, annually revisited policy under Decree 2362 of 2018, signed during the government of Iván Duque, which cited a declining trend in homicides and injuries linked to firearms between 2016 and 2018 as grounds for continuing it. Its most recent extension came from Decree 1482 of December 31, 2025, signed by then-President Gustavo Petro, which pushed the suspension’s expiration to December 31, 2026. Decree 1368 repeals both the 2018 and 2025 measures outright.

The general suspension power itself derives from Article 41 of Decree Law 2535 of 1993, as modified by Law 1119 of 2006, which authorizes Colombia’s competent military authorities to suspend the validity of carrying and possession permits nationwide. Colombia’s Constitutional Court upheld that authority in a 2010 ruling, finding it consistent with the state’s constitutional monopoly on arms.

De la Espriella defended the decision with seizure figures covering January 1 through September 3, 2026: Colombia’s security forces confiscated 15,700 firearms in that period, 14,179 of them linked to the commission of crimes, according to El Tiempo. Of the total, 980 weapons were tied to FARC dissident factions, 551 to the Clan del Golfo and 339 to the National Liberation Army (ELN), the president said, adding that the weapons linked to dissident groups alone included 380 rifles and 65 60-millimeter mortars.

“There is no justification for bandits being armed to the teeth while decent people cannot defend themselves.”

— President Abelardo de la Espriella

The decree specifies that the lifted suspension does not extend to weapons whose permits have expired, been individually suspended, canceled or revoked, been seized or placed under a judicial or administrative measure, or that are subject to a separate legal or judicial prohibition, nor to permits that authorize only possession rather than carrying. Colombia’s military authorities retain their power to issue, renew, suspend, cancel or revoke individual permits, the Policía Nacional (National Police) keeps its inspection and seizure authority, and the Ministry of Defense’s Departamento Control Comercio de Armas, Municiones y Explosivos (Department for the Control of Arms, Ammunition and Explosives Trade) will continue to maintain the registries used to verify which permits remain valid.

The distinction that matters going forward, according to attorney Fabio Humar, is between possession and carrying. “Proving you are licensed to have a weapon requires a permit. But possession is different from carrying, which is what was restricted. What this decree does is authorize carrying,” Humar told El Tiempo.

Former President Gustavo Petro, whose own government signed the most recent extension of the suspension in December 2025, criticized the repeal in a two-word post on X: “La necropolítica,” or “necropolitics” — a concept, Infobae noted, that links state policy to violence and exposure to death.

Above photo: © Loren Moss

“Japan is looking at Colombia again, and we are ready to capitalize on that confidence.”

— Mauricio Gómez Amín, Colombia’s minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism

Gómez Amín, who leads the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism (MinCIT), met separately with Toshiro Ino, Japan’s state minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, and with Hiroshi Nanbu, president of Business Planning and Operation at Toyota. The trip is part of President Abelardo de la Espriella’s administration’s push to attract long-term Japanese investment and generate employment.

With Ino, Gómez Amín advanced an agenda to reactivate and conclude the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between Colombia and Japan, an accord intended to open Colombian agroindustry to Japanese investment and technology transfer. The two countries began negotiating the EPA in December 2012. 16 of its 18 chapters have been agreed, but two — rules of origin and market access — remain unresolved, and the talks were suspended in 2021, according to Colombia’s embassy in Tokyo. El Tiempo reported that Colombia and Japan reactivated the negotiation in September 2025, when then-President Gustavo Petro and then-Trade Minister Diana Marcela Morales Rojas met their Japanese counterparts on the sidelines of Expo Osaka 2025.

“Japan is looking at Colombia again, and we are ready to capitalize on that confidence,” Gómez Amín said.

The Toyota meeting revisited a relationship of more than five decades. The first Toyota vehicles reached Colombia in 1959, and the company formalized a local distributor in 1967. Sofasa, the assembler that has long built Renault vehicles in Envigado, Antioquia, signed a letter of intent with Toyota in 1989; assembly of Land Cruisers and Hilux pickups began in 1992 and continued for 17 years, before Toyota exited its stake in the plant. In Tokyo, the Colombian government invited Toyota to expand its footprint into the assembly of hybrid and electric vehicles, along with charging infrastructure and the development of local suppliers.

The government describes the push as an effort to draw on Colombia’s talent, strategic location and existing conditions to build a regional production and investment platform. Gómez Amín said the goal is to put Bogotá “on the world map of investments, strengthening relations with a region that for years looked favorably on Colombia,” according to comments carried by El Tiempo.

Japan is the largest Asia-Pacific source of foreign direct investment in Colombia. Japanese investment flows into the country totaled $562.7 million USD between 2010 and 2021, or 32.9 percent of all Asia-Pacific investment Colombia received in that period, ahead of China (21.2 percent) and Australia (14.6 percent), according to the Colombian embassy in Tokyo.

The Tokyo meetings produced no signed agreement and no specific investment commitment from Toyota; both would require further negotiation that the two governments have not scheduled publicly.

Headline photo: Colombia’s Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism Mauricio Gómez Amín (right) and Japan’s State Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Toshiro Ino, in Tokyo. (Photo courtesy MinCIT)

The month split into two distinct phases, Grupo Cibest’s analysts wrote. Early in August, the Banco de la República (Bank of the Republic), Colombia’s central bank, surprised markets. Its board had voted at a July 31 session to hold the benchmark interest rate at 12% and to build up to $4 billion USD in international reserves through a new options-auction mechanism; when the bank ran the program’s first auction on August 3, buying $400 million USD, according to El Universal, the combination of the rate hold and the new dollar demand pushed the dollar down further against the peso. The mood reversed after August 27, when the government of President Abelardo de la Espriella, who took office August 7, submitted a revised 2027 National Budget to Congress that acknowledged a far deeper deterioration in public finances than previously disclosed.

The peso weakened sharply in the final days of August as the 2027 National Budget rattled markets. (Source: SetFX, prepared by Grupo Cibest; chart: Finance Colombia)

The revised budget raised the government’s projected total fiscal deficit from 5.3% to 7.2% of gross domestic product for 2026, and from 4.5% to 9.4% of gross domestic product for 2027, after incorporating obligations tied to debt service, pensions, health care, payroll costs, energy subsidies and the Fuel Price Stabilization Fund that had previously been underestimated. Grupo Cibest called the disclosure “a necessary reality check” and said clarity on the government’s medium-term fiscal adjustment plan, which has yet to be published, would be critical to the peso’s direction from here.

The 2027 National Budget nearly doubled the projected fiscal gap for both years. (Source: Colombia’s Ministry of Finance, prepared by Grupo Cibest; chart: Finance Colombia)

The currency’s slide happened despite favorable conditions abroad. The US Dollar Index fell 0.5% in August after a weak employment report, while Brent crude gained 0.3% to close the month at $90.04 USD per barrel — a combination that would typically support, not weaken, an emerging-market currency like the peso. Grupo Cibest said the divergence showed the depreciation was driven almost entirely by local, not global, factors.

A weaker dollar and firmer oil prices should have supported the peso in August; instead it depreciated. (Source: LSEG Workspace and SetFX, prepared by Grupo Cibest; chart: Finance Colombia)

Even with August’s reversal, the broader trend remains firmly in the peso’s favor. The exchange rate stayed below both its 50-day and 100-day moving averages for most of the month, and Grupo Cibest noted that the medium-term technical structure remains bearish for the dollar, with all three moving averages still trending downward. Analysts at Corficolombiana attributed the rally mainly to lower political and fiscal risk premiums tied to Colombia’s change of government rather than to any structural improvement in economic fundamentals, and it expects a partial correction in the exchange rate in the months ahead.

The exchange rate closed August below all three moving averages, a sign of sustained peso strength. (Source: LSEG Workspace, prepared by Grupo Cibest; chart: Finance Colombia)

The strong peso has split Colombia’s export sector from its import-dependent businesses and consumers. Between January and May, exporters stopped receiving approximately $12.2 trillion COP in revenue as a direct consequence of the currency’s appreciation, according to the same Corficolombiana analysis, with coal, bananas, flowers, coffee and labor-intensive manufacturing among the hardest-hit categories. Fenalco noted that those losses have been compounded by higher labor costs and by new United States tariffs on Colombian goods, which combine a 10% universal duty with an additional 2.5-percentage-point surcharge tied to labor-standards enforcement, and it pointed to Colombia’s 12% policy rate, one of the highest in the region, as a magnet for the short-term capital inflows that have helped drive the appreciation. Bruce Mac Master, president of the National Business Association of Colombia (ANDI), said in August that the trend was already undermining the country’s competitiveness as an exporter.

“The dollar is reaching levels of COP3,000, which without a doubt puts us in a very complex situation and takes away our competitiveness. It significantly affects exporters’ income when they convert it into pesos.”

— Bruce Mac Master, president, ANDI

Mac Master said Colombia should study measures to discourage those capital inflows, arguing that the central bank’s inflation mandate now competes with a bigger risk: eroding the country’s productive base. Corficolombiana’s own numbers suggest the picture is more mixed than exporters’ losses alone would indicate. The research firm estimated that cheaper imports saved Colombian businesses and households about $15.6 trillion COP over the same five months, for a net national benefit of roughly $3.4 trillion COP, and it found no significant widening of the trade deficit so far, in part because Colombia’s oil and gold exports have benefited from higher international prices even as their peso-denominated value has been squeezed by the exchange rate.

Tourism has felt a similar split. The association of travel and tourism agencies, Anato, told La República that the arrival of non-resident visitors fell 1.6% between January and May compared with the same period in 2025, as the stronger peso made Colombia a less attractive low-cost destination for foreign travelers. “The appreciation of the Colombian peso can create the perception of a more expensive country for foreigners, a situation that is worsened when combined with risk factors such as informality, security perceptions and travel warnings,” the association said. Anato’s executive president, Paula Cortés Calle, said the currency move complicates outbound travel as well: although a weaker dollar is usually seen as an incentive for Colombians to travel abroad, she said, the operational reality for travel agencies is more complex because of the time gap between quoting a trip and paying international suppliers.

Grupo Cibest expects the exchange rate to trade within a COP3,100-COP3,300 range in September, with risk running in both directions. On the upside for the dollar, the firm is watching the government’s promised Economic Rescue Act proposal, which it said would be critical in assessing Colombia’s ability to stabilize its public debt trajectory, along with continued pressure on US dollar liquidity. Foreign exchange intermediaries’ spot dollar cash position stood at $1.4 billion USD on August 9 before turning negative later in the month; Grupo Cibest expects it to settle near $800 million USD, well below the 2026 year-to-date average of $3.1 billion USD.

Dollar liquidity among foreign exchange intermediaries tightened sharply in the second half of August. (Source: Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia, prepared by Grupo Cibest; chart: Finance Colombia)

On the downside for the dollar, Grupo Cibest pointed to continued carry-trade activity, in which investors borrow in low-rate currencies to invest in higher-yielding Colombian assets, as well as to the central bank’s plan to keep purchasing close to $400 million USD in reserves per month through September. Additional support for the peso could also come from international aid tied to the reconstruction effort following the magnitude-7.4 earthquake that struck Chocó and neighboring departments on August 10.

As of September 7, the exchange rate stood at COP3,126, near the middle of Grupo Cibest’s forecast band, according to a market report carried by El Universal. Colombia’s August inflation figure, due the same day, was expected to remain above 6%, a reading that would keep pressure on the central bank to hold its policy rate steady even as the fiscal picture it revealed at the end of August continues to work through the market.

Medellín will host the Horasis Global Summit for the first time in November, becoming the third Latin American city — and the first in Colombia — to hold the international conference since it launched in Liverpool, United Kingdom, in 2016. The meeting runs November 10-13, 2026, at Universidad de Medellín, with the bulk of panels, plenaries and keynote sessions concentrated on November 11 and 12.

A press release issued August 12, 2026, by Horasis, the Swiss group that organizes the summit, describes Medellín as Latin America’s second host city, after São Paulo. Horasis’ own published event history lists two prior Brazilian editions before Medellín: Vitória in 2024 and São Paulo in October 2025, the 10th edition of the summit and the largest to date, with roughly 1,000 speakers from 50 countries. Medellín’s edition, the 11th Global Summit, is the first held in a Spanish-speaking country in Latin America.

Organizers expect more than 700 international speakers from 40 countries across five continents, plus a comparable number of Colombian participants. Sessions will run in English, the standard format for Horasis meetings worldwide, and will cover economics, artificial intelligence, health, education, sustainability, technology, investment and international cooperation under this year’s theme, “Building Tomorrow.”

José Manuel Restrepo, who was sworn in as Colombia’s vice president on August 7, 2026, alongside President Abelardo de la Espriella, according to El Tiempo, is listed as guest of honor. Restrepo previously served as Colombia’s minister of commerce, industry and tourism and later as finance minister under former President Iván Duque, and has served as rector of three Colombian higher-education institutions — CESA business school, Universidad del Rosario and Universidad EIA — according to Noticias RCN. He is scheduled to speak at the summit’s grand opening alongside Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez and Horasis chairman Frank-Jürgen Richter.

Richter, who founded Horasis after serving as a director of the World Economic Forum, said the choice of Medellín reflects the city’s transformation. “Holding the Horasis Global Meeting in Medellín represents much more than choosing a venue; it means recognizing a city that has shown that transformation is possible when leadership, innovation, academia and cooperation converge,” Richter said. “Medellín will inspire the world, and at the same time, the world will find in Medellín a space to build shared solutions for the future.”

Dr. Frank-Jürgen Richter is the founder and chairman of Horasis – The Global Visions Community.

Ana María Pineda de Béglé, Horasis’ director for Latin America, is leading the event’s organization. “It’s a unique opportunity for Medellín, Antioquia and Colombia to meet with opinion leaders from around the world, exchange perspectives with them, and form alliances that could extend across Latin America and other continents,” she said.

The summit carries the backing of the Alcaldía de Medellín (Medellín Mayor’s Office), the Cuerpo Consular de Medellín (Medellín Consular Corps), Comfama, the Greater Medellín Convention & Visitors Bureau, ACI Medellín, Fenalco Antioquia, Acopi Antioquia, Corporación Fenalco Solidario, ProColombia, Metro de Medellín and the city’s public and private universities, according to organizers. Horasis has also opened four sponsorship categories for companies and institutions seeking to participate as strategic partners.

The program lists more than a dozen confirmed co-chairs, including Bo Inge Andersson of Ivanhoe IV, Claude Béglé of Symbioswiss, Carlos Creus Moreira of WISeKey, Martín Burt of Fundación Paraguaya and former Zimbabwean minister Sekai Holland. A session titled “Building Colombia’s Global Economic Role,” scheduled for November 11, lists confirmed panelists including Federico Hoyos of Fundación Los 8 Valores, Loren Moss, publisher of Finance Colombia, Daniel Umaña of DUE Capital, Alvaro Soto-Holguin of Neotropico and Judith Vergara of Universidad EAFIT.

A separate session, “Building Medellín’s Innovation Economy,” chaired by Ruta N director Santiago Henao, is set to examine what has made the city’s innovation-district model — anchored by Ruta N since 2009 — distinctive, and what the city still needs in talent, capital or regulation to compete for high-growth companies.

Richter, in the press release, said he hopes the Medellín meeting becomes more than a one-time event. “Through Horasis, the success of Medellín’s social and economic transformation will spread even further, as entrepreneurs and academics from around the world come to share their ideas and solutions to put into practice here,” Richter said. “And hopefully Colombia will become the permanent home of Horasis’ global conference.”

Headline image: Delegates at a previous Horasis Global Summit. (Photo courtesy Horasis)

The monitor is built to anticipate Colombia’s official inflation reading before the National Administrative Department of Statistics, or DANE, publishes it. Grupo Cibest’s analytics team blends daily purchasing data from Servinformación, a company that tracks sales activity in neighborhood stores and small grocery outlets, with wholesale price information collected through DANE’s Sistema de Información de Precios y Abastecimiento del Sector Agropecuario (Agricultural Sector Price and Supply Information System), known by its acronym SIPSA. The report is signed by Laura Clavijo, Grupo Cibest’s chief economist and head of research; Arturo Yesid Gonzalez, quantitative and analytics manager; and Sebastian Ospina, data controller.

Perishable food prices drove Colombia’s food inflation in August 2026, rising 9.32% year over year versus 4.57% for processed food. (Chart: DANE, SIPSA, Servinformación; estimates by Grupo Cibest)

Perishable food prices rose 0.92% for the month and 9.32% year over year, more than double the pace of processed foods. (Chart: Finance Colombia, based on Grupo Cibest data)

Perishable food prices, the more volatile half of Colombia’s food basket, swung from a 0.83% monthly decline in July to a 0.92% increase in August, pushing their annual rate to 9.32%, Grupo Cibest said in the report. Processed food prices, packaged and industrially prepared goods that are less exposed to weather and harvest cycles, rose a comparatively modest 0.12% for the month, which Grupo Cibest said was two basis points above July’s reading, implying a July increase of roughly 0.10%; the annual rate for processed food stood at 4.57%.

Perishable food prices swung from a 0.83% monthly decline in July to a 0.92% increase in August 2026. (Chart: DANE, SIPSA, Servinformación; estimates by Grupo Cibest)

Perishable food prices reversed course within a single month. (Chart: Finance Colombia, based on Grupo Cibest data)

Grupo Cibest attributed the swing in perishables to “a combination of adverse factors,” naming wildfires in the department of Tolima, the advance of El Niño, and damage from the earthquake that struck Valle del Cauca and Armenia, in Quindío department. On August 10, a magnitude-7.4 earthquake centered near San José del Palmar, in Chocó department, struck a wide swath of western Colombia. As of August 24, Colombia’s disaster relief agency, the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (National Unit for Disaster Risk Management), had confirmed 331 deaths and 240 people still missing, with damage reported across 16 departments and 494 municipalities, including Valle del Cauca, Chocó, Quindío, Risaralda and Caldas, according to newspaper Vanguardia.

At around the same time, a wildfire season in Tolima burned more than 20,000 hectares of vegetation across 13 municipalities during August, according to reporting by El Tiempo. Colombia’s meteorological institute, IDEAM, has confirmed that El Niño arrived roughly three months earlier than initially projected and is on track to reach one of the strongest intensities recorded since 1950 by the fourth quarter of 2026.

Nearly every item in the fruits and vegetables segment got more expensive in August. Potatoes led the group with an 8.5% monthly jump, and prices for vegetables and legumes climbed 7.1%. Oranges were up 6.0%, rounding out the largest gains Grupo Cibest recorded for the category.

Potatoes, vegetables and legumes, and oranges led monthly produce price gains in Colombia in August 2026. (Chart: DANE, SIPSA, Servinformación; estimates by Grupo Cibest)

Potatoes led monthly gains in the fruits and vegetables segment. (Chart: Finance Colombia, based on Grupo Cibest data)

The picture was less uniform for animal protein. Processed meats climbed 1.15% for the month, the largest gain in that group, while beef added 0.4%. Pork moved the opposite direction, down 0.7%, and poultry slipped 0.3%. Grupo Cibest did not explain what is driving pork and poultry lower while beef and processed meats rise.

Protein prices were mixed in August 2026, with processed meats, beef, poultry and pork posting divergent monthly changes. (Chart: DANE, SIPSA, Servinformación; estimates by Grupo Cibest)

Processed meats and beef rose in August while pork and poultry prices fell. (Chart: Finance Colombia, based on Grupo Cibest data)

The estimate marks a sharp reversal from Colombia’s most recent official reading. DANE reported that consumer prices for food and non-alcoholic beverages fell 0.13% in July, a below-average reading in a month when the country’s overall annual inflation rate eased to 6.03% from 6.14% in June. If Grupo Cibest’s August estimate holds once DANE publishes its own figure, food would go from subtracting from monthly inflation to adding to it within a single month.

Grupo Cibest estimates food prices rose 0.31% in August 2026, reversing DANE’s official -0.13% reading for July. (Chart: DANE; estimates by Grupo Cibest)

Colombia’s food consumer price index went from an official monthly decline in July to an estimated increase in August. (Chart: Finance Colombia, based on DANE and Grupo Cibest data)

Other economists are also revising their outlooks upward because of the earthquake. Citing the risk of supply restrictions, higher demand for emergency relief goods, and damage to transportation infrastructure, Banco de Bogotá‘s economic research team projected monthly inflation of 0.2% in August and 0.3% in September, with the annual rate closing 2026 at 6.8%, according to reporting by Semana. Oxford Economics offered a more measured view, noting that the Colombian peso’s appreciation of nearly 15% during 2026 has been helping offset both El Niño and the earthquake’s impact on food costs, and it expects overall inflation to hold near 6% through year-end.

Beef and beef products carry the single heaviest weight of any food category in Colombia’s consumer price index, at 1.9%, followed by poultry meat at 1.2%, milk at 1.0% and rice at 0.9%, according to the weighting Grupo Cibest published alongside its report. That concentration means price swings in cattle and poultry markets carry an outsized effect on the overall food inflation reading compared with lower-weighted items such as coffee or sugar, even when those categories move by a larger percentage.

Perishable and processed food categories carry different weights in Colombia’s consumer price index, shaping how segment-level swings feed into the headline number. (Chart: DANE)

Beef carries nearly double the CPI weight of the next-largest food category. (Chart: Finance Colombia, based on DANE and Servinformación data prepared by Grupo Cibest)

DANE is expected to publish its official August consumer price index reading in the coming weeks, providing the first confirmation of whether food prices accelerated at the pace Grupo Cibest is projecting. The reading will also feed into deliberations at Banco de la República, Colombia’s central bank, which has been working to bring annual inflation back toward its 3% target from the 6.03% recorded in July.

The magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck on August 10, centered near San José del Palmar, in Chocó, killing at least 111 people on its first day, according to Finance Colombia’s coverage of the disaster, which also drew $1.3 billion USD in international pledges in the weeks that followed, Finance Colombia reported at the time. Colombia’s disaster-management agency, UNGRD, put the toll at 331 deaths, 111 people still missing and 36,326 homes completely destroyed as of a September 7 update — the same day as the Chocó summit — according to Semana.

Officials are calling the new initiative Colombia’s own “Plan Marshall,” a reference to the US-funded program that rebuilt Western Europe after World War II. The goal, De La Espriella’s government said, is not simply to repair what the earthquake destroyed, but to use the reconstruction to close Chocó’s longstanding economic gaps and draw new investment to one of the country’s poorest departments.

“I don’t want 100 small, scattered initiatives, each going its own way, with every ministry announcing its own program,” De La Espriella told the assembled executives, according to Valora Analitik. “We are going to do proper planning, set clear priorities, secure the resources we need and, as a government, I am committing to stay on top of execution so that things actually happen.”

Among the projects announced is the Malecón Gastronómico de Quibdó (Quibdó Gastronomic Waterfront), a new promenade along the Atrato River in the departmental capital meant to revive tourism and commerce there. Chocó Governor Nubia Córdoba said financing for the project is guaranteed through contributions from the business sector, according to El Colombiano. A separate $1 trillion COP infrastructure and connectivity package will fund five road projects to improve Chocó’s links to the rest of the country, split evenly between Colombia’s works-for-taxes program and direct private investment, according to Valora Analitik.

The strategy contemplates new commercialization opportunities for Chocó producers, through direct-purchase mechanisms that will connect local production with large business chains. (Photo courtesy Presidencia de la República)

A $5 billion COP seed-capital fund, channeled through iNNpulsa Colombia with contributions from Colombina (BVC: COLOMBINA), Bancolombia, the banking arm of Grupo Cibest (NYSE: CIB; BVC: CIBEST), and Tecnoglass (NASDAQ: TGLS), is intended to benefit roughly 1,000 entrepreneurs affected by the earthquake, with about $5 million COP going to each business, Commerce Minister Gómez Amín said, according to El Colombiano.

The Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo (Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism), known in Colombia as MinCIT, is leading several of the measures aimed at accelerating the region’s economic recovery. Nuquí and Bahía Solano, two Pacific coast municipalities in the earthquake-affected zone, were selected for a tourism-development push under what officials are calling a “Pueblos Milagro” strategy, backed by Fontur — the Fondo Nacional de Turismo (National Tourism Fund) — and the Fundación Santo Domingo.

Tourism is one of the strategic sectors of the agenda for Chocó, with the strengthening of tourist destinations such as Nuquí and Bahía Solano, selected among the municipalities in the affected zones that will be supported through Fontur. (Photo courtesy Presidencia de la República)

Companies including Olímpica, Grupo Nutresa (BVC: NUTRESA) and Colombina pledged to buy directly from Chocó producers, aiming to connect them with larger markets, the government said. Separately, officials said they will promote sales of biche, a traditional Pacific-coast spirit made by Chocó producers, through the Central Mayorista de Antioquia wholesale market in Itagüí, near Medellín.

The package also includes financial-inclusion measures, 100 scholarships for young Chocoanos — 50 of them pledged directly by Grupo Nutresa, according to Valora Analitik — solar-power generation for Pacific communities, a special regime meant to formalize small-scale mining, and a special tax and legal regime the government says is designed to attract private investment to the department. Officials also said they will study the feasibility of an interoceanic canal or a rail corridor linking the Urabá region with a deep-water port on Chocó’s Pacific coast.

De La Espriella framed the plan as a long-term commitment rather than a one-time relief effort.

“Chocó was not born to be poor. We are not simply going to rebuild what was lost — we are going to connect the department, attract investment, generate jobs and open opportunities. Government and business are united so that this time, promises become facts.”

— President Abelardo De La Espriella

Commerce, Industry and Tourism Minister Mauricio Gómez Amín said the government wants the reconstruction to leave a lasting economic footprint: “We have a historic opportunity to turn reconstruction into development. The challenge now is to translate these commitments into investment, jobs, new markets and concrete results for the people of Chocó.”

According to Valora Analitik, the business leaders who met with De La Espriella included Alejandro Santo Domingo of Valorem; brothers Jaime and Gabriel Gilinski of Grupo Gilinski; a representative of the Organización Ardila Lülle; David Vélez, founder of Nubank‘s parent, Nu Holdings (NYSE: NU); Bancolombia chief executive Juan Carlos Mora; Fuad Char of Olímpica; Colombina’s César Caicedo; Tecnoglass’s Christian Daes; and Miguel Cortés Kotal of Grupo Bolívar (BVC: GRUBOLIVAR).

Headline photo:Commerce, Industry and Tourism Minister Mauricio Gómez Amín speaks on the Chocó reconstruction plan.

Bogotá’s 32nd Court for the Execution of Sentences and Security Measures (Juzgado 32 de Ejecución de Penas y Medidas de Seguridad de Bogotá) ruled that Cepeda, along with Holmer Pérez Balmaceda of the Catatumbo Farmers’ Association (Ascamcat) and Clímaco Carmelo Landazuri Preciado of the Corporación Étnica Ambiental del Pacífico Sostenible (Capacs), had not shown a current violation of their rights or irreparable harm attributable to MinTIC or Inravisión. The court found the stations had not been shut down and their frequencies had continued operating.

“Inravisión has not issued any administrative act or directive aimed at suppressing, closing or eliminating the Peace Radio Stations, canceling their frequencies or permanently ending their operation.”

— Bogotá’s 32nd Court for the Execution of Sentences and Security Measures

The dispute traces to August 17, 2026, when Inravisión — the name the public broadcasting system readopted earlier this year after two decades as RTVC — instructed the directors of the 20 stations by WhatsApp message to halt their regular programming, according to reporting by El Armadillo. The order also reached 11 decentralized stations in the Radio Nacional de Colombia network, covering more than 70 frequencies in total. Since then, the affected signals have carried only music from Bogotá in place of locally produced news, culture and community programming. One of the 20, in Ituango, Antioquia, was among the first two Peace Radio Stations to go on air, in 2019, alongside a sister station in Chaparral, Tolima, and is the only one of the network’s stations in Antioquia department, according to Las2orillas.

Cepeda, who lost the presidency to Abelardo de la Espriella in the June 21 runoff, announced on August 21 that he would sue, writing on X that the suspension “disregards that these stations were created under Section 6.5 of the Final Peace Agreement and the duty of state authorities to comply in good faith with what was agreed,” according to El País (Cali). The Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (FLIP), the Misión de Observación Electoral and the Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias (AMARC) all publicly rejected the suspension, and separately argued it affected more than 463,000 listeners, mostly in rural, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities.

The Peace Radio Stations were created under the 2016 accord between the Colombian government and the demobilized FARC guerrilla group to produce content on peacebuilding and the accord’s implementation in municipalities hit hardest by the armed conflict; roughly 90 percent of their programming has consisted of locally produced content rather than national feeds, according to Inravisión staff cited by Infobae Colombia. The network had previously been cited as the one commitment of the 2016 accord to reach full implementation.

The suspension followed the August 7 inauguration of de la Espriella and the August 12 appointment of Ángela María Mora as Inravisión’s new manager. On August 16, MinTIC issued a statement declaring the end of what it called “the propaganda apparatus in Colombia’s Public Media System,” announcing an “immediate action plan” with Minister Alexandra Falla to overhaul programming, review contracting and eliminate the news and opinion slots across the system’s radio and television offerings, according to Semana. Mora and Falla said the review covers more than 1,051 contracts worth over $100 billion COP signed in 2026, including roughly $7,255 million COP in advertising, planning and digital-content services under separate scrutiny, according to Las2orillas. Findings are set to go to Colombia’s Inspector General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Nación) and Comptroller General’s Office (Contraloría General de la República). The former Inravisión manager, Hollman Morris, had faced a Procuraduría disciplinary investigation opened in June over allegations that the outlet was used to favor the previous Petro government’s political agenda. Senator Enrique Gómez, of the Salvación Nacional movement that backed de la Espriella’s campaign, said on August 21 that the stations were “the official megaphones of the FARC for indoctrinating regions” and a “nest of propaganda,” a characterization FLIP rejected, warning that stigmatizing the stations’ journalists could increase their risk of attack, per Las2orillas.

In its ruling, the court also rejected the censorship claim, finding the programming change applied uniformly across all 20 stations without singling out particular content, programs or people, and that the plaintiffs had not specified what information had gone unreported or what concrete impact the centralization had caused. On the stations’ role under the peace accord, the court acknowledged they serve as “an instrument intended for pedagogy and reconciliation in territories affected by the conflict” but found the shutdown did not rise to an actual, current violation of the right to peace, since the infrastructure, frequencies and underlying contracts had all remained in force. The government has described the change as a temporary programming scheme adopted while a review and reorganization of the schedule is carried out, rather than a final decision to end the service.

Although it denied the tutela, the court urged Inravisión — without making it binding — to define and publish a timetable for reactivating the stations’ local news programming. Cepeda has said he will appeal the ruling to a higher court, according to Cablenoticias. Colombia’s Congress has already taken up the underlying dispute: Representative Alejandro Toro, of the opposition Pacto Histórico, filed a control-hearing request, joined by 18 other representatives, to question Falla and Mora over the decision.

Headline photo: Illuminated signage on the Inravisión — Sistema de Medios Públicos headquarters in Bogotá.

Colombia’s government told its Pacific Alliance partners this week that it will send Congress the bloc’s free-trade agreement with Singapore, a step meant to bring Bogotá into line with Chile and Peru, where the pact has been in force since May 2025.

The pledge came at the first meeting of the Alliance’s High-Level Group hosted by Mexico since it took over the bloc’s rotating presidency from Colombia earlier this year. The Grupo de Alto Nivel (High-Level Group, or GAN) — the vice ministers of foreign trade and foreign relations from Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru — met August 20 and 21, 2026, in Mexico City, in a session that photos released by the Alliance place inside Mexico’s Secretaría de Economía (Ministry of Economy).

Colombia’s vice minister of foreign trade, Sandra Carvajal Sáenz, told her counterparts that President Abelardo de la Espriella’s government would submit the Pacific Alliance-Singapore agreement to Congress for the legislative and Constitutional Court review that Colombian treaties require before they can take effect. Singapore, Chile and Peru completed those procedures and put the deal into force on May 3, 2025, three years after it was signed at a Pacific Alliance presidential summit in Colombia; Mexico and Colombia are the two Alliance members that have yet to ratify it.

The High-Level Group’s agenda covered four areas. On regional value chains and regulatory cooperation, the vice ministers looked for ways to integrate production across the four countries and cut the regulatory barriers that keep exporters from adding value before selling into outside markets. On public-private coordination, they discussed concrete steps to link the bloc’s technical working groups with governments and with the private-sector Consejo Empresarial de la Alianza del Pacífico (Pacific Alliance Business Council, or CEAP). On small and medium-sized enterprises, the goal is turning those businesses into a bigger driver of the bloc’s trade and growth. And on trade promotion, the vice ministers discussed how the four countries’ promotion agencies affect trade, investment and tourism, and agreed those agencies need to be a governmental priority. Carvajal told her counterparts Colombia was “fully willing to work hard, constructively and decisively with our Pacific Alliance partners to actively contribute to this integration mechanism having an increasingly tangible impact on our economies and, above all, on generating jobs and opportunities for our citizens.”

The vice ministers’ meeting followed a forum the CEAP held on attracting foreign investment to the bloc’s four economies. Speaking on behalf of Commerce, Industry and Tourism Minister Mauricio Gómez Amín, Carvajal said legal and regulatory stability — along with tools such as free-trade zones and trade-facilitation mechanisms — are priorities for the ministry. Gómez Amín made the same point in an August 10 statement from the ministry announcing his appointment: “Colombia needs clear rules, legal certainty and a government that sees business as an ally, not an adversary,” he said. “We are working to unblock projects and bring domestic and foreign capital into infrastructure, logistics, energy, connectivity, agribusiness, tourism and exportable services.”

Carvajal is one of two vice ministers Gómez Amín swore in on August 14, 2026, alongside Manuel Alejandro Naranjo Giraldo as vice minister of business development, El Heraldo reported. She joined the ministry after 17 years at ProColombia and, most recently, as the Caribbean regional manager for the exporters’ association Analdex. Gómez Amín, a Barranquilla lawyer and former senator, took over the ministry after de la Espriella’s government was sworn in this year, El Tiempo reported.

Mexico assumed the Pacific Alliance’s rotating presidency from Colombia on January 30, 2026, after Colombia closed out its own term with the signing of the Bogotá Act. The bloc, created in 2012 by the presidents of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru to pursue free movement of goods, services, capital and people among its members, is also working through Costa Rica’s bid to join, a process that began when Alliance ministers accepted San José’s candidacy in December 2024, under Chile’s presidency, and has continued through working-group sessions on framework-agreement compliance and trade-protocol negotiations since.

Carvajal used the Mexico City trip to also hold separate bilateral meetings with counterparts from Costa Rica, Mexico, Chile and Peru, the ministry said.

Headline photo: Vice ministers of foreign trade and foreign relations from Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru meet as the Pacific Alliance’s High-Level Group at Mexico’s Secretaría de Economía in Mexico City, August 21, 2026. (Photo courtesy Pacific Alliance)

The recording is now the subject of a preliminary criminal inquiry by the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) and a separate disciplinary inquiry by the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office), both opened in June against Rueda, former Defense Minister Iván Velásquez, former National Intelligence Director Jorge Lemus and former Counterintelligence Chief Ricardo Rey Rosanía. Rueda has said the meeting was part of an exploratory phase, not a formal negotiation, and that the freeze-tag comment was a metaphor. The recordings, the numbers and the officials’ own public statements are on record; what follows is drawn from them.

Pérez, whose organization also goes by the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia and answers to top commander Jobanis de Jesús Ávila, alias “Chiquito Malo,” opened the meeting by citing a unilateral ceasefire the Clan del Golfo had declared on August 7, 2022 — Petro’s inauguration day — and asked the government for a reciprocal gesture: the withdrawal of special infiltration units and undercover operations from the group’s territory. “If the organization says there’s been a ceasefire since August 7, then there should also be a gesture from the government, withdrawing the special operations and infiltration units in the area,” Pérez said, according to the recording. “We’re working on that,” Rueda replied.

“There are things that don’t get said outright, because nobody wants to show they’re conceding. Everyone wants to say, ‘I’m strong.’ We know you, we recognize you. Calm down. Look, in another region — what did we achieve? You control up to here. Let’s play frozen. So all three of us stay frozen. Now, if someone decides to move, that’s when the trouble starts.”

— Danilo Rueda, then Colombia’s high commissioner for peace, in a recorded September 2022 meeting with a Clan del Golfo representative

Rueda then went further, according to the recording, offering “two messages: one, a halt to bombardments; two, a decision to clean house in police intelligence.” He tied the bombing halt directly to Velásquez, saying: “We knew there were bombing operations under way. I found out, and we spoke with the minister, and orders were given, for your group and others.” Velásquez’s public position at the time was narrower — that bombing was restricted only where minors might be present. Ministry of Defense data cited by Noticias Caracol shows no aerial bombardments against the Clan del Golfo for roughly two years after the meeting; the first came in late 2024, followed by five more in 2025.

Five days after Petro’s inauguration, on August 12, 2022, the government retired 35 generals and colonels in the largest shake-up of Colombia’s military and police command in recent history. On the recording, Rueda cited that purge to Pérez as evidence of good faith, and went further: three colonels who had been assigned to strategic posts in intelligence, the judicial police directorate and anti-narcotics units — believed to be John Arbey Alzate Duque, Juan Miguel Thiriat Tovar and Zaid Eduardo Pabón Ortega, according to El Colombiano, all tied to the anti-Clan del Golfo operation Agamenón — were removed within about a week of their appointments. “Three were vetoed who had the mission of sabotaging everything,” Rueda said on the recording. “But information came in, and then they criticize the president… because there’s information I can’t share with you.”

Extradition came up last. Pérez asked for a “lifting of arrest warrants” and “extradition orders” as a condition of trust. “All of that gets done,” Rueda replied. Asked for de-escalation of operations in the group’s territory “so there’s trust,” Rueda said: “Yes… that’s possible.” Nearly four years later, in 2026, the government’s peace office formally asked Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo to lift arrest warrants against 29 Clan del Golfo members, including Ávila, the group’s top commander, who is wanted for extradition by US courts on drug-trafficking charges. Camargo declined, citing insufficient verification of the group’s compliance with the negotiations and Colombia’s international extradition obligations; the Supreme Court backed her decision, according to El Colombiano.

Gerson Arias, a researcher at the Fundación Ideas para la Paz (Ideas for Peace Foundation), told Noticias Caracol that the Clan del Golfo “expanded and grew stronger in the midst of these initial explorations,” pointing to “a premature ceasefire, the elimination of bombing operations, and the reduced effectiveness of military, police and judicial operations resulting from a weakening of the intelligence capabilities the Colombian state had built up over years.” Juanita Goebertus, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, drew a similar conclusion from her organization’s own field documentation, saying the combination of an absent security policy and “the perverse or unintended effects” of the total-peace strategy has been linked to armed groups gaining “greater territorial and population control.” By 2025 the Clan del Golfo operated in 23 of Colombia’s 32 departments through four blocs and 25 armed fronts, with trafficking cells reaching Spain, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela, El Colombiano reported; in Antioquia alone, the departmental government put the group’s growth at 60 percent.

The disclosure drew an immediate legal response. Representative Christian Garcés, of the opposition Centro Democrático party, filed a criminal complaint with the Fiscalía days after the recordings surfaced, naming Rueda, Velásquez and Rey Rosanía on charges including concierto para delinquir (conspiracy to commit crimes), revealing state secrets and misuse of privileged information. “If the government committed military decisions, intelligence operations or institutional benefits to favor the Clan del Golfo, Colombia would be facing the possible use of public power for the benefit of a criminal organization,” Garcés said, according to Infobae. Garcés also asked the House Accusations Committee to examine whether Petro himself knew of or directed any of the concessions. The Fiscalía’s own preliminary inquiry, opened in early July, was assigned to the unit of prosecutors who work before the Supreme Court and folded into other ongoing cases examining government favoritism toward armed groups, according to Semana.

A parallel thread involves the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (National Intelligence Directorate, DNI). Video and audio also obtained by Noticias Caracol show Jorge Lemus, then the DNI’s director, and Rey Rosanía, his counterintelligence chief, meeting on August 19, 2025, in Bogotá with Eduard Ferney Rincón, a former trafficker known as “Boyaco Sinaloa” who has said he paid $18 million USD to US authorities to avoid extradition, and a former staffer for the legislative office of Senator María José Pizarro. On the recording, Lemus asked Rincón to lean on congressional contacts to help pass a government bill on armed-group submission to justice, central to the total-peace strategy, and to help establish a direct line to Ávila, whom Lemus said had been avoiding the agency. Lemus has defended the meeting as lawful intelligence work conducted under Colombia’s Intelligence Law and has said the leak of the material endangered intelligence sources and methods.

Rueda, in an interview with Caracol Radio after the recordings surfaced, said the September 2022 meeting was part of a preliminary “exploratory phase,” not a formal negotiation, that only three such meetings took place, all with international witnesses present, and that no ceasefire was ever signed. “In that exploratory phase, there was never any decision by the president of the republic that meant military operations against the group would not continue,” he said. On the officer purge, he said he was never given names: “I was never given the names of police officers who had to be removed from the security forces for abuses or overreach.” Asked about “let’s play frozen,” he called it a metaphor: “To be able to talk, you need a space… but the conversation ends and the game continues. It’s like the cat chasing the mouse.” Velásquez, in a written statement, said his evaluation of senior officers began two weeks before he took office as defense minister and was “a rigorous procedure” based on documented sources, that Rueda “had no participation in or knowledge of that process,” and that bombing suspensions applied only where minors were at risk. “The statements made by Danilo Rueda implicate only him, and he is the one who will have to provide the corresponding explanations,” Velásquez said.

Rueda left the peace commissioner’s post in November 2023; Otty Patiño succeeded him and, with negotiating-team lead Álvaro Jiménez, pursued two rounds of dialogue with the Clan del Golfo in Doha, Qatar — an initial confidence-building agreement in September 2025, followed by a peace agreement signed December 5, 2025, that established temporary concentration zones for the group’s fighters. The first such zone, in Tierralta, Córdoba, was scheduled to receive an initial contingent the day after the audio broke.

Abelardo de la Espriella, who defeated Pacto Histórico Senator Iván Cepeda in the 2026 presidential election, was inaugurated August 7, 2026, in Cali — the first Colombian presidential inauguration held outside Bogotá. “The option of dialogue is completely exhausted,” he declared in his inaugural address, according to Infobae. He announced a security offensive against armed groups, an incoming list of narco-terrorist organizations and Colombia’s entry into the US-backed Escudo de las Américas regional security initiative. Within his first weekend in office, according to Infobae, his government reported operations against Clan del Golfo and dissident FARC fighters in three departments. The Clan del Golfo remains listed by Washington as both a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

Federico Gutiérrez, the mayor of Medellín, used a July 27, 2026, press conference to lay out what he described as a coordinated criminal structure operating inside the administration of his predecessor, former mayor Daniel Quintero Calle, and Quintero’s brother, Miguel Quintero Calle. Gutiérrez told reporters the network reached into nearly every district agency and directed more than $1 trillion COP in public contracting, based on findings the Alcaldía de Medellín (Medellín Mayor’s Office) has compiled since he took office in January 2024.

Prosecutors classify the alleged network as a grupo de delincuencia organizada, or GDO (organized crime group) — a designation Colombian law uses for entrenched, racketeering-style criminal structures. Gutiérrez has given it a public nickname, “Hermanitos Q” (Little Q Brothers), and said the case file, which stood at 501 findings in an earlier accounting, now includes 666 findings after his administration added 165 new files. He said the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) has formally charged 55 people, a number he expects to reach 59, and that the combined prison exposure of the group’s members, based on current charges, exceeds 750 years, according to Infobae Colombia.

Gutiérrez said the network coordinated in part through a WhatsApp group its members called “Los Amiguitos” (The Little Friends), which he said the implicated parties created themselves in 2020 and which prosecutors are using as evidence. He also displayed images he said documented purchases tied to the alleged scheme: an armored Toyota pickup truck Miguel Quintero acquired about two months into the administration, valued at $260 million COP, a swimming pool built at Miguel Quintero’s farm in Copacabana, Antioquia, valued at $160 million COP, and firearms, according to Infobae Colombia. “This wasn’t a government with corruption cases,” Gutiérrez told reporters. “It was corruption governing from different desks. As they say, not even Ali Baba dared so much.”

Quintero governed Medellín from 2020 to 2023. He now serves as Colombia’s national Superintendent of Health, appointed by President Gustavo Petro by decree in April 2026 despite the pending charges, according to El Espectador. The appointment drew public opposition from health-sector groups, including Change.org petitions that together gathered more than 17,000 signatures asking Petro to reconsider, according to Infobae Colombia. Quintero rejected Gutiérrez’s allegations the same day, calling the mayor “ridiculous” in a post on X: “The only government plan Mayor Federico Gutiérrez had was trying to screw me over because I denounced what happened at Hidroituango, where $10 trillion COP is still missing that people are paying for through their utility bills,” he wrote, according to Infobae Colombia. Hidroituango, EPM’s long-delayed and cost-overrun hydroelectric project, predates Quintero’s administration.

The Área Metropolitana and Itagüí’s fire department

The most legally advanced case centers on six contracts signed between 2020 and 2023 between the Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá (Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley, AMVA) and the volunteer fire department of Itagüí, a Medellín-area municipality, worth $17,645 million COP, according to Infobae Colombia. Prosecutors allege the money, meant to fund emergency and pandemic response, was instead diverted through inflated invoices. Juan Alberto Cardona Henao, the fire department’s former accountant, has already been convicted and sentenced to 19 months in prison; he is cooperating with prosecutors under a plea agreement. Miguel Quintero, his business associate Sebastián Ortega, former AMVA official Álvaro Villada and Vanesa Álvarez Restrepo face a hearing where prosecutors intend to formally charge them with embezzlement and undue interest in contracting — exposure of up to 22 years and six months. That hearing has been postponed three times: originally set for August 3, pushed to August 25 and then to August 31 at the request of Villada’s defense, and voided a third time on August 31 itself, after the presiding judge agreed with Quintero Calle’s defense that the case had been improperly transferred to her courtroom following the original judge’s medical leave. It is now scheduled for September 10, according to Infobae Colombia.

Afinia and EPM’s Caribbean coast utility

Gutiérrez also renewed a long-running allegation, first raised by his administration in 2024, that the general manager’s post at Afinia — a Caribbean-coast electricity distributor in which EPM (Medellín’s public utility) holds a stake — was effectively sold during Quintero’s term for between $5 million and $8 million USD, in a deal allegedly brokered at a restaurant in Medellín and finalized in meetings in Cartagena and Barranquilla. Gutiérrez said the buyers installed Javier Lastra Fuscaldo as general manager in August 2021 with the help of Emilio Tapia, a contractor already convicted in Bogotá’s unrelated “carrusel de la contratación” (contracting carousel) case. Lastra has denied the allegations since they first surfaced. “Nobody made conditions on my appointment at Afinia, and my management was carried out based on good practices,” he told El Colombiano in 2024, adding that he had not been formally notified of any complaint against him. Gutiérrez said Afinia has lost $1.5 trillion COP a year since; separately, EPM’s own board told El Colombiano in 2024 that Afinia was losing $80 billion to $90 billion COP a month and needed at least $1.5 trillion COP in fresh investment that year.

Medellín Mayor Federico “FICO”Gutierrez speaking on “Los Hermanitos Q.” (courtesy Alcaldia de Medellín)

Metroparques, the Aguas water park, and Inder

Prosecutors have filed a formal accusation against four people over maintenance contracts for the Parque de las Aguas water park, administered through Metroparques, worth close to $22 billion COP: Álvaro Villada, Jorge Enrique Liévano (Metroparques’ former general manager), Viviana del Valle Velázquez (the entity’s former purchasing chief) and contractor Juan Alexander Pino Jaramillo, who together face up to 33 years in prison, while three additional contractors face up to 16 years. Prosecutors allege contracting companies tied to Pino — Comercializadora J. Pino SAS, Soluciones SAS and Estructuras Zafiro SAS — received more than $4.5 billion COP, and that cost overruns on chlorine, floodlights and biosafety supplies alone caused more than $2.79 billion COP in damage. Authorities have already applied asset forfeiture to a car and a motorcycle tied to the case.

A separate, related matter involves a 2020 contract awarded to Sian Eventos y Logística SAS, led by Mauricio Jaramillo Botero, to supply sports equipment for youth recreation programs run by Inder (Medellín’s sports and recreation institute) through Metroparques. Gutiérrez said the contract ran up $3,705 million COP in cost overruns on balls, medals, uniforms and trophies, stretched from a planned two-and-a-half months to 26 months, and that roughly $200 billion COP in Inder funding was separately redirected to Metroparques through similar inter-agency contracts. Jaramillo faces up to 16 years in prison; Diana Paola Toro (Inder’s director), Liévano and María Eugenia Domínguez (another former Metroparques general manager) face up to 33 years.

Buen Comienzo, the early-childhood program

Gutiérrez said prosecutors have charged three people over an early-childhood nutrition and education contract awarded in October 2020 to Corporación Colombia Avanza, after Quintero appointed Vivian Cecilia Puerta Guerra to run the Buen Comienzo program. According to the accusation Gutiérrez cited, the contract exceeded the corporation’s demonstrated operating capacity by 2,816%, producing patrimonial damage of roughly $1,423 million COP — money Gutiérrez said could have fed more than 3,300 additional children for a month. Colombia’s Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office) has already barred former education secretary Marta Alexandra Agudelo from holding public office for eight years; she and Henry Paulison Gómez Montoya, Colombia Avanza’s general manager, face up to 33 years and 16 years respectively in the criminal case. Gutiérrez said four children ages 0 to 5 died of acute malnutrition in Medellín in 2023, the last full year of Quintero’s term, and that no similar deaths have occurred since.

The Jardín Botánico and a witness’s murder

A 2020 contract to maintain the city’s parks and green spaces, previously handled by the nonprofit Jardín Botánico de Medellín, was instead awarded through a private process to Reforestadora El Líbano SAS for $5,250 million COP, according to Gutiérrez. The Procuraduría has already disqualified former infrastructure secretary Natalia Urrego Arias and Liévano from public office for nine years over the contract; Luz Eliana Henao Rodríguez, El Líbano’s legal representative, faces up to nine years in the separate criminal case. Gutiérrez also renewed a request to the Fiscalía and national police for protective measures for witnesses in the broader investigation, citing the March 14, 2024, killing of Asdrúbal Vélez Orozco, a businessman linked to El Líbano and the husband of Henao. Gutiérrez said other witnesses and their families are currently being threatened and pressured.

Aguas Vivas and the international money trail

The Aguas Vivas case, the one that directly names Quintero, is separate from the broader “Hermanitos Q” file but factors into Gutiérrez’s overall tally: 13 people, including Quintero, face embezzlement and abuse-of-authority allegations tied to $42 billion COP in alleged patrimonial damage and more than 4,000 pieces of evidence. Gutiérrez has also pointed to an alleged international money trail: a Medellín businessman’s Miami-based gold-trading company reported revenue of roughly $112 billion COP over the last three years of Quintero’s administration, then reported no income after Gutiérrez took office in 2024, according to Telemedellín.

US Ambassador to Colombia Hugo Guevara visited Gutiérrez’s office in Medellín on August 21 for talks focused on combating child sexual exploitation, during which Gutiérrez also raised the corruption findings, according to Telemedellín. Gutiérrez then traveled to the United States, meeting Homeland Security Investigations personnel in Phoenix on the same child-exploitation cooperation before flying to Miami, where he met for more than two hours on August 31 with the FBI‘s International Anti-Corruption Unit. He handed over a file the mayor’s office says contains roughly 13,000 pieces of documentary evidence, four plea-agreement cooperators and imputation proceedings against 55 former officials, according to El Espectador. Quintero dismissed the trip on X, telling Gutiérrez to “stop being a clown” and adding that if he had “a single ill-gotten peso” in the US, “the United States wouldn’t need your theatrics to find it,” according to Infobae Colombia.

Gutiérrez said several other officials facing charges in the broader case have gone on to hold national-government posts under Petro, including Fabio Andrés García (Medellín’s former secretary general, now in a leadership role at the Superintendencia Nacional de Salud), Sergio Andrés López (Medellín’s former planning director, now an advisor at the Ministerio de Salud (Health Ministry)), Natalia Andrea Jiménez (a former subsecretary of contracting execution, now a contractor at the Cancillería (Foreign Ministry)), César Augusto Chavarría (Metroparques’ former logistics chief, now at the DIAN tax authority) and Rubén Darío López (the infrastructure secretariat’s former technical director, now a contractor at Aerocivil, Colombia’s civil aviation authority).

Where the cases stand

Two threads of the investigation are moving on parallel, and separately contested, tracks. In the Aguas Vivas case, Judge 22 of the Medellín Criminal Circuit Court nullified the formal charges against Quintero and 12 co-defendants on July 14, 2026, ruling that prosecutors had not specified clearly enough how each defendant participated in the alleged scheme. The Fiscalía and the Alcaldía de Medellín, recognized in the case as a victim, are asking that same judge to reverse herself before the matter can move to the Tribunal Superior de Medellín (Medellín Superior Court) for a final ruling. Hearings on August 6 and August 20 each ran long before prosecutors and the city’s legal representative — who cited more than 4,000 pieces of evidence and 50 witness statements — could finish arguing that the nullity was wrongly decided; the defense is now set to respond at a hearing scheduled for September 14, 2026, after which the judge will rule, according to El Colombiano and Telemedellín. The nullity is a procedural setback for prosecutors, not an acquittal or a dismissal, and the case remains open.

In the AMVA-Itagüí firefighters case, Gutiérrez said the repeated delays have gone beyond ordinary scheduling friction. After the August 25 postponement, he called it “indignante” (outrageous) and asked prosecutors to seek the defendants’ arrest rather than wait out further delays, according to Infobae Colombia. After the August 31 hearing was voided over the reassignment dispute, Gutiérrez wrote on X: “There have been three postponements. They have dragged this process out so much that we have gone to the courts to investigate what is happening — this is no longer normal.” He added that his administration, recognized as a victim in the case, would join prosecutors in asking the court to order pretrial detention for the defendants when the hearing resumes on September 10, according to Infobae Colombia.