Three developments over a single week in June have braided together to expose how Colombia’s health-oversight apparatus has become an instrument in the final stretch of the presidential race. At the center of all three is Daniel Quintero, the former mayor of Medellín who took office as National Superintendent of Health — head of the Superintendencia Nacional de Salud (National Health Superintendence) — in May despite facing more than 40 criminal and disciplinary investigations of his own. Within days, the office he now runs has been pointed squarely at the opposition’s presidential candidate, and the maneuver has split the very coalition it was meant to help.

An appointment the left now concedes “backfired”

The first thread surfaced on June 9, when Carlos Carrillo — who had just resigned as director of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres, or UNGRD) — told Blu Radio that Quintero’s appointment had been “basically a shot in the foot for the campaign” of leftist candidate Iván Cepeda. Carrillo argued the decision — taken “a month before the elections” — cost Cepeda decisively in Antioquia, where, he said, “they beat us by almost 30 points.” Without that result, in his telling, “the winner of the elections is Iván Cepeda.” He said the Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) “owes the people of Antioquia an apology,” and called handing the Superintendence to “those presumably crooked gentlemen, with all the investigations they carry,” an “enormous strategic error.”

That an ally would say so out loud underscores how exposed the appointment always was. As Finance Colombia reported in May, Quintero became the fifth health superintendent of President Gustavo Petro’s administration while carrying more than 40 criminal and disciplinary complaints tied to his 2020–2023 tenure in Medellín. The watchdog group Transparencia por Colombia (Transparency for Colombia) called the designation “inappropriate,” and Carrillo himself was quoted at the time noting that the Pacto Histórico “has no reason to bear the political cost of his legal troubles.”

“The charged official who left Medellín in intensive care now wants to pose as an anti-corruption defender by doing political favors for Cepeda.” — Centro Democrático

The most serious of those cases is the “Aguas Vivas” scandal, in which prosecutors at the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) charged Quintero — alongside nine former officials and three private parties — with embezzlement (peculado), undue interest in public contracts, and malfeasance (prevaricato) over the reclassification of a 142,000-square-meter forest-reserve plot in Medellín’s El Poblado that allegedly inflated the land’s value. No conviction has been issued, and Quintero maintains his innocence. It is from this position — charged, awaiting trial, and his appointment under a nullity challenge admitted by the Consejo de Estado (Council of State) — that Quintero now wields one of the most powerful financial-oversight offices in the Colombian state, with authority over the EPS health insurers and the public funds that flow through them.

An election-eve probe aimed at the opposition candidate

The second thread arrived on June 15. That day, Cepeda announced a criminal complaint against his runoff rival, Abelardo de la Espriella, alleging the right-wing lawyer’s involvement in the “plundering of the health system” in the Caribbean region through the now-liquidated Salud Vida EPS. Within hours, Quintero announced that the Superintendence would “investigate the transfers made by these EPS to Joaquín Gutiérrez, his companies, and Abelardo de la Espriella,” framing it as a response to Cepeda’s allegations about “a group of EPS related to paramilitary leaders.”

Quintero put specific numbers on the claim. He described contracts “signed with health parafiscal resources for more than $18 billion COP” (about $4.5 million USD), set against what he called more than $160 billion COP (about $40 million USD) “diverted from Salud Vida EPS toward a front company in Panama.” He said the contract awarded to De la Espriella was not reported to the comptroller the Superintendence had designated at the time, citing the designated official’s statement that she “had no knowledge of the content and scope of the terms,” and asserted that records on the origin of those funds had been “extracted or eliminated” from the Superintendence’s databases in prior years. After reviewing more than 10,000 documents, Quintero said, the agency was forwarding copies to the Fiscalía, the Contraloría (Comptroller General’s Office), and the Procuraduría (Inspector General’s Office).

De la Espriella rejected the accusations outright, calling them a “smokescreen” driven by the proximity of the vote, insisting the contracts corresponded to “legitimate legal services” and that he would cooperate with the authorities. His campaign stressed — accurately — that opening an investigation “does not constitute a sanction” but a preliminary stage to gather information.

The timing did not escape the opposition. On June 16, the Centro Democrático (Democratic Center), the party of former president Álvaro Uribe that is backing De la Espriella, accused Quintero of weaponizing his office: “The charged official who left Medellín in intensive care now wants to pose as an anti-corruption defender by doing political favors for Cepeda,” the party said, pinning the system’s distress on the Petro government and citing “more than 2 million complaints, 313,000 tutelas [constitutional rights claims], medicine shortages, and a debt of more than $25 trillion COP owed to hospitals and clinics.”

The optics are conspicuous: an official who is himself charged, installed by the incumbent president weeks before the vote and whose own appointment is being litigated, has used the oversight powers of that appointment to open — and publicize — an investigation into the candidate running against the incumbent’s chosen heir, four days before the runoff.

A fight that spilled inside the left

The third thread shows the strategy turning inward. Also on June 15, Alianza Verde (Green Party) representative Catherine “Cathy” Juvinao criticized Cepeda’s decision to take the health fight to the courts, arguing that the way to win over independents and the center — the voters likely to decide June 21 — was “to recognize the mistakes of this government in health, withdraw the reform, and guarantee the negotiation of a new project,” not to move the programmatic debate “to the courts.”

Carrillo answered not by engaging the argument but by digging up Juvinao’s social-media posts from 2011 to 2013, when she was a fierce critic of the EPS and of Ley 100 (Law 100, the statute that created the current insurance-based system), and accusing her of having flipped: “She has made it sufficiently clear that between Iván and the EPS, she sides with the EPS… how power changes people.” The episode is telling on two counts. It places Carrillo — the same figure who days earlier had branded Quintero a crook and called his appointment a self-inflicted wound — in the position of defending the Cepeda camp’s health offensive against criticism from within his own ideological neighborhood.

Carlos Carrillo, director of the UNGRD under the later part of the Petro administration.

And it confirms that Juvinao’s misgivings are not the opposition’s talking points but a live anxiety inside the center-left: that judicializing the campaign in its final days may repel precisely the undecided voters both sides are chasing.

Why it matters

Taken together, the three developments trace a single arc. The appointment that Carrillo concedes already cost the left votes in Antioquia has now produced an official willing to deploy his office against the opposition candidate on the eve of the vote — and that deployment has, in turn, opened a rift between those on the left who see the health card as a winning attack and those who fear it alienates the middle.

For Quintero, the calculus carries real risk. The investigation he has launched is preliminary, and the underlying allegations against De la Espriella — which the candidate denies — remain to be tested by the Fiscalía and the courts, not by a Superintendence headed by a man awaiting his own trial. Should De la Espriella, a combative litigator who built his fortune defending the accused and who has never been shy about using the courts himself, prevail in the runoff he led after the first round, the man who turned a state oversight office into a campaign instrument days before the election would find himself uniquely exposed — still charged in Medellín, his appointment still contested, and now on record having targeted the incoming president. Quintero’s tenure was always expected to be temporary; a new head of state takes office on August 7 with the power to replace him. Whether the gambit damages De la Espriella or merely deepens Quintero’s own jeopardy is a question the June 21 runoff will begin to answer.

Headline image: Daniel Quintero and President Gustavo Petro during the swearing-in ceremony of the new health superintendent. Photo courtesy of the Presidency of Colombia.

As Colombia heads into its June 21, 2026 presidential runoff, some companies are writing a contractual escape hatch into their deals — a provision the construction trade group Camacol Antioquia calls the “Cláusula Cepeda,” or “Cepeda clause” — that would let them pause or unwind agreements if leftist candidate Iván Cepeda wins, according to Teleantioquia and a televised news report. The accounts come from business representatives describing market sentiment; the prevalence of the clauses has not been independently quantified.

According to Eduardo Loaiza Posada, manager of Camacol Antioquia, “we know that the implementation of the ‘Cepeda clause’ exists in the market.” He said the possibility of a Cepeda win “generates so much uncertainty that many businesspeople have considered that, in the event of his victory, they would unwind deals already agreed.” Loaiza Posada framed the issue as one of confidence: “When there is doubt, uncertainty follows — and uncertainty is legal insecurity,” he told Teleantioquia, adding that “legal insecurity makes investment frightened.”

The trade group says the clauses surfaced across several productive sectors — housing, construction, and the financing of hotels and logistics centers — and that some projects have been shelved outright. “Even companies that were planning to build a new institutional or corporate headquarters have told the builders: ‘Let’s get the contract ready, but if this candidate wins, we undo the deal,'” Loaiza Posada said, according to Teleantioquia. He added that the hesitation is not limited to domestic players, citing instances of international funds and hotel chains reconsidering whether to finance or lend their brand to projects.

In a separate televised report, a real estate agent confirmed that some home purchase-and-sale contracts now include a clause letting the buyer withdraw based on market expectations and on changes to government policy and housing subsidies. The agent said the provision is “very much named at the moment” and is meant to offer investors an additional guarantee against a continuation of the current government’s policies, allowing a party to exit “without any penalty.”

“When there is doubt, uncertainty follows — and uncertainty is legal insecurity.” — Eduardo Loaiza Posada, manager of Camacol Antioquia

The practice is not new, and it is not unique to Cepeda. The same reports note that a “Cláusula Petro” appeared during the 2018 and 2022 campaigns, when Gustavo Petro was a candidate, transferring political expectations onto investment decisions in the same way. Legal commentators have described these as conditional clauses that are valid under Colombian private law: as Portafolio and El Tiempo reported in 2022, a contract can lawfully be made contingent on a future event, including an election outcome, and undone if that event occurs. By that reading, the “Cepeda clause” is a recurring feature of Colombian electoral cycles — a form of risk management — rather than a novel maneuver.

It also lands in a housing market already under strain for reasons that predate the runoff. According to figures from Camacol cited in the broadcast report, more than 134,000 households abandoned plans to buy a home between 2022 and February 2026, a 130% increase in the social-interest (VIS) segment. The report attributed much of that to regulatory uncertainty and policy decisions such as cuts to housing subsidies, alongside higher costs and rising interest rates. Data from the portal Finca Raíz cited in the same report showed sale prices climbing above inflation, with increases of up to 13%, as fewer project launches tightened supply. Colombia builds a little over 100,000 homes a year, the report noted, while DANE figures suggest 230,000 to 250,000 new families form annually — a structural gap that the slowdown widens.

Cepeda’s campaign has not publicly responded to the clause, and his published platform is more measured than the business alarm implies. His roughly 118-page plan, built around the idea of an “economy for life,” does propose a larger role for the state, a stronger internal market, and an emphasis on the peasant, popular and solidarity economy. But as La Silla Vacía and El Colombiano have reported, the document is more moderate than several positions President Petro has defended: it does not call for eliminating the independence of the central bank, a constituent assembly, or forced investments, and the campaign has sought to present a more pragmatic version of the current government’s agenda.

The runoff offers voters two markedly different economic visions — Abelardo de la Espriella campaigning to shrink the state, cut taxes and lean on the private sector, and Cepeda proposing deeper state intervention and expanded social programs — which is what the contractual hedging ultimately reflects: uncertainty about which direction policy will take. Cepeda advanced to the second round after the May 31 first round, in which he took 40.9% of the vote to De la Espriella’s 43.7%. With days to go, the market is watching the result and the signals it will send for housing and investment policy.

The liquor company owned by Colombian presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella continues to lose money and has shut down its operation in the United States, according to an investigation by La Silla Vacía based on the company’s most recently published financial statements.

Dominio De la Espriella, the firm that produces and markets the candidate’s spirits brands, reported a net loss of $503 million COP (about $124,000 USD) for the year ended December 31, 2025, according to its published financial statements. With that result, the company has accumulated losses of roughly $3.88 billion COP (about $960,000 USD) since it was founded in late 2020, the same statements show. (USD figures throughout are approximate, converted at the 2025 average of about 4,050 COP per USD.)

Dominio De la Espriella produces Ron Defensor 12-year and 18-year rum and Vino Fratellone wine. Before De la Espriella’s entry into politics, it had become his most visible business project outside his law firm, La Silla Vacía reported. A bottle of the rum sells for between $265,000 and $351,000 COP and the Fratellone wine for $189,000 COP, according to prices listed by De la Espriella Style, the candidate’s merchandising company, as cited by La Silla Vacía.

The brand was formally launched in 2022 alongside vallenato singer Silvestre Dangond, who holds an 8% stake through the company Music Dreams, according to La Silla Vacía.

The US push was the company’s most ambitious bet. When Dominio De la Espriella launched, it set a target of more than $4 million USD in US sales, the outlet reported. According to the financial statements published for 2023 and 2024, the company recorded only $1,199 million COP in international sales — about $272,000 USD, or 7% of the target, La Silla Vacía reported. The 2025 statements report that “se cerró la operación” (“the operation was closed”) in that market.

The US chapter was brief. The financial statements show that in 2023, when the company entered the country, it received an injection of $1 million USD (then $4,332 million COP) from US investors, identified in the accounts only as “Dominio Estados Unidos,” money meant to fund production of 33,000 bottles, according to La Silla Vacía. A year later, the company reported that the deal had fallen through and that it now owed the $1 million back. La Silla Vacía reported that the recorded obligation fell from $1,891 million COP in 2023 to $799 million COP in 2024; the 2025 statements list a remaining “obligation for rescission of the US operation contract” of $722 million COP (about $178,000 USD).

With the US exit, revenue dropped sharply. La Silla Vacía reported a roughly 60% fall in operating income; the company’s statements show net operating revenue declining from $1,637 million COP in 2024 to $687 million COP in 2025. The 2025 statements report just $7 million COP (about $1,800 USD) in cash at banks, with the company’s resources concentrated in rum and wine inventory valued at $1,397 million COP and $1,403 million COP in receivables.

“Se cerró la operación” — “the operation was closed,” reads Dominio De la Espriella’s 2025 financial statement, describing the company’s exit from the US market (as reported by La Silla Vacía).

The statements also show how the business has been funded. Thirteen of the company’s 15 shareholders have contributed an additional $4,829 million COP (about $1.2 million USD) on top of the $500 million COP in founding capital to increase their stakes, but the shares have not been issued and the money remains recorded as a liability, according to La Silla Vacía. The candidate himself has been financing the operation, lending the company $1,695 million COP (about $420,000 USD) through 2025, the outlet reported.

A separate La Silla Vacía investigation into De la Espriella’s business holdings reported that 14 other companies hold stakes in the venture. According to that reporting, the 50% owner is Somos Inversiones, a Panama-based company whose papers list figureheads, and the structure also includes companies tied to relatives of Hugues Rodríguez — convicted for promoting paramilitary groups — and to oil businessman Serafino Iácono.

The US retail presence has also wound down. Liquor Dreams, the Instagram account that presented itself as Ron Defensor’s official ambassador in the United States, stopped posting about the brand, and a new management has been announced for the store in the Coral Gables area of Florida, La Silla Vacía reported. The venue had served as a place for De la Espriella to host Colombian politicians, among them former president Álvaro Uribe, according to the outlet.

The US departure follows the closure of De la Espriella’s Místico restaurant, also in Coral Gables, where he had likewise promoted his liquor brand. La Silla Vacía said it confirmed that Místico closed months ago and that a different restaurant now operates in its former location. Among Místico’s partners, the outlet reported, were Dangond and Héctor Amaris, known as “Oso Yogui.”

The reporting lands as De la Espriella heads into the June 21, 2026 presidential runoff against leftist senator Iván Cepeda. De la Espriella, an attorney campaigning on a hardline security platform, led the May 31 first round with 43.7% of the vote to Cepeda’s 40.9%, according to results reported by CNN and other international outlets.

Abelardo de la Espriella, the conservative outsider who led the first round of Colombia’s presidential election and now heads into a June 21 runoff against leftist senator Iván Cepeda, has put an unusual question on the table: could Colombia, for the first time, elect a president who is also a citizen of the United States?

De la Espriella holds three nationalities. He was born in Colombia — making him Colombian by birth — inherited Italian nationality through his maternal grandparents, and obtained US citizenship by naturalization in February 2023, according to La Silla Vacía. It is that third passport, not the mere fact of multiple nationalities, that has triggered a constitutional debate which could shadow the campaign to its final day.

More than thirty jurists, academics, and constitutionalists — among them, La Silla Vacía reported, former Council of State president Stella Conto Díaz, Álvaro Echeverri, Ramiro Bejarano, Leopoldo Múnera, and Rodrigo Uprimny — signed a statement warning that his US citizenship could amount to an “incompatibility” with the presidency. Their objection is specific. Colombian naturalization in the United States requires an oath in which new citizens declare they renounce “absolutely and entirely” all allegiance to any other state of which they have been subjects. There, the signatories argue, lies a tension between that oath and the duties a Colombian head of state must perform — a concern they tie to the Constitutional Court’s own references to “potential conflicts of national loyalty.”

“Constitutional disqualifications are not discovered. They are expressly established or, simply, they do not exist.” — Mauricio Gaona, constitutional lawyer

The debate turns on what the Constitution actually requires. Article 191 states that to be president a person must be Colombian by birth, a citizen in exercise, and over 30 years of age. As campaign legal adviser Germán Calderón España told La FM, those are the only three conditions, and none excludes a Colombian by birth who holds a second nationality. Disqualifications, he argued, must be expressly written into the Constitution or the law rather than inferred. Calderón also said the campaign was facing what he called a “tutelatón” — an estimated 30 tutela constitutional-rights petitions a day from allies of the Pacto Histórico, Cepeda, and President Gustavo Petro.

Constitutional lawyer Mauricio Gaona reached the same conclusion in a published legal opinion, reported by Infobae. Gaona wrote that dual nationality is legally valid, that holding simultaneous legal duties to more than one state is possible, and that US naturalization — including its allegiance oath — “does not create a constitutional disqualification to exercise the Presidency of the Republic of Colombia.” He grounded the analysis in the Constitution, Law 43 of 1993, US nationality law, and US Supreme Court rulings including Afroyim v. Rusk (1967), Kawakita v. United States (1952), and Vance v. Terrazas (1980), as well as the US State Department’s position that “U.S. law does not require a U.S. citizen to choose between U.S. citizenship and another nationality.”

Current Colombian President Gustavo Petro is also an Italian citizen.

Gaona pointed to Article 191’s silence as decisive: the text, he wrote, does not require exclusive nationality, the absence of foreign citizenship, prior renunciation of another nationality, or a certificate of exclusive loyalty. He acknowledged that some specific posts — those tied to national security, intelligence, or classified information — can carry dual-nationality restrictions, but said any such limit must be expressly established. “Constitutional disqualifications are not discovered,” he wrote. “They are expressly established or, simply, they do not exist.”

The campaign has pointed to a sitting precedent: Petro himself holds Italian nationality, which he acquired through family descent, has openly acknowledged, and has cited as letting him travel to the United States without a visa; the US Treasury’s sanctions listing on the Colombian president records an alternate Italian citizenship, and in September 2025 he publicly weighed renouncing it in protest over the war in Gaza. The comparison has limits, however, and they cut to the heart of the dispute: Petro’s Italian citizenship — like De la Espriella’s own Italian nationality, which no one contests — was acquired by descent, without an oath. The critics’ argument rests specifically on the renunciation oath sworn in US naturalization, a step neither Petro’s nor De la Espriella’s Italian status involved.

There is also a political irony the candidate’s opponents have seized on: De la Espriella has built much of his campaign on overtly nationalist imagery, including the Colombian flag and the national soccer team’s jersey — symbols a tribunal ordered him to remove from his campaign within 24 hours, La Silla Vacía reported. His wife drew attention shortly before the first round when she suggested the family might move to Italy if he lost, a remark she later softened.

For now, the candidacy stands. The Fifth Section of the Council of State rejected a lawsuit seeking to strike De la Espriella from the ballot over his triple nationality, finding that the registration was not subject to that form of judicial review, La Silla Vacía reported. Whether the broader incompatibility argument ever reaches a definitive ruling — and from which court — remains unresolved.

The stakes are concrete for a country whose largest trading and security partner is the United States. De la Espriella, who campaigns as an admirer of US President Donald Trump and whose running mate is former finance minister José Manuel Restrepo, would bring an openly Washington-friendly posture to the Casa de Nariño; Cepeda would broadly continue the foreign policy of the Petro government. Voters return to the polls on June 21. If De la Espriella wins, the question of a president who also answers, at least on paper, to a second flag will move from the seminar room to the presidential palace.

Colombians delivered a pointed rebuke to their political establishment on Sunday, May 31, sending two candidates from outside the country’s traditional parties into a June 21 presidential runoff. With nearly all polling stations reporting, conservative outsider Abelardo de la Espriella led the first round with 10,361,499 votes, or 43.74%, ahead of leftist senator Iván Cepeda, who took 9,688,361 votes, or 40.9%, according to the Registraduría Nacional. More than 23 million Colombians cast ballots, a turnout of roughly 56%.

The rest of the field trailed far behind. Paloma Valencia of the Centro Democrático — the party of former president Álvaro Uribe — finished third with about 6.9% and fewer than 1.7 million votes, a disappointment for a candidate once seen as a strong contender. Former Medellín mayor and Antioquia governor Sergio Fajardo took roughly 4.26%, just over a million votes, and former Bogotá mayor Claudia López drew less than 1%, around 225,000 votes. The remaining minor candidates together accounted for about 1%.

The outcome underscored fatigue with both of the poles that have defined Colombian politics for two decades. On the right, the movement known as Uribismo — built around Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010 — failed to resonate beyond its aging base. Uribe was convicted at first instance in 2025 on charges of witness tampering and procedural fraud and sentenced to house arrest, becoming the first former Colombian president to be criminally convicted, before a Bogotá appeals court overturned the verdict and absolved him in October 2025. His last hand-picked candidate, Iván Duque, left office in 2022 with approval ratings near 30%, and Valencia’s weak showing suggested the Uribista brand no longer commands a national majority.

“People are tired of the same old. They want a different direction — not more of Petro’s approach, and not more nostalgia for Uribe.” — Loren Moss, Finance Colombia

On the left, President Gustavo Petro’s flagship security policy, Paz Total, has drawn sharp criticism. The initiative, which Cepeda helped shape in Congress, sought to negotiate with armed groups, but rising homicides, the expansion of guerrilla factions such as the ELN and FARC dissidents, and the entrenchment of organized crime have undercut that promise.

The first-round map reflected the discontent. De la Espriella carried Antioquia, the historic heartland of Uribismo, with about 54%, along with the coffee region, while Cepeda won Bogotá — roughly 1.7 million votes to 1.5 million — as well as much of the Caribbean coast and the Pacific, where he exceeded 75% in Chocó. Notably, Caquetá, sparsely populated and scarred by guerrilla violence, broke for De la Espriella, a result that reads as a demand for a tougher security posture rather than continued negotiation.

De la Espriella, who has never held elected office, built his profile as a prominent defense attorney whose clients included Alex Saab, the Colombian businessman accused of acting as a financial front man for Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. He campaigns as an admirer of US President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, promising a hard line on crime, a smaller state, and renewed private investment. Cepeda, a veteran human rights advocate and senator for the Pacto Histórico, is Petro’s chosen successor; his running mate is Aída Quilcué, a Nasa indigenous leader and senator from Cauca.

The runoff is already reshaping alliances. Valencia and the Uribe camp moved quickly to endorse De la Espriella, consolidating the right behind him, while the center — Fajardo and López — has yet to commit and may decline to back either finalist. Cepeda’s coalition is expected to mount large-scale voter mobilizations. Whoever prevails will govern without a legislative majority: neither finalist controls a bloc in Congress, which is therefore likely to remain a strong check on executive power, as it has been for much of Petro’s term.

For business and investors, the contrast is stark. Major gremios such as the ANDI and Fenalco do not formally endorse candidates, but a De la Espriella government would be expected to favor private enterprise, restart the oil and gas licensing that Petro suspended — a priority for state-controlled Ecopetrol and for the foreign exchange Colombia draws from crude — and keep a market-friendly stance toward the mining, technology, and business-process outsourcing sectors. A Cepeda administration would likely continue Petro’s freeze on new hydrocarbon exploration and his push toward a more state-run health system. That overhaul is now led by Health Superintendent Daniel Quintero, the former mayor of Medellín, who himself faces more than 40 criminal and disciplinary investigations stemming from his time in office. On foreign policy, De la Espriella would probably restore warmer relations with Washington, while Cepeda would maintain closer ties with the region’s left.

Security will shadow both the campaign and the country’s economic recovery, since a deteriorating safety picture in parts of Colombia threatens tourism and investment alike. The first round passed without major electoral violence, and even the ELN pledged a pause in hostilities during voting. Colombians return to the polls on June 21.