Three days after the ceremony, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake hit western Colombia and rewrote the agenda entirely. The inheritance came first, though, and it is the reason he is president at all.

The numbers that elected him

The Centro de Paz y Seguridad (Center for Peace and Security) at Universidad Externado counted 40,663 homicides in Colombia between August 2022 and August 2025 — Gustavo Petro’s first three years in office — an annual average of 13,554. Over the equivalent stretch under Iván Duque, the figure was 37,795, averaging 12,598 a year, and under Juan Manuel Santos it was 36,646, averaging 12,215. El Tiempo published the center’s findings in December 2025.

Under Paz Total (Total Peace), the policy that opened simultaneous negotiations with practically every armed and criminal structure in the country, those structures grew. Infobae reported a military intelligence count showing membership rising from 15,120 in December 2022 to 25,278 by July 2025, an increase of 10,158, concentrated in the Nariño Pacific, Catatumbo, Cauca, Bajo Cauca Antioqueño and Arauca — zones, in Infobae’s words, of weak institutional presence. The Fundación Ideas para la Paz (Ideas for Peace Foundation), working from the same count, puts 48 percent of that total under arms and the remaining 52 percent in support networks. By July 2026 the figure had reached 28,802, a 90 percent increase across the Petro years, according to El Colombiano. That is not an interpretation of the policy; it is the count.

The sharpest version of that failure, for a business, is extortion. Ministry of Defense data reviewed by La FM shows 2,914 extortion complaints filed in the first three months of 2026, the highest quarterly figure in 10 years. Gen. William Rincón, director of the National Police, told La FM that more complaints do not automatically mean more crimes, and put the year-over-year increase at 13.1 percent for the same period. La FM identifies merchants, shopkeepers, cattlemen and small business owners as the standing victims of that economy.

A mandate Medellín paid for

De la Espriella won the June 21, 2026, runoff with 12,959,542 votes against 12,708,712 for Iván Cepeda — a margin of 250,830 votes, which El Tiempo put at 0.96 percentage points of all ballots cast, blank and null included, in the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil (National Civil Registry) preliminary count. MercoPress called it the narrowest margin in a Colombian runoff in 32 years. In the same El Tiempo breakdown, Medellín gave him 819,285 votes against 421,839 for Cepeda — a net margin of about 397,000, larger than the entire national margin, out of a single metropolitan area. Bogotá went the other way, 2,235,514 to 1,933,243. World Population Review puts Bogotá at roughly 7.9 million against 2.5 million for Medellín, so the smaller city delivered the decisive block. Take Medellín out of the arithmetic and Abelardo de la Espriella is not the president of Colombia.

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That is arithmetic, not commentary, and Medellín knows it. The city will expect a return, and an itemized one: the international airport expansion, highway concessions, hard security and continued support for the business climate that made it a destination for nearshoring and technology investment. That is the first political claim on the new government, and it arrives ahead of everything else in the program.

The inauguration was supposed to happen somewhere else. De la Espriella wanted to be sworn in at a military garrison in Popayán, and the Senate approved moving Congress to Cauca for it. Petro killed that on July 24, 2026: “I give no permission to any garrison or military establishment to make itself ready for the swearing-in of any official of the civil power in Colombia,” he said, in a statement carried by El Colombiano that extended to the Army, the Navy and the National Police. La Silla Vacía traced what followed: the House approved the switch to Cali 117 to 7 on July 28, the Senate followed on July 29 by 58 to 30 with 15 abstentions, and de la Espriella’s team cited volcanic activity around Popayán, whose Guillermo León Valencia airport had been shut more than a third of the preceding 20 days. Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) lost its own blocking motion 114 to 6 and then announced it would not attend the ceremony at all. Per MercoPress, Congress convened at Universidad Santiago de Cali’s arena, Senate President Honorio Henríquez placed the presidential sash on him, and de la Espriella then moved to the Pichincha Battalion, where he spoke to armed forces and police commanders for more than an hour. The same report lists King Felipe VI of Spain among the attendees, along with Javier Milei of Argentina, Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, Santiago Peña of Paraguay and José Raúl Mulino of Panama, with José Antonio Kast of Chile there for bilateral meetings on the sidelines, and records Cepeda ending the day by announcing a shadow cabinet.

Worth noting, because it complicates the symbolism: Cali voted against him, 682,166 to 443,047, and so did Barranquilla, 375,178 to 309,652 — the city he wants recognized as an alternate capital. That designation is not ordinary legislation. Infobae laid out the route: Article 322 of the Constitution makes Bogotá the sole capital and Capital District, so recognizing Barranquilla requires an acto legislativo (constitutional amendment) — eight debates across two rounds, against the four an ordinary law needs. “The forgetting is over, the neglect is over, the centralist abandonment is over,” de la Espriella said in announcing it, per Semana. He has cast it as a break with Rafael Núñez: “A hundred and forty years ago Colombia did not have a president from the Caribbean. The last was President Núñez. But I am not going to make Núñez’s mistake. I am not going to defend the centralism that President Núñez defended. I am going to defend decentralization,” he said, in remarks reported by Infobae. The physical seat is already going up: El Heraldo reported that the Army’s Second Brigade at the Batallón Paraíso will house it, with the Atlántico governor’s office under Eduardo Verano executing the works. El Tiempo counts three regional seats in all: Barranquilla, plus the Centro Cultural de Cali, offered by Mayor Alejandro Eder and plaqued as an alternate presidential seat, and Medellín’s Palacio de la Cultura Rafael Uribe Uribe. In Bogotá itself the presidency moves to the Palacio de San Carlos, which currently houses the Foreign Ministry, while the Casa de Nariño becomes a museum open to the public.

His diagnosis is sound, and the problem is older than any of us: power in Colombia has been concentrated in the capital since independence, and the coast, the Pacific, the plains and the south have paid for it. Whether this becomes an actual redistribution of investment and institutional capacity, or a series of well-photographed ceremonies in cities that did not vote for him, will take a year or more to read.

A mandate without a legislature

The Consejo Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Council) granted legal status to de la Espriella’s Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland) on August 3, 2026 — six magistrates in favor, one against and two absent — on the strength of the 12,960,166 votes certified to the ticket in the final scrutiny — 624 more than the preliminary count above — or 49.66 percent, nearly 14 times the 3 percent threshold the law requires, as Infobae reported. He was inaugurated four days later. The party holds no seats in either chamber; Infobae puts its first electoral outing at the regional elections of October 2027, and the next congressional cycle is March 2030.

The Congress he has to work with was elected on March 8, 2026, and seated on July 20, 2026. El País of Cali reported Pacto Histórico rising from the 20 Senate seats it won in 2022 to 25, and Centro Democrático (Democratic Center) from 13 to 17. In the House, La República counted 183 seats, with Pacto Histórico again the largest bloc at 41, Centro Democrático second at 30 and the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) at 24, one Cundinamarca seat still disputed. The largest single bloc in both chambers belongs to the coalition he just defeated.

That matters more than the usual first-100-days handicapping, because the marquee items all need a legislature. Abolishing the Instituto Nacional Penitenciario y Carcelario (National Penitentiary and Prison Institute), or INPEC, would require statutory change and a redefinition of the state’s role in prison administration. The alternate capital requires a constitutional amendment. So would eliminating the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace), or JEP, a tribunal created by constitutional amendment under the 2016 peace accord. What a president can do alone is issue decrees and direct the security forces, and that is what week one consisted of.

The traditional right cannot rescue him, because it is coming apart at exactly the moment he needs it. Centro Democrático’s candidate, Paloma Valencia, won the right-wing inter-party consultation in March 2026 with more than 3 million votes and had been polling near 20 percent going into the May 31, 2026, first round. A Guarumo poll published by El Tiempo had her at 19.9 percent in March 2026, up from 6.9 percent in January. She finished the May 31 first round with 1,639,668 votes, 6.92 percent, behind de la Espriella’s 43.74 percent and Cepeda’s 40.90 percent, per El Espectador’s tally of the Registraduría count — ending roughly where she had started the year. A party founded in 2013 to be the wall against the Colombian left finished third, behind both the man who beat it and the left coalition it exists to stop.

María Fernanda Cabal left the party in January 2026 along with her husband, José Félix Lafaurie, who heads the Federación Colombiana de Ganaderos (Colombian Federation of Cattle Ranchers), telling Infobae that the internal process which selected Valencia over her was irregular. In August 2026, she went further and filed for an escisión (a formal legal split) of the party. “No party can survive when it renounces the ideas that gave it origin,” she wrote, in remarks also carried by Infobae. Valencia, for her part, told a meeting in Antioquia that “we have to understand very clearly what party we are in. This is not a right-wing party.”

Álvaro Uribe’s own legal position complicates the popular version of this story. Judge Sandra Liliana Heredia sentenced him on August 1, 2025, to 12 years of house detention and a fine of $3.444 billion COP for procedural fraud and bribery in a criminal proceeding, the first former Colombian president convicted by the ordinary courts after waiving his congressional privilege in 2020. “The damage was colossal,” she said, as El Espectador reported. The Tribunal Superior de Bogotá (Bogotá Superior Court) acquitted him on October 21, 2025, finding he had committed neither offense. Infobae reported that the court held the interceptions of Uribe’s calls with his attorney Diego Cadena to be illegal and threw them out, and found contradictions and personal motives in the accounts of the former paramilitaries whose testimony carried the case. The Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) and the accredited victims filed cassation appeals with the Corte Suprema de Justicia (Supreme Court of Justice) on January 13, 2026, as Infobae reported, and Infobae also reported the court halting the proceeding in February 2026 over a recusal motion against one of its magistrates. Convicted, then un-convicted, with the final word still pending.

Regardless of how that ends, the political cost has landed. Centro Democrático was built around Uribe’s personal ability to anoint a candidate and deliver the votes behind them, and the legal fight, his age and the unpopularity of the Duque administration have drained that ability. The loyalists still worship the man, but his base is aging along with him and that circle is visibly shrinking. Younger conservatives who were not around to admire his successes against the guerrillas went a different direction this cycle, in some respects further right than Uribe and his movement.

“The peace commissioner’s office is finished, because there will be no more false peace processes in my government.” — Abelardo de la Espriella, president of Colombia

The program, and what it will cost

On his first day, de la Espriella signed the decree creating the Bloque de Defensa para la Seguridad Urbana (Urban Security Defense Block), which he had announced on July 5, 2026, while convening the mayors of Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla and Bucaramanga. “To issue effective measures matched to the needs of the worst-affected cities, I am convening the mayors of Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla and Bucaramanga so that, starting from their needs, we can create the largest urban security operation in Colombia,” he said, in remarks reported by El Tiempo. Bogotá Mayor Carlos Galán backed it in the same account: “the country needs to redefine its criminal policy. Far from rewarding criminal gangs, we must punish them. Anyone who commits a violent crime or reoffends in criminal conduct that harms the lives of others belongs in prison, not on the streets.” Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez answered, in a post carried by El Heraldo, “We are ready, President Abelardo de la Espriella… The only ones who should feel afraid are the criminals.” His inauguration address added a tax reform aimed at evasion, elimination of the wealth tax, publication of an official list of narco-terrorist organizations, coca eradication and financial inclusion for informal workers, according to MercoPress.

The centerpiece of the longer program is a set of maximum-security megacárceles (mega-prisons) modeled on the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, built by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Speaking to Caracol Radio in March 2026, in an interview Infobae wrote up, he described “ten mega-prisons in the middle of nowhere, where not even the signal of the Holy Cross gets in,” to be built with private capital in exchange for concessions of “fifty, seventy, eighty years, whatever it takes,” and confirmed the Bukele model when asked directly. On INPEC he was blunter: “INPEC is a cancer for Colombian justice and for Colombian society. It has to be taken out.” The number is not settled — El Tiempo’s summary of his 10 governing pillars put it at seven. A senior Salvadoran government official said Bukele’s administration is willing to advise Colombia on the build, in an interview with Semana reported by Chicanoticias. Medellín is not waiting: Gutiérrez has announced a high-security facility for more than 1,300 inmates, financed with public and private funds, guarded by its own dedicated force rather than INPEC officers, and expected to open in 2027, according to AFP reporting carried by France 24.

The baseline is genuinely bad. A Contraloría (Comptroller General) review running to 306 findings, reported by El Tiempo, puts overcrowding at 27.1 percent at the close of March 2026, against 19.9 percent in February 2022. Installed capacity rose by 378 beds in four years, from 80,647 to 81,025, while the inmate population grew by 6,246, from 96,703 to 102,949. El Tiempo puts the guard shortfall at up to 12,000, even as the custody corps itself grew from 12,715 to 14,142 officers. The economics are the harder problem. La Nación of Neiva estimates each facility at more than $1 trillion COP and three to four years to build, and cites the Universidad de los Andes security and drugs research center noting that five earlier national planning-council prison-infrastructure plans rarely executed more than 20 percent of their targets, while the combined budget of INPEC and the prison services agency USPEC went from $1.6 trillion COP to more than $4 trillion COP between 2015 and 2025 without improving recidivism.

Colombia does not bring a strong balance sheet to that negotiation. The Finance Ministry’s own investor relations office lists S&P Global Ratings at BB- in foreign currency with a stable outlook as of April 2026, Fitch Ratings at BB stable as of December 2025, and Moody’s Ratings at Baa3 stable as of June 2025 — two of the three agencies below investment grade, with Moody’s alone still holding the sovereign at its lowest investment-grade notch. The April cut was Colombia’s fourth on S&P’s scale since 2020, El Espectador reported, quoting José Ignacio López of the financial research institute ANIF that the country “keeps moving away from investment grade.” A government proposing a mega-prison program on that scale, a national urban security surge and the elimination of the wealth tax, from that starting point, will be judged on sequencing rather than on ambition.

Then the ground moved

At 7:34 a.m. on Monday, August 10, 2026, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia, centered on San José del Palmar in Chocó, a community of 4,800 people about 400 kilometers west of Bogotá. Al Jazeera, reporting with AP and Reuters, sourced the epicenter to the United States Geological Survey and put the toll at 250 dead or more by August 11, with more than 2,700 people reported missing on citizen-run websites and about 1,600 buildings damaged or destroyed. Several upper floors of Cali’s Hospital Universitario del Valle collapsed, including pediatric wards, with roughly 600 patients treated in a street full of rubble; hospital director Irne Torres Castro described the scene to Caracol television. The same report cites the Servicio Geológico Colombiano (Colombian Geological Service) recording 21 aftershocks by late Monday, and quotes Camila Gómez, deputy director of programs for Colombia and Venezuela at the International Rescue Committee, calling it the largest earthquake Colombia has experienced in two decades.

Imágenes desgarradoras del terremoto en Pereira muestra como se les viene encima la casita a esta familia. Pensando más en lo material que en sus vidas, pero nadie sabe cuánto costó conseguirlo. #terremoto #temblor pic.twitter.com/i7gqeZmy5B

— Don Ramon (@RuedaJohnn37191) August 15, 2026

Per that same account, de la Espriella declared a national state of emergency, mobilized what he called “the entire military and police apparatus,” traveled to Quibdó and to Cali, and promised rental subsidies for people whose homes were damaged. Curfews went up in Cali, Armenia and Manizales; hospitals in five cities went to red alert; airports at Pereira, Manizales, Quibdó, Armenia, Cartago and Buenaventura suspended operations for structural inspection. “Chocó will never again be the land of the forgotten,” he said in Quibdó. MercoPress reported his appointment of geological engineer David Suárez Tamayo to head the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (National Disaster Risk Management Unit).

That Quibdó sentence is the decentralization argument, delivered under conditions nobody would have chosen. Counting the departments behind the cities named above — Chocó, Valle del Cauca, Risaralda, Quindío and Caldas — the quake hit the exact periphery the alternate-capital project is nominally about, and it hit the department where he had been sworn in three days earlier. It is also the first hard test of a government whose organizing promise is that the state can show up where it never has. On the early evidence, the machinery is being learned in real time. Colombia requested supplies but not foreign rescue personnel, despite offers from at least six countries, issuing a diplomatic note on August 11, 2026, that MercoPress noted does not formally amount to an international appeal. The same report has Bukele making Colombia’s position public before Bogotá did, and quotes international relations scholar Sandra Borda saying “the government is learning on the go how the mechanism works,” and that cities cannot channel aid directly. The posture shifted within days. By August 15, in the same El Tiempo report that carried his call with Trump, the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (National Disaster Risk Management Unit), or UNGRD, had begun formalizing requests for specialized teams from the United States, El Salvador, Ecuador and Israel, and de la Espriella had thanked Benjamin Netanyahu by telephone for the Israeli search-and-rescue crews.

🔴Se conocen impactantes imágenes del momento exacto en el que colapsó una edificación en la entrada del Centro del Comercio, en la ciudad de Pereira, durante el terremoto de 7,4 que se registró en Colombia el pasado 10 de agosto.

Las grabaciones muestran la caída de fragmentos… pic.twitter.com/oNZGvdbCJC

— EL TIEMPO (@ELTIEMPO) August 14, 2026

For the fiscal picture above, the quake is not a footnote. Reconstruction across those five departments now competes directly with prison concessions and an urban security surge for the same constrained peso. That belongs in any risk model built on the strength of the new security program.

Washington promises a billion dollars, and raises the tariff

The external position moved faster than anything domestic. On inauguration day, the US State Department released a statement titled “A New Era in US-Colombia Relations”, announcing that Washington, in coordination with Congress, intends to provide $1 billion USD as part of a security package supporting the new administration. El Tiempo noted the money is not approved: the statement says only that Washington will work with Congress to assemble it. The reversal it implies is still steep. US assistance to Colombia, which once ran at about $400 million USD a year, fell to roughly $187 million USD during the first year of Trump’s second term, according to a report to the US Congress cited by Infobae — a cut made in Washington, not in Bogotá, during a period of open dispute over drug policy. In 2025, the United States declined to certify Colombia’s counternarcotics performance for the first time since 1997, with a national-interest waiver that withheld the harshest consequences.

MercoPress reported that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche led the US delegation to the inauguration, with Office of National Drug Control Policy director Sara Carter and the vice president’s national security adviser, Cliff Sims; Donald Trump, JD Vance and Marco Rubio did not travel. The same State Department statement folded Colombia into Escudo de las Américas (Shield of the Americas), a regional security initiative backed by the Trump administration. De la Espriella had already placed its Colombian seat in Medellín, announcing on July 22, 2026, that the headquarters would go there “because this is where the head of the serpent of drug trafficking and organized crime is,” in remarks reported by Portafolio — a strategic choice, and also a second payment on the electoral debt described earlier.

Five days after the inauguration that relationship acquired a considerably harder edge. At an Escudo de las Américas meeting in Panama on August 12, 2026, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the new Colombian government had asked Washington to join its fight against narcoterrorism, “authorizing joint military operations to destroy the terrorists and the terror networks,” and named Colombia the 19th member of the Coalition Against the Cartels of the Americas. El Universal of Cartagena reported the announcement, and Vanguardia and El Tiempo both described what was authorized as joint military operations inside Colombia. That is a different proposition from an assistance package. Aid is a budget line Washington can adjust; foreign forces operating alongside Colombian ones inside Colombia is a sovereignty question, and it was settled in the first week of a presidency that commands no bloc in Congress. Whether that arrangement stays executive or ends up before the legislature is among the most consequential open questions he leaves himself.

The billion-dollar headline needs one piece of context that did not make the statement. CBS News reported that at the end of July 2026, roughly a week before the “new era” release, the United States raised its general tariff on Colombian imports from 10 percent to 12.5 percent, with exceptions including coffee and oil. After the earthquake, de la Espriella’s first substantive ask of Trump was to undo it. He told El Tiempo that the 10-minute call was “very friendly and cordial,” that he had asked Trump to consider a temporary suspension “to relieve our businesspeople, who are facing very difficult times because of the effects of the earthquake,” and that he had described the task ahead as rebuilding Colombia “in the middle of the economic situation — so difficult, so apocalyptic — that I inherited.” CBS News put the accompanying US assistance at $26.5 million USD, up from the $15.5 million USD announced on the day of the quake.

In his victory speech in Barranquilla, covered at the time by Finance Colombia, he framed the shift as Colombia returning to its place among the free nations, as a serious partner and a loyal ally rather than a dependent one. A relationship in which the ally sets your tariff rate and you ask for relief by telephone is a workable relationship. Whether it stays reciprocal, or curdles into dependency on whichever administration holds the White House, is a fair question over four years, and it is worth asking no matter who is in Washington.

Troublesome tendencies in Abelardo’s background

Between 2008 and 2019, de la Espriella filed 109 criminal complaints for defamation and slander against journalists, reporters and other citizens, according to Fiscalía figures provided to the Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (Foundation for Press Freedom), or FLIP. Most were archived, withdrawn or went nowhere, which is precisely FLIP’s point about them: the organization argues that the effect of repeated recourse to lawsuits, injunctions, rectification demands and platform complaints is measured not in convictions but in legal costs, attrition and self-censorship.

Ahead of the runoff, FLIP and the International Federation for Human Rights issued a joint statement describing a pattern of attacks against the press, and FLIP’s own June 18, 2026, statement characterized it as “public disparagement, accusations of alleged political agendas, judicial harassment of journalists, baseless challenges to editorial independence, and actions aimed at undermining journalism on matters of public interest related to his candidacy.” The same LatAm Journalism Review summary records de la Espriella’s answer, that it is necessary to “set limits on journalists who believe they are untouchable.” He now says that with the machinery of the state behind him rather than a private lawyer’s caseload. Whether he has matured on this point, or simply acquired better tools, is one of the first real tests of the term.

In July 2026, he announced the closure of the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace along with the presidential offices for National Reconciliation and for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law, folding their functions into the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Defense ministries on the argument that those competencies already sit there and the offices duplicate them. “The peace commissioner’s office is finished, because there will be no more false peace processes in my government,” he said, as El Tiempo reported. The Unit for Implementation of the Final Agreement goes with them, its responsibilities passing to a new National Security Commissioner — the postconflict brief absorbed into a security structure. Infobae put the scope at 229 positions cut from the Presidency as of August 7, 2026, for a projected annual saving of $10 billion COP. Winding down a negotiating strategy that failed on the numbers above is a defensible decision. El Tiempo’s reading of the rest is the part worth sitting with: the move dismantles the two offices that tracked state human rights policy and compliance with Colombia’s international commitments, and leaves those subjects with no unit reporting directly to the president.

The prison model carries the same risk in another form. The attraction of Bukele’s system, in de la Espriella’s own telling, is the collapse in gang violence that followed it. What it also produced is documented: Amnesty International found that four years into El Salvador’s state of emergency more than 90,000 people had been detained and at least 470 had died in state custody, in a report titled «Seguridad» sin derechos (“Security” Without Rights) built on six documentation visits between May 2022 and January 2025, 109 interviews and direct examination of more than 80 individual cases. The organization argues the pattern could amount to crimes against humanity. Whether Colombia’s version imports the first result without the second is unknown, because the program does not exist yet. It belongs near the top of the watch list for the coming year, and not only on financial grounds.

What to watch

In the Barranquilla victory speech quoted earlier, de la Espriella struck a different note than his record suggests: no victors and no vanquished, no retaliation, no persecution, rights respected even for those who did not vote for him. With a margin under 1 percentage point, a party four days old at inauguration and no bloc in Congress, that posture is arithmetic before it is generosity. It is also the only version of this presidency with a chance of surviving past a single term.

The collapse documented here fell hardest on low-income Colombians in the cities and the countryside — the people without private security, who cannot simply avoid a dangerous neighborhood. If the crackdown that began under the urban security decree goes after the armed structures themselves rather than the poorest people living next to them, the homicide and extortion trends can reverse. If it does not, the country trades one set of victims for another and buys a human rights problem on top of a security problem.

Five markers will tell the story faster than any speech. Whether quarterly extortion and homicide figures move, and in which municipalities. Whether financing for the prison program appears as an actual budget line rather than a concession announcement, now that reconstruction has a prior claim on it. Whether the Corte Suprema rules on Uribe, and what that does to what is left of Centro Democrático. Whether the alternate-capital amendment survives even the first of its eight debates. And whether any rating agency moves an outlook on the strength of the new fiscal posture, or against it on the cost of the quake.

The armed groups tested every recent transition in Colombia early, and there is no reason to expect this one to be different. The FARC dissident structures and the National Liberation Army, or ELN, will test the response, and the way this administration answers that first test — in Cauca, in Catatumbo, in the Bajo Cauca — will tell you more about the next four years than the first 100 days of decrees.

“Colombia recognizes Morocco’s sovereignty over its Sahara,” Bula Escobar said at the meeting. Restrepo described the announcement as “a new beginning” for the two countries and called Morocco “Colombia’s first ally in Africa,” adding that Bogotá wants to build a strategic partnership with Rabat. Restrepo also raised the possibility of negotiating a free trade agreement to encourage Moroccan investment in Colombia, though no such talks have formally begun.

Colombia reconoció la soberanía de Marruecos sobre el Sáhara Occidental.

El anuncio se dio durante el primer encuentro del vicepresidente José Manuel Restrepo (@jrestrp) y el canciller Omar Bula (@omarbula) con el Ministro de Asuntos Exteriores del país africano.

Con esta… pic.twitter.com/aas0pirwSc

— Cancillería Colombia (@CancilleriaCol) August 8, 2026

Two days later, Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the Cancillería) issued a formal statement confirming the decision followed a “sovereign review” of the recognition its predecessor government had granted to the entity it calls the República Árabe Saharaui Democrática (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, or SADR), noting that the United Nations does not recognize it as a member state. Bogotá said it would freeze all political and diplomatic contact with the SADR, halt exchanges of missions, and withdraw support for it in multilateral forums, “including the United Nations and the Security Council, where Colombia currently serves as a non-permanent member.” The ministry identified trade, investment promotion, tourism, food security, port and logistics development, and Atlantic connectivity as areas it wants to expand with Morocco.

A colonial-era dispute still unresolved

Western Sahara has been contested since Spain withdrew from its former colony in 1975. Morocco organized the “Green March” that year, sending hundreds of thousands of civilians into the territory to press its claim, and has administered most of it since. The Polisario Front, an armed movement representing the territory’s indigenous Sahrawi population, fought Morocco and declared a government-in-exile, the SADR, in 1976. A 1991 ceasefire monitored by the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) held for nearly three decades without the referendum ever taking place; fighting between Morocco and the Polisario Front resumed in November 2020 and has continued intermittently since. Morocco controls roughly the western three-quarters of the territory, separated from the Polisario-administered “Free Zone” to the east by a fortified sand berm running the length of the territory. Morocco has offered the region autonomy under its sovereignty since 2007; the Polisario Front continues to demand a UN-supervised independence referendum.

A widening diplomatic tilt toward Rabat

Colombia’s move follows a broader realignment in Morocco’s favor. The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2797 on October 31, 2025, renewing the MINURSO mandate and, for the first time, calling on the parties to negotiate on the basis of Morocco’s autonomy proposal as the most “feasible” path to a settlement. Eleven Council members voted in favor; China, Russia and Pakistan abstained, and Algeria — not a Council member at the time — did not take part. Morocco’s foreign ministry says more than 130 countries now back the autonomy plan as the most realistic basis for resolving the dispute, and only about a dozen of the African Union’s 54 members still recognize the SADR. Mali withdrew its recognition of the SADR in April 2026 and Ecuador suspended its own in 2024; Peru ended its recognition in 2023. Colombia’s reversal extends that trend into what had been one of the Polisario Front’s remaining strongholds in Latin America.

For Morocco, Colombia’s recognition is a further diplomatic gain and another setback for Algeria, the Polisario Front’s principal regional backer. It also positions Rabat as an intermediary between Latin American and African markets, a role Bourita highlighted directly, saying Morocco and Colombia “could represent economic platforms for each other” given their respective positions on the two continents. He described Colombia’s decision as “historic,” saying it could give “great momentum” to bilateral relations, and said his presence in Cali reflected the Kingdom’s intent to elevate ties “to a higher level.”

“A regrettable quid pro quo arrangement driven by a deeply ideological agenda.” — Polisario Front, in a statement condemning Colombia’s decision

The Polisario Front rejected the decision. In a statement carried by Moroccan outlet Yabiladi, the movement said it “strongly condemned” Colombia’s move, calling it “a regrettable quid pro quo arrangement driven by a deeply ideological agenda” that helps “legitimize a situation resulting from the military occupation of a territory that remains subject to a decolonization process.” The Front argued the decision conflicts with Article 9 of Colombia’s own constitution, which grounds the country’s foreign relations in respect for international law and peoples’ right to self-determination, and said it undermines “Colombia’s international role as an important actor in the pursuit of peace.” It called on Bogotá to reconsider. Algeria has long framed the dispute as a matter of “incomplete decolonization and an unfulfilled right to self-determination,” and has backed the Polisario Front diplomatically and militarily for decades.

Why Colombia had not recognized Morocco’s claim before

Colombia’s position on Western Sahara has shifted with its governments for four decades. Bogotá first recognized the SADR in 1985 under President Belisario Betancur, then froze those ties in 2001 under President Andrés Pastrana. President Gustavo Petro restored full diplomatic relations with the SADR in August 2022, shortly after taking office, framing it as support for Sahrawi self-determination consistent with his government’s broader identification with Global South and non-aligned foreign-policy positions. Petro reaffirmed that stance as recently as November 2025, pledging what he called “unrestricted” support for the Sahrawi cause and linking it to Colombia’s arrival on the UN Security Council for a two-year term beginning in 2026.

That position did not survive the change of government. De la Espriella, a right-of-center former defense lawyer who took office August 7, had campaigned on unwinding Petro’s foreign policy, and moved quickly on more than one front: alongside the Western Sahara reversal, his government also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and moved to restore ties with Israel, becoming only the second country after the United States to do so. Colombia’s recognition of Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara is best read in that context — less a response to new facts in the territory than a marker of where the incoming administration wants to position Colombia internationally, closer to Washington, Jerusalem and Rabat and further from the non-aligned coalition Petro had cultivated.

What remains untested is the commercial follow-through. Restrepo’s reference to a possible free trade agreement was aspirational rather than an announcement of negotiations, and the Colombian and Moroccan governments have yet to lay out a timeline for the trade, investment, port-logistics and Atlantic-connectivity cooperation both sides say they want to pursue.

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia at 7:34 a.m. local time on Monday, August 10, 2026, killing at least 111 people and injuring 87 others, according to figures confirmed by President Abelardo de la Espriella and reported by Noticias Caracol. Twenty-nine of the deaths occurred in capital cities. The figures are expected to rise as search-and-rescue teams continue working through collapsed buildings in Cali, Chocó, and the Coffee Axis region.

“The same seismic systems and plate tectonics powering today’s earthquake are also behind recent volcanic activity at Volcán Puracé, but it would be a mistake without more evidence to infer any causality between the phenomena.” — Isabella Casasbuenas, mining engineer, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

The US Geological Survey (USGS) located the epicenter 5 kilometers south of San José del Palmar, a small municipality in the department of Chocó, at a depth of approximately 110 kilometers. The Servicio Geológico Colombiano (SGC, Colombian Geological Survey) described it as the strongest earthquake to hit Colombia in a decade. It was felt as far away as Bogotá, Medellín, and neighboring Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama.

The national government declared a “situación de desastre nacional” (national disaster situation), and President de la Espriella, who was inaugurated just three days earlier, canceled his Monday agenda to lead the response personally. “He asumido directamente el liderazgo de la atención por la emergencia en San José del Palmar” (“I have taken direct leadership of the emergency response in San José del Palmar”), the president wrote, announcing a Puesto de Mando Unificado (Unified Command Post) at the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (UNGRD, National Unit for Disaster Risk Management). He later said he would travel to Bogotá to run the response from the UNGRD’s crisis room, with the vice president and cabinet ministers dispatched to Chocó, the Eje Cafetero (Coffee Axis), and other affected zones. “Lo primero es el rescate de las personas que están bajo los escombros, esa es la prioridad” (“The first priority is rescuing people under the rubble”), he said, according to Noticias Caracol.

The most dramatic footage I’ve ever seen of an earthquake as it was occurring … 🙏🏼🙁 pic.twitter.com/yg1BWUnhFc

— John (@market_sleuth) August 10, 2026

According to the president’s office, the earthquake damaged 1,575 homes and destroyed 37 others, collapsed 61 buildings, and damaged 18 health centers, 52 schools, 17 community centers, and 18 roads. Six airports, including those serving Pereira, Manizales, Quibdó, Armenia, Cartago, and Buenaventura, lost commercial operations, and a seventh sustained runway damage. In Cali, the mayor’s office reported more than 20 collapsed structures with people trapped inside; in Manizales, a tower of the city’s cathedral was damaged. The UNGRD said four urban search-and-rescue teams, from Bogotá, Envigado, Yopal, and Medellín, were deployed, with Bogotá and Antioquia contributing heavy equipment and aircraft. The agency also confirmed there is no tsunami threat to Colombia’s Pacific coast, and the SGC recorded two aftershocks, of magnitude 2.8 and 4.8, near the Chocó municipality of Nóvita.

Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM, Medellín’s public utility, which operates several of the country’s hydroelectric dams) said in a statement that its infrastructure was undamaged and no injuries were reported at its facilities. “Producto de nuestras operaciones no se han presentado personas o estructuras afectadas,” the utility said, adding that it continues operating normally while monitoring the situation. Read the full statement at epm.com.co.

The One Foundation is mobilizing to support the response in the hardest hit areas. Click or scan the QR code.

How to help

Readers looking to support relief efforts can donate through the UNGRD‘s official channels , the One Foundation (One Inversión Social), or the Cruz Roja Colombiana (Colombian Red Cross), which coordinates emergency response nationally; its website was intermittently unreachable Monday amid the surge in traffic following the earthquake. In Medellín, the Fundación Banco Arquidiocesano de Alimentos de Medellín (Carrera 52 No. 30A-97) and Fundación Saciar (Carrera 50 No. 25-261) are collecting non-perishable food, water, rice, cooking oil, pasta, lentils, beans, canned goods, cornmeal, wheat flour, panela, powdered and UHT milk, hygiene products, diapers, and bedding for affected families. Noticias Caracol has additional donation points as they are confirmed.

Understanding the science: why a deep quake shook such a wide area

For readers unfamiliar with seismology, a few basics help explain why an earthquake this size caused damage across several cities at once, rather than concentrated destruction near a single epicenter.

Estimated shaking intensity for the August 10, 2026, earthquake near San José del Palmar, Chocó. Image: US Geological Survey (USGS)

Earthquake magnitude measures the total energy released at the source; USGS calculated this event at 7.4 on the moment magnitude scale, the modern standard that replaced the older Richter scale for large earthquakes. Depth matters just as much as magnitude in determining what people on the surface actually feel. Most damaging earthquakes, like Ecuador’s 2016 Muisne quake or Haiti’s 2010 disaster, originate less than 20 kilometers below the surface, concentrating destructive shaking in a relatively small area near the epicenter. Monday’s earthquake originated roughly 110 kilometers down, a category seismologists call an “intermediate-depth” earthquake (any quake between 70 and 300 kilometers deep). Energy traveling that far to the surface loses some of its punch directly overhead, but it spreads shaking, typically more moderate but still potentially damaging, across a much broader region. That is why residents felt Monday’s earthquake as far as Bogotá and across three neighboring countries, even though the shaking was most intense closer to the Chocó-Valle del Cauca border.

The quake’s mechanism was primarily strike-slip faulting, meaning the two sides of the fault slid horizontally past each other, rather than one block thrusting up over the other, as happens in the shallow “megathrust” earthquakes more familiar along Chile’s or Japan’s coastlines. USGS’s analysis of the seismic waves (a “focal mechanism”) could not distinguish between two possible fault orientations, a steeply dipping fault with a mix of reverse and left-lateral motion, or a moderately dipping fault with largely right-lateral motion, but both are consistent with deformation occurring inside the Nazca plate itself as it descends beneath the South America plate along Colombia’s Pacific margin. Given the depth, USGS said the rupture likely occurred within the subducting plate rather than at the shallower boundary between the two plates.

Intermediate-depth earthquakes like this one are common along the length of the South America subduction zone and are generally attributed to bending stresses within the descending plate, distinct from the shallower interface earthquakes that produce tsunamis. Monday’s event occurred near the northernmost point where this type of intermediate-depth seismicity has historically been observed in Colombia. USGS noted that only two earthquakes of magnitude 7 or larger have occurred within 250 kilometers of Monday’s epicenter since 1950, and both were located near the coast; the region has more typically produced earthquakes below magnitude 7. USGS’s automated PAGER impact system, which generates preliminary loss estimates within hours of an earthquake to guide humanitarian response, issued an “orange” alert, its second-highest level, indicating significant casualties and widespread damage were likely; the system’s early statistical model, not a confirmed count, pointed toward hundreds of fatalities and roughly $649 million USD in economic losses, broadly in line with the toll now being confirmed on the ground.

Estimated population exposed to each level of shaking intensity. Image: US Geological Survey (USGS)

A volcano already on alert nearby

The earthquake struck as Colombian authorities were already managing a separate, unrelated emergency: an orange alert at Volcán Puracé (Puracé Volcano) in the department of Cauca, roughly 150 kilometers south of Monday’s epicenter. The SGC has kept the Coconucos volcanic chain, which includes Puracé, Piocollo, and Curiquinga, under its second-highest alert level since a sharp rise in seismicity and gas emissions began around July 20, with instrumental readings in early August reaching the highest levels recorded since continuous monitoring began in 1993.

The volcano has produced six ash emissions since the afternoon of Friday, August 7, including two significant plumes, documented by residents and the SGC’s monitoring cameras, on Friday at 5:57 p.m. and Saturday at 9:12 a.m. Sulfur dioxide flux from the crater has measured around 2,100 tons per day, well above the volcano’s historical average, while ground-based carbon dioxide readings have also climbed. Natalia Contreras, the SGC official who oversees geohazard information, said the seismic activity driving the alert is dominated by fluid movement in shallow volcanic conduits, tremor and long-period earthquakes located less than a kilometer beneath the crater, rather than by rock-fracturing earthquakes, which have stayed comparatively rare and weak. It is the second time in less than eight months that Puracé has reached orange alert. The UNGRD has begun trucking water to roughly 3,000 residents in nearby communities after ash and acidic gases affected local water sources and pasture, and has prepared, but not activated, evacuation routes for the area.

Finance Colombia asked Isabella Casasbuenas, a mining engineer from Colombia’s Universidad Nacional (National University), whether Monday’s earthquake and Puracé’s unrest are connected. She explained that the same regional seismic systems and plate tectonics, ultimately driven by the Nazca plate’s subduction beneath South America, underlie both phenomena, but cautioned against inferring any direct causal link between the two without further evidence. Seismologists broadly share that caution: Monday’s rupture occurred roughly 110 kilometers underground, within the subducting Nazca plate, while the seismicity driving Puracé’s alert is occurring less than 2 kilometers beneath the volcano’s crater, in the shallow magmatic and hydrothermal system that feeds it. The two processes sit within the same broad tectonic framework but are not, on current evidence, mechanically linked events.

This is a developing story. Casualty and damage figures are preliminary and likely to change as search-and-rescue operations continue.

USGS’s ShakeMap system, which models expected shaking intensity using the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale, estimated that roughly 1.6 million people experienced “very strong” shaking (MMI VII), nearly 8.9 million experienced “strong” shaking (MMI VI), and another 17 million experienced “moderate” shaking (MMI V) across Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama.

As Abelardo de la Espriella took the oath of office as Colombia’s president on August 7, the US Department of State announced that Washington intends to provide $1 billion USD in security assistance to his new government, capping a stunning reversal in a bilateral relationship that a year earlier had produced sanctions against a sitting Colombian president, a revoked visa, and a call from the presidential palace for American soldiers to disobey their commander-in-chief.

A US Presidential Delegation led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche represented the United States at de la Espriella’s August 7 inauguration in Cali, a city in Colombia’s conflict-scarred southwest that hosted the ceremony instead of the traditional venue in Bogotá. In a statement titled “A New Era in U.S.-Colombia Relations,” the State Department said the delegation “demonstrates US commitment to reinvigorating the US-Colombia relationship and deepening of our shared security and economic partnership,” and that the $1 billion package is intended “as a cornerstone of this renewed partnership.”

A delegation built around security and counternarcotics

Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not travel to Cali, but the delegation Washington sent was heavy with counternarcotics and security officials, according to ColombiaOne and Local 10 News. Alongside Blanche, the group included Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Terry Cole; US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida; Sara Carter, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy; Hugo Guevara of the US Embassy in Bogotá; Cliff Sims, national security adviser to Vice President JD Vance; Viviana Bovo of the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs; Joseph M. Humire, deputy assistant secretary of war for Americas security affairs; and Chris Jarvis of Joint Task Force Vulcan, which targets transnational criminal organizations.

“Yesterday was the start of a new friendship and partnership working as a team in the fight against drug trafficking and furthering our relationship in countering threats to our national security and public safety,” Blanche wrote in a statement carried by Local 10 News.

Cole struck a similarly pointed tone. “DEA is ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with Colombia again,” he said in a statement cited by Local 10 News. “We will hunt down those who profit from cocaine, corruption, violence, and terror. There will be no safe haven, no protected trafficking route, and no immunity for those who poison our communities.”

The turnaround stands in sharp contrast to where the relationship stood barely 10 months earlier. On October 24, 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added outgoing President Gustavo Petro to its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List — known in Colombia as the Lista Clinton (Clinton List), after the 1995 executive order that created it — under Executive Order 14059, which targets foreign persons involved in the global illicit drug trade. OFAC simultaneously designated Petro’s wife, Verónica Alcocer; his son, Nicolás Petro; and his interior minister, Armando Benedetti, according to a Federal Register notice of the action and Finance Colombia’s own reporting at the time. It marked the first time OFAC had designated a sitting, democratically elected head of state of a country long considered a close US ally.

The sanctions followed a September 15, 2025, presidential determination naming Colombia a “major drug transit country or major illicit drug producing country” that had “failed demonstrably” to meet its counternarcotics obligations — the first time Colombia had been placed on that list in more than 25 years.

Relations deteriorated further that same September, when Petro, addressing a pro-Palestinian rally near the United Nations General Assembly in New York, told a crowd: “I ask all the soldiers of the United States’ army, don’t point your rifles against humanity,” and urged them to “disobey the orders of Trump.” The State Department revoked his visa within hours, saying on social media that Petro had “urged US soldiers to disobey orders and incite violence,” according to CBS News. Petro dismissed the punishment, writing on social media that “international law grants me immunity to go to the UN and that there should be no reprisals for my free opinion, because I am a free person,” and noting that as a dual Colombian-European citizen he did not need a US visa, according to Al Jazeera.

Tensions eased only gradually. Petro traveled to Washington for a meeting with President Trump on February 2, 2026, in what CNN described at the time as a shift “from clash to dialogue” after a year of confrontation. Petro remained on the SDN list, and was still lobbying for his own removal from it as late as early July 2026, when he asked Trump by phone to lift the designation on him and his family — a request Trump said he would look into, according to ColombiaOne.

An election fought over the US relationship

De la Espriella, a 48-year-old lawyer and political outsider known to supporters as “El Tigre,” defeated Historic Pact candidate Iván Cepeda in a June 21 runoff, a race Trump endorsed publicly. Petro initially alleged the vote had been manipulated, a claim dismissed by international observers and Colombia’s electoral authorities before he conceded, according to Al Jazeera. The run-up to the inauguration was marked by violence, including a truck bombing near a police station in Cúcuta on August 1 that wounded eight police officers and three civilians, six days before de la Espriella took office, according to Al Jazeera. No group claimed responsibility; dissident factions of the demobilized FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Clan del Golfo criminal group are all active in the border region. Security was tightened further ahead of the ceremony itself, held under armored vehicles, soldiers, and vehicle checkpoints in Cali, according to Al Jazeera.

At his swearing-in, de la Espriella broke with Petro’s negotiated-peace strategy toward armed groups, declaring that “the option of dialogue is completely exhausted” and pledging to “relentlessly defeat narco-terrorism.” He also committed Colombia to joining the Shield of the Americas, the US-backed regional counter-cartel coalition that grew out of a March 2026 summit hosted by the Trump administration, and pledged to strengthen state-run Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC) and pursue “responsible and sustainable fracking” to shore up the country’s oil and gas reserves.

Security package now, economic dialogue to follow

Under the State Department’s framework, the $1 billion package — which still requires action by the US Congress — is aimed at strengthening Colombia’s security forces against Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Transnational Criminal Organizations, expanding coca eradication and cocaine interdiction, freezing and prosecuting the finances behind armed groups, tightening border-security coordination, and rebuilding state presence in territory once controlled by armed groups.

The State Department said the two governments will also launch a Bilateral Prosperity Dialogue aimed at stabilizing Colombia’s economy, strengthening its energy sector, and exploring critical mineral investment, alongside efforts to connect Colombian small and medium enterprises in agribusiness, manufacturing, and tech services to US buyers and supply chains. Washington also committed to contributing to relief funds for potential El Niño-related flooding and drought, to modernizing Colombia’s digital, port, and energy infrastructure, and to advancing bilateral cooperation on civil nuclear energy.

Congressional approval of the $1 billion security package remains the first test of whether Friday’s pledges translate into disbursed assistance — and of how durable the “new era” proves once the inauguration goodwill fades.

Avianca, part of Grupo Abra, has begun operating direct flights from Barranquilla and Cali to Fort Lauderdale, adding two nonstop connections between Colombia and the United States.

The new routes connect Colombia’s Caribbean region and the department of Valle del Cauca with South Florida, one of the most important destinations for Colombian travelers for tourism, business, investment, and family connections.

“With these routes we not only offer direct and convenient options to the United States, but we also give our customers access to a global network of more than 80 destinations in the Americas and Europe.”
— David Alemán, Avianca’s director of sales for Colombia and South America

The flights are operated with Airbus A320-family aircraft configured for 180 passengers per flight. Operating daily, the two routes add more than 5,000 seats per week between Colombia and Fort Lauderdale.

The service began on July 15, 2026, with three of the four flight segments launching that day and the Cali–Fort Lauderdale return service beginning on July 16.

The new schedules are:

All times correspond to local time at each airport.

The routes operate through Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and provide passengers with onward access through Avianca’s network of more than 80 destinations across the Americas and Europe.

Avianca said the expansion reflects its continued effort to strengthen international connectivity from Colombia’s regions. The airline currently operates more than 400 weekly flights to and from the United States, connecting 14 cities in Latin America with its broader network.

The carrier has previously expanded and reactivated routes between Colombia and major US destinations including New York, Miami, and Orlando.

Tickets for the new Barranquilla and Cali routes are available through Avianca’s website, mobile application, contact center, physical sales points, and travel agencies across Colombia.

Avianca and Grupo Abra expand regional network

A member of Star Alliance and part of Grupo Abra, Avianca operates a network that includes passenger, loyalty, and cargo businesses.

The airline group includes Aerovías del Continente Americano S.A., Taca International Airlines, Avianca Costa Rica, Avianca Ecuador, Aviateca, Regional Express Américas, Lifemiles, and Avianca Cargo.

With more than a century of operations in Colombia, Avianca operates more than 155 routes and more than 700 daily flights with a fleet of Airbus A320-family aircraft and Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

In 2025, the airline carried nearly 37 million passengers across more than 262,000 flights. Its Lifemiles loyalty program has more than 15 million members, while Avianca Cargo serves more than 350 destinations through cargo flights, passenger aircraft capacity, and interline agreements.

Grupo Abra brings together Avianca and Brazilian airline GOL under a broader Latin American aviation platform. The group also includes strategic investments involving Wamos Air and Sky Airline.

The company said the platform has approximately 30,000 employees and a fleet of more than 300 aircraft serving more than 25 countries and over 145 destinations.

Above image: Barranquilla skyline.

Colombia’s first-round presidential election, held Sunday, May 31, 2026, produced a result that crystallizes the country’s political exhaustion with both the governing left and the traditional right. Criminal defense attorney and political outsider Abelardo de la Espriella placed first with more than 10.3 million votes. Leftist Senator Iván Cepeda, a close ally of outgoing President Gustavo Petro and the lead architect of the administration’s Paz Total peace policy, finished second with just under 9.7 million votes. The two will face each other in a runoff election on June 21.

Senator Paloma Valencia, the candidate backed by former President Álvaro Uribe and the standard-bearer of his Uribismo movement, placed a distant third, receiving less than 7% of the vote — fewer than 1.7 million ballots. Former Medellín mayor and Antioquia governor Sergio Fajardo received just over one million votes, while former Bogotá mayor Claudia López finished below 1%, with approximately 225,000 votes. The remaining minor candidates combined for just over 1% of the total.

Under Colombia’s electoral system, the top two finishers advance to a runoff if no candidate surpasses 50% in the first round. The June 21 vote will determine who assumes the presidency on August 7.

Click above to watch the video!

The Candidates: Background and Context

Abelardo de la Espriella, 47, has never held elected office. He built a national profile over more than two decades as a high-profile defense attorney, founding De La Espriella Lawyers in 2002, with offices in Colombia and the United States. His client roster has included controversial figures: he represented Alex Saab, a Colombian-born businessman who became a close associate of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and was implicated in a scheme to launder proceeds from Venezuela’s food-assistance program, the Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP). Saab was extradited to the United States, convicted, and later granted clemency before being re-arrested in Venezuela in early 2026. De la Espriella also represented members of the Nule family in connection with the Carrusel de Contratos — a major contracting scandal tied to infrastructure works at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport corridor. He has additionally been reported to have represented individuals linked to organized crime.

De la Espriella has drawn comparisons to figures such as US President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. His campaign has centered on hard-line security policy, including proposals for large-scale incarceration, expanded military operations against armed groups, and the rejection of negotiations with guerrilla organizations. He is reported to hold Italian and US citizenship in addition to his Colombian nationality, and is said to own property in Florida.

In a notable departure from his defense work, de la Espriella took the side of a victim in a high-profile acid-attack case, acting as a private prosecutor to secure a stronger sentence for the perpetrator — an episode that raised his public profile beyond the defense bar.

Iván Cepeda, 63, enters the runoff as the consolidated candidate of the Colombian left and Petro’s Pacto Histórico coalition. He is the primary legislative architect of Paz Total, the Petro administration’s policy of negotiating simultaneously with multiple armed actors, including the ELN and FARC dissident factions. Cepeda’s family background includes deep ties to the Colombian left: his father was secretary general of the Communist Party, and was assassinated. Cepeda himself studied in communist Bulgaria during the soviet era. The two finalists have an established legal and political history: Uribe attempted to bring criminal charges against Cepeda while both served in the Senate, but the Supreme Court determined that Uribe had fabricated the accusations and attempted to bribe witnesses — a case that resulted in Uribe’s criminal conviction.

“If nothing changes, Abelardo wins.” — Loren Moss, Finance Colombia

The Electoral Map

The geographic distribution of the vote reflects deep regional divisions. Cepeda carried Bogotá, which has trended left for years, particularly in lower-income districts on the city’s south and west sides. Antioquia — historically the heartland of Uribismo and home to Medellín, the country’s second-largest city — voted more than two to one for de la Espriella, a result that signals the weakening grip of Uribe’s movement even in its traditional stronghold.

The heart of coffee-growing country — the departments of Caldas, Risaralda, and Quindío also went to de la Espriella. Caquetá, a sparsely populated department in southern Colombia that has suffered sustained guerrilla violence from both the ELN and FARC dissident groups, voted for de la Espriella as well, a result we may interpret as a direct rejection of Petro and Cepeda’s Paz Total.

Cepeda carried Colombia’s Pacific coast, including the chronically neglected department of Chocó, as well as the sparsely populated Amazonas and Putumayo departments bordering Peru and Brazil, and the northern Caribbean coast. The Caribbean coast result is notable, as the region has historically suffered from underdevelopment, infrastructure deficits, and significant income inequality. Norte de Santander with its Catatumbo region on the Venezuelan border and experiencing severe armed-group activity — voted for de la Espriella, a result consistent with public exhaustion over security policy.

The Political Context: From Uribe to Petro and Beyond

Colombia’s current political trajectory is rooted in decisions made across the past two decades. President Uribe served two terms in the early 2000s and, together with then-Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, mounted a sustained military campaign against the FARC that significantly weakened the insurgency. Santos later broke from Uribe after assuming the presidency, governing independently and ultimately negotiating a peace agreement with the FARC — a deal that Uribe actively opposed. A plebiscite on the accord failed, but Santos used legislative maneuvering to implement it anyway.

Colombia 2026 1st round top two (Graphic: Sofi Imfeld for Finance Colombia)

Uribe’s next handpicked candidate, Iván Duque, won the 2018 election but finished his term with approximately 30% approval. Members of his own party publicly distanced themselves from him — Senator María Fernanda Cabal, a staunch Uribista, called Duque a “mamerto” (leftist idiot) while he was still in office. Under his administration, indicators on crime and guerrilla activity worsened, and armed groups including the ELN rebuilt operational capacity that had been degraded under Uribe and Santos.

Petro’s administration has not met initial fears of a Venezuelan-style democratic breakdown: Congress has largely blocked the most radical components of his agenda, including attempts to nationalize the private pension system and convert the healthcare system to a single-payer model. However, crime has increased, armed groups have expanded their operational footprints, and the security situation in several regions has worsened. Paz Total is widely seen as having produced few tangible results.

Uribe himself was convicted of witness tampering and attempted bribery in the case he had brought against Cepeda. Though released from house arrest after conviction, the judges who authorized his release are now reportedly under investigation for judicial corruption. Valencia’s poor performance in the first round — despite being Uribe’s chosen standard-bearer — suggests that Uribismo as a political force is waning, with its core constituency aging and new generations of voters disengaged from the Uribe legacy.

What to Expect Before June 21

Both campaigns will intensify mobilization efforts over the coming three weeks. Cepeda’s movement — Colombia Humana and the broader Pacto Histórico coalition — has historically relied on organized mobilizations, including indigenous community-led mingas, labor unions, and allied social movements. Cepeda’s running mate Senator Aida Quilcué is an indigenous activist, a choice expected to energize those constituencies. FECODE, the Federación Colombiana de Trabajadores de la Educación (Colombia’s main teachers’ federation), is expected to align officially with Cepeda, though individual teachers may not follow union leadership in their voting choices.

On the right, Paloma Valencia issued a public endorsement of de la Espriella immediately following the first-round results. Business community organizations, including ANDI (the Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia) and Fenalco (the Federación Nacional de Comerciantes), do not formally endorse candidates, but their members are widely understood to favor a government that supports private enterprise and market-oriented policy. De la Espriella holds no congressional constituency, meaning whichever candidate wins will face the same dynamic Petro encountered: a fragmented Congress that is likely to act as a check on executive authority.

The question of centrist voter alignment remains open. Fajardo and López are not expected to formally endorse either finalist, and the direction of their combined approximately 1.2 million votes is uncertain.

Winners and Losers by Sector

For international investors and executives operating in Colombia, the policy differences between the two candidates are substantive across several key sectors.

Petroleum and Natural Gas: De la Espriella has stated unequivocally that he will restart petroleum exploration and licensing, which the Petro administration blocked. Ecopetrol S.A. (NYSE: EC; BVC: ECOPETROL), Colombia’s state-controlled oil company, which also holds producing assets in the US Permian Basin and Gulf of Mexico, has operated under a government that halted new drilling permits. The consequences have included a decline in future production capacity at a time when global oil prices have risen due to Middle East tensions. Colombia has been forced to import natural gas at elevated prices to meet existing domestic demand — including from transportation fleets that were converted to natural gas under government incentive programs. Cepeda would be expected to continue or deepen current restrictions on fossil fuel expansion.

Healthcare: The Petro-Cepeda platform favors a government single-payer model. The administration has already taken over several Entidades Promotoras de Salud (EPS) — Colombia’s managed-care intermediaries — placing the healthcare system in legal and financial uncertainty. Private clinics, hospitals, and physicians who wish to operate outside a government-controlled framework would benefit from a de la Espriella administration. Cepeda’s healthcare agenda would accelerate the shift toward government-managed care.

BPO, Tech, and Call Centers: The BPO sector — which provides large volumes of formal employment, particularly in Medellín, Bogotá, Cali, and Barranquilla — was significantly affected by Petro-era minimum wage increases of 16% and 23% in successive years. These increases created contract renegotiation pressures with international clients, some of whom have shifted or considered shifting operations to competing jurisdictions including Honduras, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Guatemala. At the CX Summit, the industry’s main annual event held in Cartagena, the son of Álvaro Uribe appeared as an invited keynote speaker — a gesture that could be interpreted within the industry as an implicit signal of political alignment. A de la Espriella government, with its orientation toward labor market deregulation and reduced regulatory burden, would be viewed more favorably by this sector. Current Colombian labor law prohibits part-time employment contracts and places significant restrictions on dual employment, making workforce flexibility difficult for businesses that operate outside traditional 40-hour weekly structures.

Mining: The Petro administration has been less aggressive toward mining than toward petroleum, but sector participants expect a more permissive regulatory environment under de la Espriella, and continued constraints under Cepeda.

Security and Tourism: Both candidates have stated support for tourism promotion, but the sector’s trajectory is more directly linked to security conditions. Under current policies, several regions that were accessible to domestic and international travelers several years ago have experienced increased armed-group activity, effectively closing them to tourism. A de la Espriella administration is expected to pursue a more aggressive military posture toward the ELN and FARC dissident factions; a Cepeda government would likely continue dialogue-first approaches. The outcome will directly affect which parts of Colombia’s territory remain accessible to investment and tourism.

Foreign Relations: A de la Espriella government is expected to restore a broadly cooperative relationship with the United States, which deteriorated under Petro following several high-profile diplomatic incidents. De la Espriella has expressed admiration for US President Donald Trump, and reports indicate he holds US citizenship and owns property in Florida. Relations with Ecuador, which have been strained by mutual tariff escalations between Petro and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, would be expected to normalize. Relations with Venezuela under Cepeda would likely continue along the current allied trajectory, while a de la Espriella government would be expected to take a more critical posture toward Caracas. China and Russia would find a more receptive diplomatic environment under Cepeda, and a cooler one under de la Espriella.

The Poor and Informal Workers: Cepeda’s campaign argues that minimum wage increases and expanded state services benefit lower-income Colombians. Critics counter that elevated formal labor costs have pushed more employment into the informal sector — which currently accounts for approximately half the Colombian workforce — depriving those workers of pension contributions, health benefits, and job security. De la Espriella’s platform, which emphasizes business formation, security, and labor market deregulation, would be presented as generating more formal-sector job creation. The actual distributional effects of either approach remain contested.

The Outlook

Assuming current polling trends hold and Uribista voters consolidate behind de la Espriella as expected following Valencia’s endorsement, de la Espriella enters the runoff as the frontrunner. Cepeda’s path to victory depends on driving high turnout among his base, securing support from centrist voters who did not vote for either finalist in the first round, and potentially benefiting from any missteps by de la Espriella in the final three weeks of campaigning.

The first-round results produced no major electoral violence. The ELN announced a temporary halt to armed actions during the voting period. Authorities detained some individuals reportedly attempting to purchase votes in rural areas, but no large-scale incidents were recorded.

The incoming president will face a Congress with no natural majority aligned to the executive, a healthcare system in partial administrative disarray, a petroleum sector whose future production trajectory is in question, and regions where state presence remains contested by armed groups. The June 21 runoff will determine which vision — market-oriented restructuring or continuation of the Petro project — Colombia pursues for the next four years.

Finance Colombia’s executive editor, Loren Moss, sat down for coffee with Rupert Stebbings, the CEO of Alma Air. Stebbings, a longtime contributor to Finance Colombia, brings a wealth of experience to this new venture, including a history in international investment dating back to his time with the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia (BVC) and his role as a former board member of Viva Air.

The discussion focused on this significant milestone from Colombia’s civil aviation authority, Aerocivil, the unique operational challenges of floatplanes in Colombia, and the immense market opportunity for connecting remote and developing tourist destinations.

Finance Colombia: I’m here with Rupert Stebbings, the CEO of Alma Air, a friend, a longtime contributor to Finance Colombia, former board member of Viva Air. You know, I know that you have a long history not only working with investment, international investment, going back to the BVC and before that; but then, of course, your experience with Viva Air. And now you’re heading up this venture Alma Air. And we’ve talked about that before, but you guys have just received your operating certificate from Aerocivil, I believe. Tell me about the significance of this development and give us an update as to where things stand since we last spoke, I think back in February.

Rupert Stebbings: Yeah, sure. Good to be with you, man. We’ve been together a long time, so if you know me a long time, you know my history here. So as opposed to the operating certificate, what do you have? In Aerocivil, there’s various stages, right? And the first stage is kind of a greenlight process. You have a public audience and then they look at the plan, what you’re looking to do, they look at where you want to go, and then they give you the green light, which we’ve got a couple of weeks ago. They say, “Okay, move ahead. Sit down with us, let’s go through everything in detail.”

It’s probably the most complicated stage, stage one. It takes a lot of study and it’s a new product. It’s innovative. So there’s an education process. We’ve now got that green light. So what’s happening? This coming week my team, the pilots, the maintenance guys, the guys who really know how a plane works; they’ll be in Bogotá. They’ll be sitting down with the inspectors looking to get the inspectors appointed in Medellín, Cartagena, to move forward the process. And from there, you’re moving through the stages, it’s a four-stage process, bit by bit by bit. And then by early next year, the planes will be here. Then we check the manuals and all the technical aspects that go with that to make sure it’s absolutely safe and secure.

Finance Colombia: Now, you guys are using Textron (NYSE: TXT) Cessnas for this. What are the specific challenges that come with a floatplane operation? Because not only can these planes land at regular airports, they can also land—and I think that this is what makes your business model unique here in Colombia—they can land in rivers. They can land in keys and small islands, and they can land in areas that are less developed. So what are the technical challenges, and even not just technical, but operational challenges that that brings, along with the advantages of not being tied to, “Hey, there’s no airport here, but we can still service here,” you know?

Rupert Stebbings: No, no. Obviously, there’s a lot of Cessna Grand Caravans already in Colombia doing land to land. They’re a very common plane not just here, but in the whole world. What are the challenges? Well, the challenge is it’s a completely new product. It might exist in the Bahamas, Alaska, Vancouver, Australia, wherever you want to go. Whilst they were here 100 years ago, they haven’t been here for a long time. So what do you have to do? Like you mentioned, they can land on the sea. They can land on the sea, the lakes, on rivers. But it has to be done safely.

These airlines, these planes… seaplanes have got a tremendous track record in terms of security. We want to maintain that. So we have to sit down with the local authorities. There was a test flight carried out by another party down in Ayapel a few weeks ago. And it’s precisely for that. Aerocivil was there, they were on the plane. What are you checking? You’re checking where you’re landing. Is it safe to land? Are there people in the water? Are there boats? Are there jet skis? How is the mooring? How is the pier? Is it safe? Is it big enough? Is it away from boats? So a lot of it’s to do with security.

We know that these planes are environmentally very clean, so we don’t worry about that. But we do worry. And obviously, as an innovative new product and being pioneers in this, we need to make sure we get it absolutely spot on. And that wherever we land, wherever it is in Colombia, it’s done safely, securely, and that everyone locally knows exactly what’s going on and the benefits that come with it.

Finance Colombia: What have you seen with regards to the reception? The last time that we spoke on this, it was at ANATO back in February in Bogotá, and that’s the tourism industry convention. What has been the reaction of hotels, of tour operators, of the agencies, of the package promoters and the industry in general, when it comes to this kind of, innovative for Colombia, mode of transportation?

Rupert Stebbings: Yeah, pre the 2024 public audience, I spent a lot of time on the coast: Cartagena, Barranquilla, Santa Marta, all around the coast, Mompox, Magangué. And the reception was incredible. Public sector, we sat down with the mayor’s office, tourism, secretaries. But then we sat down with the private sector, hotels, agencies. Everyone wants in, everyone wants a new product. Why? Everyone knows that Colombian tourism is booming, but now everyone’s looking at different types of tourism, a ‘better tourist’, for want of a better phrase.

We’ve seen the cruises, AmaWaterways in the Magdalena River, starting in April, 48 cruises a year. And now are going to double that this month. They’re getting a second boat because the top-end tourists, there’s so much demand to come to Colombia. We want to be part of that. And that’s why it’s been well-received. Now, since the public audience, what’s happened is we’ve been called from all over the country. We’ve had Los Llanos, I’ve been down to the Amazon, Bahia Solano. Can we go there? Here in Medellín, Guatapé, which isn’t far from here. I’ve been and sat down with Guatapé, I’ve sat down with the mayor’s office, I’ve sat down with the city, with the town council. And they, too, want to push ahead because the connectivity from Bogotá to Guatapé can be an hour. It’s about four hours now if you want to go El Dorado to Rio Negro. Or Medellín, downtown Medellín, to get there to Guatapé. There were 3.7 million tourists in Guatapé last year. It’s a huge number. When you look at Mompox, which is 84,000, there’s massive numbers, more and more foreigners want to go there, and tourists. But right now, on a ‘puente’, a long weekend, it’s three or four hours. In a nice car, but it’s three or four hours. We can get you there in 10 minutes from downtown Medellín. So the minute we went public with this, everyone’s called us and the reception has been, I can just say, unanimously positive.

Finance Colombia: That’s impressive, especially when you think about- I mean, Guatapé, for example, from here, it would be an hour drive, but it’s more like a two-hour drive because of traffic. And this is a way to avoid that by operating these Cessnas. You can operate out of Olaya Herrera instead of having to come out of here. I think about places that are under development, like Coveñas, for example. They’re expanding Tolú, but up until now, you have not been able to get in there with a traditional 737 or A320 or something like that. The other islands and the islands that are outside of Cartagena that have been becoming more and more of a tourist draw.

Tell me financially, if we talk about from the investment perspective, you know, you guys are stable, you guys have experienced investors, but I believe that there is still opportunity. Tell me about what your goals are. Obviously, operationally, you need to go through the steps to become an operating functional airline. You’re backed by experienced investors that have not failed globally but have a track record of success around the globe when it comes to airlines. This is kind of a new and viable, but very fun project, I think. But tell me about the opportunity and the gap and the need there for additional partners when it comes to looking at bringing this project to fruition and supporting it in the future.

Rupert Stebbings: Yeah, I think over the next six months, there’s three phases. One, as you mentioned, the technical aspects of Aerocivil, which is so important. Number two, commercially, continue to build contacts, look at new locations, destinations. But number three is this: as you know, our backers have been all over the world, many places. But what we’d never pretend to be… I’ve been here 20 years, but I wouldn’t pretend to know Colombia inside out. Every time I go to the coast, or I go somewhere, somebody’s got a new idea. “Have you been to this place, or this lake’s got a beautiful eco-hotel.” We can’t get there.

So every time they tell me to go somewhere, there is new know-how, and our preference would be to have a partner, for sure. We’ve got a lot of friends we’re working with overseas who are already in the seaplane business all over the world. We speak to people in every continent on this. But also locally, Colombia is a country apart. It’s a country with a huge, huge opportunity. It’s a big country. And honestly, it would be great to have somebody alongside us, sat down with us saying, “Hey, have you thought about this? Have you done this?” As I say, we don’t pretend to know Colombia inside out. It’s an amazing country. Everyone knows that every time you see an article anywhere around the world, Colombia gets a mention. The best for this, the best for this. Pension, live, digital nomads, but also for tourism. The numbers are going through the roof.

And I think everyone, whether it’s us, an agency, a hotel, everyone’s looking for more and more know-how, more knowledge. And the more people you have inside the tent, the more people you have helping you, the easier it is to move forward, to make good decisions, and make the most of the opportunities that definitely are here. And so, you know, we’re looking for a partner, whether it’s overseas, that’s fine, whether it’s local, great as well. But we’re definitely looking for people to come on board and join us in this project, which is, as we know, it’s innovative, it’s new, it’s tremendous excitement. And if somebody wants to share in that, you know, we’re open to a conversation.

Finance Colombia: You know, I think the great thing is that intellectual humility, of not coming into a place and saying “we know everything.” And if I think about the track record of some of the investments, the investors, they go into Mexico, they partner with a local company that made things a success. They go into places like Singapore. They go into places like the U.S., and they’ve done that. And even before with Viva, every place that they’ve done that has been a success, because they’ve bought in the local intellectual capital, as well as financial capital participating, so that the local economy has a stake in things. It’s not like, “Hey, we’re from the outside and we’re just going to do things.” In other sectors, in mining, I’ve seen the companies that do it right, they follow that model. They bring in people, not like the old model that we saw in Asia, where it’s like, you’ve got to bring in a local partner so that they can screw you. Like we would see, you know, 40 years ago in India, or in a lot of places like, you’ve got to have a local partner for capital controls and things like that.

No. Colombia, as you know living here, one of the great things about Colombia is that legally we’re treated on an even par as… you know, there’s no difference. And I can speak to this having been a business owner in Colombia, you’re not treated any differently. You have no disadvantage in the local system being a foreigner. And I think that that makes it, whatever the flaws are and whatever the drawbacks are, that makes it a very safe place and an advantageous place for investment.

Rupert Stebbings: Yeah, I worked in the financial sector for decades in Asia. In Asia, it was exactly that model. We’ll parachute in and it’s us. We’ll only use the local because we need their license. So they didn’t take on as much local know-how intellect as they did. Well, that’s changed over the years. And in this sector in particular, if you look at the tourism sector here, there’s tremendous influence amongst the hotels, the agencies, from overseas. But they are all using local know-how, the people on the ground in general or locals, and we want to be part of that. As you say, I wouldn’t be absolutely stupid to come into a country with a new product, a product that was here from 1919. I turn up in 2025 saying I know all about that. No, there’s people who know, there’s people have been around. This airline sector is one of the oldest in the world. So local knowledge, I think, is fundamental.

Finance Colombia: And even in 1919, the industry was started by Germans who came in here and did it and they were able to be successful. And then the airline evolved and went through iterations and became kind of the national flag carrier of Colombia. But I think that it speaks to the friendliness that Colombia has towards investment. And the thing that you mentioned is that these people are real partners. They’re not agents that, “Oh, I need to have a license, or I need to sign off this checkbox on some kind of license form.” But these are real partners who are involved and things like that.

Rupert Stebbings: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. And you know, I’ve done a lot of research and written on Colombia, but even agent people at the World Bank, they’ll put Colombia in the top 15 countries in the world to invest for the protection of your rights when you come here, because you’re looked after when you come here, because the country wants to develop, wants to move forward, and they look after you when you get here. And I think that’s fundamental.

Finance Colombia: Absolutely. I mean, you know, I’ve been here for 11 years. I’ve never seen a form or any kind of government document that differentiates between, “Okay, check this box” or “you can’t do this because you’re a foreigner.” And Colombia is great when it comes to that. Now, let’s look at- going back to operations. What has to happen before Alma Air is flying routes, scheduled routes with passengers? Now, I know that in the U.S., you know, we had like Part 91 aviation, 132 aviation and things like that. And there’s one thing that’s a scheduled airline, there’s another thing that’s like a charter airline, and then there’s, you know, general aviation. Is the set up the same way here? And whatever the case might be, what has to happen and how far away are we from booking tickets to fly on Alma Air?

Rupert Stebbings: Okay. So, we’re going to work as an air taxi, charter, no scheduled flights. Which is similar to other countries. Most companies and seaplanes work on that basis. You call me, you tell me what you want. Obviously, we’ll have a menu: this is what you can do, call me when you want to do it, who you want to do it with, etc. So that’s how it’ll work. 100% charter air taxi, as it’s mentioned here. What do we have to do? As I mentioned, the guys are in Bogotá this coming week. They’ve got to sit down, and the aforementioned paperwork, which is the same for everybody, we need to fill in a lot of paperwork. We need to go through the manuals, which are done, but there’s something like 50+ manuals for seaplane operation. So they need to be doing a page turning, go through it. Because it’s new, right?

And also, there’s regulation. We’re also working with DIMAR, which is the coastal authority, and the internal authorities, and the environmental authorities to make sure that everyone’s on board the regulation, everyone understands the rules. So I’m going to put a plane there. What needs to be there? Who needs to be aware of it, etc.? So there’s an awful lot to be done through Aerocivil, DIMAR, and the authorities. In parallel, we’re speaking with the lessors overseas to sort out the planes, the arrival times, and then that will be going through the Christmas period into January. And then by the end of the first quarter next year, we should be seeing planes arrive here to then go through the same paperwork. You can’t just bring it here and fly it around. [Laughs.] ‘Hey, I’m here, I’m just going to fly around.’ No, not at all. We’ll bring it here, the plane has to be checked over, everyone needs to be on board. Then hopefully within around probably less than six months, you’ll be able to call me up and say, “Hey, I want to take the family and do this and this,” you know, whether it’s to go to a hotel, you want to do a sightseeing trip, you want to go to a couple of lakes in a day, you let me know and we’ll get in touch and we’ll sort you out.

Finance Colombia: Amazing. You know, I’m looking forward to it. I’m not the high roller who’s going to be like, “I want to go to a couple of lakes.” But hopefully there will be some kind of group travel opportunity and things like that over the weekend.

Rupert Stebbings: But the thing is, everyone talks about… Every time I do an interview with the press it’s, “How much, how much you’re going to cost?” “Yeah, it’s going to be really expensive.” No. Colombia is full of charter planes already. It’s already full of private planes. And I would say the price point of this is the same as you doing something special for your anniversary. You know, you want to do something special, let’s fly somewhere and go to a spa for a couple of days in a hotel, for example. We’re in that price point. We’re not in a ridiculous point. And the one thing you’ll be buying from me is time.

And that’s the key. If you’re in Bogotá, you want to go to Guatapé for a beautiful weekend and a beautiful hotel, then you don’t need to spend five hours getting there, five hours getting back. I’ll get there in one hour. So you can buy four hours for you, or three hours on the way, three hours on the way back. That’s six hours. Plus, your partner, that’s 12 hours. You get more time at your resort and not at a huge increment in price.

Finance Colombia: And, you know, the Grand Caravans have a capacity of what, like 12 or something like that?

Rupert Stebbings: It’s eight passengers plus pilot and copilot. That’s one thing we push very hard for. You’ve got to have a copilot and pilot. That’s not global, but that’s what we believe, definitely, in terms of security. Then you got the eight passengers. These planes will take up to 14 seats, but we’ve checked around the world and the most successful seaplane companies are using the eight planes. Why? Because if I’m going somewhere in a seaplane, I want to go somewhere real nice and spend a few days, I don’t want to go there with a backpack. Comfort and what I take with me.

Finance Colombia: You know, that’s a good point. My cousin, for example, runs a charter service out of Miami and he services the Caribbean. He has a Learjet and a King Air. And I remember talking to some of his passengers one time in the Bahamas and talking to him; and it’s not that the people are rich. I mean, they’re not poor, but they’re not like super rich where they’re going to fly to St. Bart’s on a private jet. But what happens is, one of the passengers explained to me, they’re mostly like avid fishermen, anglers. And they’ve got to carry all their rods and all that stuff like that. And they explain this, “Look, this is a family trip for us, and there are six of us. And by the time I pay for six airline tickets, it’s actually less expensive to fly on this charter.”

Rupert Stebbings: And the bags, and the extra bag, and the extra length luggage. When people say, “It’s going to cost me this.” I’m like, “No, it’s actually going to cost you this, because you were going to pay this. But I’m going to charge you on top for the convenience.” So it’s not an extraordinarily expensive thing to do. But that’s education, that’s the education process. And the fact that it’s so common; if you go to Vancouver, people commute to work on a seaplane. So it simply doesn’t add up that it costs you thousands of dollars just to go one way. Of course it doesn’t. But again, this is part of the education. I think in time people will come to see “this is something I can do with my family.” And hopefully we’ll fill the skies here with seaplanes, which should be great.

Finance Colombia: I would imagine that there’s also a market for things like air ambulance. Colombia has so many remote areas, there are cities in Colombia that you can only get to by river or by air. And, you know, we just published an article about the high quality of Colombian health care in places like Cali and Medellín and Bogotá. But to get people who need, you know, urgent or unusual operations or have conditions and things like that. You guys can play a vital link in that process as well.

Rupert Stebbings: Of course. It would be a second stage. But already the authorities have manifested interest in what can be done. We looked at a study in 2021, there were thousands upon thousands of air ambulance trips in one year in Colombia, from remote areas in. And they’re not using air ambulances; they’re just putting them into normal charter planes in an emergency. So that’s definitely something we looked at. The authorities are interested; the security forces are interested. You know, as you say, most bad things in Colombia take place in remote areas. Whether it’s military, whether it’s a car crash, whether it’s a heart attack on a remote island. But as we know, as you mentioned, Colombia’s got a tremendous medical system, but it’s concentrated in the main cities or even the big towns. So if you’re in a place, you don’t have to be far away to be hours and hours away. You know, if you go from Colombia to Mompox, to pick an example, you’re talking five or six hours in a car, no mainstream hospital. There’s a hospital in Magangué. But I’ve spoken to many people in Cartagena in clinics who do evacuations, and they say, “No, almost all the cases come into Cartagena or Barranquilla.” So if we can help in any way, we’re definitely there to do that.

Finance Colombia: That’s amazing. Now, is your website up and running? If interested, if people want to get in touch with you all, do they go through your website or what are the methods that you recommend?

Rupert Stebbings: Yeah, flyalma.com, up and running already. It already gives you a good indication of services, destinations, the routes we’re going to use… It’s got the history as well of seaplanes, which is very important to get into, who we are… So then go in there, look at all the information, the contact information is there, we are on LinkedIn or on Instagram. So you can find us, that’s not a problem at all. So you get in touch with us and we will definitely be there to respond ASAP.

Finance Colombia: Is there anything that you wanted to mention that I neglected to ask?

Rupert Stebbings: No, I just think that a lot of people I think have been wondering why it’s taken so long, or longer than expected. But I think you have to be respectful with the authorities. This is something new. And every time you get a new product, they’re very careful about bringing something new to Colombia. People don’t understand. When they did the seaplane test in Ayapel, the members of Aerocivil had never been on a seaplane. So the people at the very top running the airline services, they don’t know what a seaplane is, other people don’t. So it’s very important. And we’re going to isolated places, where they’re not used to these kinds of services. They’re not even used to seeing airplanes, etcetera, or even many tourists. So there’s a big education process. We’re working, obviously, with the Ministry of Commerce and Tourism, FONTUR. So we’ve got a lot of partners. It’s taken longer than desired by anybody, but we’re getting there. And now I feel there’s been a definitely a pivot of the last few months in terms of, “let’s get this done and let’s get this done as soon as possible.”

Finance Colombia: Great. And one of the things that I think I’ve seen, no matter what administration, you know, I’ve been here 11 years, I think you’ve been here longer, is that there is—and this is not a right or left thing—but there is a consensus that tourism and especially things like nature tourism and sustainable tourism are a strategic path to not only pacifying the country… and we talk about terms of peace. We talk about terms of sustainability, not places that are over-touristed, but to really develop and to bring tourism to these, maybe up until now off-the-path areas that you guys will specialize in. So I think that there is a comfort, I should say, in that no matter what happens politically, that remains a priority no matter who is controlling the reins of government.

Rupert Stebbings: No question at all. And in the webpage, we even refer to that. And we also refer back to one year ago, COP16 in Cali, where USAID, which unfortunately is no longer with us, but they mentioned “Colombiamorfosis,” which is this program of getting tourists in new areas. And we’ve been to visit new areas. In Ayapel, we met with the governor of the Zenú people in Cecilia, which is the town they have there. And we’re looking to connect these new areas, and we’re getting approached all the time. Communities are saying, “Look, we’ve got amazing wildlife, birdlife, we’ve got walks you can do in the jungle. We can take boats across lakes.”

And so what we want to do is connect them, because according to the UN, and the Petro government has backed up on this, the fastest return on investment to get people out of poverty is through tourism. It’s a UN program. The UN tourism director is actually Colombian, Natalia (Bayona), who lives in Madrid. So we’ve been in touch with her. And again, we’ve seen tourism booming. It’s been a big bet of this government, no question. It’s been successful. But I’m absolutely sure whatever government comes in now, tourism is the way to go. It’s a way to get to remote areas and connect overseas tourists or local tourists who have the money with needy communities. And between them, you can make the connection and take some of these communities out of poverty and give them a little more dignity.

Finance Colombia: I’m super excited for you all, of course, as an organization and as people. I know a lot of you are involved in this. But then also for Colombia, because of the positive benefit that it can have for Colombia. Again, I think it’s a win for you all as an organization, it’s a win for Colombia as an economy and as a people, and it’s a win for whatever financial and commercial partners that are involved in this. And so I’m super optimistic. I can’t wait for my first ever seaplane flight. I know that airlines love to have these inaugural flight things- And I’m going to be mad if I see it in the news and I didn’t hear from you [Laughs.] Yeah, you’re going to be waving down from me from up the final approach right here, right? So I’ll be calling you on WhatsApp there. But thanks a lot for your time, Rupert. Always fun to talk to you guys, again, thank you also for your contributions as an individual. And you wouldn’t say this, but as an expert. It’s more fun because I don’t always agree with you, and that makes me nuts sometimes. But it makes it fun, you know. And so can’t wait till the next time. Keep us updated and count on us to keep the public posted on what’s going on at Alma Air.

Rupert Stebbings: [Laughs.] We’ll wave. No problem, it’s alright. [Laughs.] That’s life! Great, man. Thank you for your time, and I will see you on board in some place you didn’t know you could get to. Cheers, man. Take care.

Top-Tier Rankings

Four Colombian hospitals were among the top ten in the overall ranking:

• Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá (Bogotá): Ranked third in Latin America, earning 78.75 points.
• Fundación Valle del Lili (Cali): Ranked fifth, with a score of 75.95 points.
• Fundación Cardioinfantil (Bogotá): Ranked seventh, with 74.84 points.
• Clínica Imbanaco (Cali): Ranked ninth, with 73.83 points.

Additional Colombian Hospitals in the Rankings

While a complete list of all 26 Colombian hospitals was not publicly available, several other institutions from the country were also featured in the ranking’s top 30:

• Hospital Pablo Tobón Uribe (Medellín): Ranked 14th with a score of 67.08.
• Hospital de San Vicente Fundación (Medellín & Rionegro): Ranked 19th with 60.33 points.
• Clínica Reina Sofía – Colsanitas (Bogotá): Ranked 20th with a score of 56.81.
• Méderi Hospital Universitario (Bogotá): Ranked 21st with 56.71 points.
• Clínica Las Américas AUNA (Medellín): Ranked 24th with a score of 56.33. AUNA’s parent company is a publicly traded entity on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: AUNA).
• Clínica Somer (Rionegro): Ranked 26th with 55.64 points.
• HOMI – Hospital Pediátrico de la Misericordia (Bogotá): Ranked 27th with 54.13 points.
• Fundación Hospital Infantil Los Ángeles (Pasto): Ranked 28th with 53.31 points.
• Clínica del Occidente (Bogotá): Ranked 29th in Latin America, placing 13th in Colombia and 6th in Bogotá.

Specialty Rankings

The ranking also assessed performance in specific medical specialties. While comprehensive data was not available, the leading Colombian institutions in each of the four specialties were identified:

• Cardiology: Fundación Cardioinfantil was ranked as the top Colombian hospital in this specialty and second in the region.
• Oncology: The Fundación Valle del Lili led in Colombia, ranking second overall.
• Gynecology and Obstetrics: Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá was placed third in this category. The Clínica del Occidente was also recognized for its performance in this area.
• Pediatrics: The Fundación Valle del Lili was ranked fourth in pediatrics.

Headline photo: Hospital San Vicente, sede Llanogrande (photo: Loren Moss)

As part of this expansion, InterNexa introduced its new Security Operation Center (SOC) service. This solution is designed to provide organizations with comprehensive cybersecurity management and strengthening capabilities. The SOC is characterized as an advanced monitoring and response center that integrates technology, automation (including artificial intelligence and machine learning), and intelligent real-time analysis to anticipate and effectively respond to cyber threats. The launch of the SOC is set against a backdrop of increasing cyberattacks in Colombia; the Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MinTIC) reported approximately 36 billion attempted cyberattacks in Colombia during 2024, positioning the country as the second most targeted in Latin America, accounting for 17% of total attempts.

InterNexa’s capabilities in cybersecurity, cloud, data center, and managed services are intended to support public entities in technology and innovation procurement processes. The company is part of Grupo ISA (BVC: ISA), which in turn is part of Grupo Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC, BVC: ECOPETROL), Colombia’s largest company. This affiliation provides a foundation for high-availability, scalable, and secure solutions, leveraging ISA’s 57 years of experience in critical infrastructure.

During ANDICOM, Loren Moss, executive editor of Finance Colombia, was able to spend a few minutes with InterNexa CEO Saúl Kattan to discuss the company’s strategy and objectives under his leadership; first during a press conference, followed by an exclusive one-on-one interview.

During the press conference with Saúl Kattan before the one-on-one interview, Kattan had these comments:

“This is the most important event Colombia has had. I don’t think there is any other event with as many attendees as ANDICOM. More than 6,000 attendees registered for the event. On the one hand, we are celebrating 40 years of ANDICOM, and on the other, we are celebrating 25 years of InterNexa, which is very important to us. So, we wanted to bring you all together and tell you about a few things. From InterNexa’s perspective, and from the National Government’s perspective.

I believe that from the National Government’s side, we continue to work on connectivity in the regions. We continue to make progress on various issues related to digital transformation. I believe that the most important issue is connectivity. It is how we can truly close the digital divide that exists in the country. Today, we are talking about connectivity of around 60-65%. It depends on how we measure it or who measures it. However, those people who are not connected are clearly the least well-off, the most in need. And this obviously leads to inequality. So, we need to work hard on the issue of connectivity. It should not be a plan of one government or another. This has to be a union of all the forces of the next government to push connectivity forward. It makes no sense to keep talking about new technologies, about being leaders in artificial intelligence, when all this does is increase the digital divide. Increase the difficulties between the most privileged and the least privileged.

So, to do this, we need to close that digital divide, connect Colombia, connect the country, and then we can think about new technologies. New humanized technologies, new technologies that we think about how they help people. They help people truly thrive, truly get ahead. Not just having technologies for the sake of having them. Like, now we have artificial intelligence. So what? How does it help us? How does it help ordinary people? How does it help all of us to have a better quality of life? So that’s from the government’s side. If you want, we’ll open it up for questions, and then we’ll move on to InterNexa.”

Finance Colombia: I’m here with Saúl Kattan: Kattan, the CEO of InterNexa. We are here at ANDICOM 2025. First, Saúl Kattan: thanks for making time. I know that you’re very busy closing deals and not only managing InterNexa —congratulations on that role— but you also have another position, helping the MinTIC, or the Ministry of Telecommunications, Information and Communications. If you would, tell us a little bit about your responsibilities there.

Saúl Kattan: Well, thank you for the invitation. Not only MinTIC, I’m trying to advise the government of Colombia in digital transformation. All the strategy around cybersecurity, all the strategy around data, data centers, cloud, and artificial intelligence. So that’s what I’m working on as a strategy proposition to the government in these aspects. And of course, InterNexa, which is an important player in the market.

Finance Colombia: Things are moving very quickly. We look at what artificial intelligence is doing. But you also mentioned cybersecurity. And I’ve seen several studies that show that Colombia, as a country, including the private sector, but then of course with the government as well, there are gaps when it comes to knowledge, best practices, as well as having the technical infrastructure. What are the steps that the government, but then even the private sector, like here at ANDICOM, what are the steps that we need to take here in Colombia to catch up, to make sure that the country has good defenses against cyber threats?

Saúl Kattan: I think that the most important part is the governance in cybersecurity. We have proposed to create an agency, a cybersecurity agency, that has to go to congress. Unfortunately, congress has denied this law project. The government will insist. But without an agency, a cybersecurity agency that can bring together all the entities, all the public entities, all the government into one agency, it will be very difficult. Other than that, of course, there’s technology. Different types of technology can work.

Another issue is people. We have to train people. There’s a big gap in the number of people with the knowledge of cybersecurity. We calculate that we need around 150,000 more people trained for cybersecurity. So, at the end, if we bring the government, if we bring the technology, and we bring the people, the training of people, I think we can have something more robust for the country.

Finance Colombia: InterNexa is a wholesaler, and you provide services to large-capacity consumers such as cell phone operators and such. What would this security role you’re talking about look like? How can you offer that to the end user? Would it be through the wholesale customers?

Saúl Kattan: Yes, we would not reach the end user. InterNexa’s focus is on wholesale connectivity. We serve operators and CSPs. We have a very important network, a very important neutral network, but we also provide technology services to the minor energy sector and the government sector. So the focus is on these entities, which in turn reach the end user in one way or another. So indirectly, we are reaching the end user, but the idea is to be able to continue focusing on the companies and sectors we are serving. We do not have the capacity at this time to reach the end user. Hopefully, in the future, but at this time, we do not have the capacity.

Finance Colombia: As someone with extensive experience in entities and companies with State or government participation, such as ETB, Ecopetrol, or InterNexa, what is the key to managing the interests of shareholders, whether they be the state, consumers, or private shareholders? If I remember correctly, ETB, for example, is about 80% government-owned and 20% Ecopetrol-owned, more or less. InterNexa has several shareholders. As an executive, how do you strike that balance? If you were advising a young executive, how would you advise them to survive? What would it be like?

Saúl Kattan: I believe that the great challenge for public companies is consistency. There really is no consistency in corporate governance. It often depends on politics. When the government changes, the people change. Sometimes during a government’s term, people change simply for political reasons. And as long as there is no long-term consistency, no long-term strategy, it’s a bit like what I was saying about the country’s connectivity. And the same applies to companies. You see private companies with presidents who last six, seven, eight, 10, or even 20 years. And they have a strategy. And the strategy is being fulfilled. Some are better than others, but it is being fulfilled.

In public companies, unfortunately, governments change and people change. And when people change, they come back and start from scratch because they think, “Well, this comes from the previous government, so let’s do the opposite.” And we see this at ETB. The company was doing wonderfully well, and then it was a debacle. Simply because of a political decision. Now they are trying to rescue it, but we have been in a debacle at ETB for 10 years. The stock dropped 95%. And what happened? Nothing happened. Because it was a political issue. And the financial damage that was done was enormous. If this had been maintained, not even the administration, but if the strategy had been maintained, today ETB would be worth four or five times more than it was 10 years ago. So I recommend that. That you have to maintain a certain long-term strategy for things to work.

Finance Colombia: I remember 10 years ago, when I lived in Bogotá, at the time you were leading ETB, and ETB rolled out something very impressive, and that was fiber to the household. And that was very new at the time, and Colombia was a leader in that, and that was under your leadership there. I now live in Antioquia. I have fiber optic to the house, and I tease some of my friends back in the US that I have double and triple the speeds in a rural area of Antioquia that they can get at any cost, unless they went to an enterprise plan or something like that, back in the States, in some areas, and that’s really amazing.

What have been the keys to success in rolling out fiber? Not just with InterNexa, which obviously is a wholesale provider to the carriers and large enterprises, but you also have experience at the retail level. And how has Colombia led with the adoption of fiber optic as a standard, as opposed to an exotic alternative?

Saúl Kattan: Well, no, I think fiber optic is the best technology that we can have for connectivity. I believe that now, I believed this 10 or 12 years ago when I got to ETB, that was a big project to show that ETB was not a phone company. It was much more than that. We took advantage of all the pipelines, all the networks that ETB had, and we deployed fiber. We were the first ones in Colombia, one of the first ones in the region. We were leaders in bringing fiber to Bogotá. At that time, 100 megabytes per second was amazing. Today it’s very good, but at that time it was outstanding.

Finance Colombia: Exactly.

Saúl Kattan: And of course, that took other companies to see what was happening in ETB, to see what the customers believed that fiber could do, and they started deploying fiber around the country.

Finance Colombia: To catch up.

Saúl Katta: To catch up, and to other countries as well. But today, even today, 10 years later, we can see that Bogotá is a more advanced place in Colombia with fiber.

Finance Colombia: Now, at InterNexa, you have a role as an enterprise that has the State and other entities with shared ownership in InterNexa, and so aside from being a company, you have a public purpose and a public mandate. We just got finished talking about how great things are in Bogotá, how great things are in Medellín, but there are parts of Colombia… We’re here on the Caribbean coast, we’re in Cartagena, but we can go a couple more hours and we’re in La Guajira, or the other way towards Panama, and we’re back in the Gulf of Urabá, or Chocó, or the south like the Amazon and Vaupés and those areas. So in Bogotá, Medellín, everything is world-class, but there are parts of Colombia that maybe have a lot of catching up to do. What is the role that InterNexa can play as a backbone provider, the social side of things, to help advance and equalize that connectivity?

Saúl Kattan: I do believe that Colombia has a big gap in connectivity. Today, 30 or 40%, depending on how you measure things, of people in Colombia do not have connectivity or have very bad connectivity. And I do believe that it doesn’t matter if you do a deployment to low-income areas to make things profitable. You can do a business providing fiber, providing connectivity to all these places that you mentioned that do not have connectivity. And I think that it’s possible. I think that in some places, maybe we need a little bit of help, financial help from the government. But other than that, I think there are a lot of places where if we get the fiber there, it will bring connectivity. There are a lot of ISPs, small ISPs, that can bring connectivity to the households and decrease the connectivity gap. So I think it is possible. I think it’s possible.

I think that InterNexa is a profitable business. We do business to make money because of our return for our investors, which is ISA. But of course, we can help the people. We can help all these regions with no connectivity, being a profitable company. I don’t think they’re going the wrong way.

Finance Colombia: Great. So that means that with ISA, InterNexa is generating profits; it doesn’t need government subsidies. Right now, when we’re in a fiscal crunch here in Colombia, it’s actually helping to solve the problem rather than saying, “Hey, we need subsidies” or things like that.

Saúl Kattan: Yes, of course. The problem of places like Colombia and many other countries is that the big carriers want to have the big markets, of course. That’s where the meat is. That’s where the big profits are. So you go to Bogotá, you go to Medellin, you go to Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, the big cities. But when you have to go to other places, you have to make a much bigger effort to get there. It becomes much more difficult. There are profits, but probably a lower amount of profits.

Finance Colombia: Right.

Saúl Kattan: But at the end, if you can make both, if you can bring all the fiber, the big networks to the big cities, but also to the small cities, I think that the complement is great for the country. And it will bring more profits for everyone. Because if there’s connectivity, there will be more opportunities for the people. There will be better health for the people. There will be a lot of places where people can go for tourism. And it will bring more consumption of the internet.

Finance Colombia: Absolutely.

Saúl Kattan: And it will increase the use of the fiber. So, at the end, it is a win-win situation for everyone.

Finance Colombia: I think just like roads, the fiber optics and connectivity backbone, whatever technology, if it’s a microwave or a satellite or fiber, is the great driver these days, even more so than roads, as was the case, let’s say, in the 20th century. Because, you know, it breaks my heart. I was in parts of La Guajira, and I saw little communities. They didn’t even have cellular access, let alone internet access. They have no access at all. And so even if you’re a school, even if you’re a student and you do your part, it doesn’t matter because you’re going to be left behind without that. And so it’s so critical to get these services to these areas where you can develop that human talent.

Saúl Kattan: It is critical and it is very important for the development of the country. You don’t have to go to La Guajira to see this. When you go 20 minutes away from Bogotá, you can see it. There is no connectivity or very bad connectivity. You cannot hold a conference call going from Bogotá to La Calera. Where La Calera is, for the people that don’t know, is basically a part of Bogotá.

Finance Colombia: Yeah, it’s a suburb in the northeast.

Saúl Kattan: A big part of Bogotá, yeah. So there’s a lot of work to do. There are a lot of opportunities. There are a lot of investments to be made. And it’s about time. It’s about money. And it’s about the consistency of the next government and the next couple of governments that we can continue working and doing things. Unfortunately, politics work in a different direction. And when another government comes, they want to change everything. And then you don’t get the benefits of a long-term strategy.

Finance Colombia: Exactly. And I guess I would say don’t feel too bad because as we can see, that’s not a problem unique to Colombia. Back in my own home country, we have the same problems, in other parts of the world as well. But you’ve been very successful navigating this. I think I first met you back at ETB, and I’ve followed your career since then. You’ve had success doing your part at Ecopetrol, of course. And that’s almost impossible. It’s like one of those reality shows. You know? So congratulations. You’ve been able to have a positive impact wherever you go. And I appreciate your time. I want to let you get back to the deal-making and the moving and the shaking as we do here. And it’s great to see you again.

Saúl Kattan: Thank you very much.

Finance Colombia: Absolutely.

Saúl Kattan: Thank you. Thank you for your time.

The conflict centers on a resolution passed by the European Parliament on September 9, which highlighted an escalation in political violence in Colombia throughout 2025. The resolution condemned a series of violent acts, including the assassination of Senator and presidential pre-candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, warning that such crimes are not isolated incidents but part of a wider pattern of intimidation that threatens democratic stability ahead of the 2026 elections.

Members of the European People’s Party (EPP), including Hermann Tertsch and Juan Ignacio Zoido, have voiced specific concerns. They allege that the Colombian executive branch is indirectly enabling groups such as the Clan del Golfo, FARC dissidents, and the Cartel de los Soles, a transnational criminal network allegedly operating out of Venezuela.

Speaking to Colombia’s W Radio, Tertsch asserted that these criminal organizations have expanded their operations during Petro’s tenure. “The international mafias could even be Gustavo Petro’s own interlocutors,” Tertsch stated, referencing alleged links between the government and criminal structures.

The parliamentarians cited recent high-profile attacks as evidence of the deteriorating security situation, including the murder of Senator Uribe Turbay, a car bomb attack in Cali, and the downing of a military helicopter in Antioquia that resulted in the deaths of 12 police officers. They argue these events are part of a coordinated strategy to destabilize Colombian institutions.

“The international mafias could even be Gustavo Petro’s own interlocutors,” Tertsch stated, referencing alleged links between the government and criminal structures.

Juan Ignacio Zoido, speaking to Blu Radio, clarified that the resolution is not a political judgment but a response to objective data. He reminded listeners of Petro’s campaign promise of “Total Peace,” contrasting it with the current security climate. “Armed violence is threatening the democratic stability of Colombia, by a man who had promised absolute peace but is achieving the highest rates of crime in the country,” Zoido declared. He added that the tone of speeches from the presidency contributes to social tension, indirectly facilitating the actions of criminal groups.

In response, President Gustavo Petro, during an official event in Timbío, Cauca, dismissed the European resolution as “senseless” (“una sinrazón”). He countered that the perpetrators behind Senator Uribe Turbay’s assassination were not domestic but rather an international mafia operating from Europe.

“It is not because of Petro’s speech that Senator Uribe Turbay was killed; he was killed by the mafia according to the evidence, and that mafia lives in Europe and not here in Colombia,” the president affirmed.

In a later, more extensive speech in Popayán, Petro directed a message to Europe, invoking historical grievances of colonialism and slavery and accusing the parliamentarians of hypocrisy. He asked the assembled crowd: “What does this town say to Europe? Is it the president who is denying democracy to Colombians, to Latin America, and to the world? What do the indigenous people of America say? Is President Petro anti-democratic?” He continued, “The anti-democrats are those who applaud those who drop bombs on babies… I ask the children and the youth of Europe, all of you, to rise.”

Despite the president’s rebuttal, the MEPs have stated their intention to continue monitoring the situation in Colombia closely, particularly as the 2026 election cycle approaches. Tertsch mentioned that parliamentary groups such as Patriots for Europe and the Spanish political party Vox, via its Foro Madrid initiative, will maintain rigorous oversight of the Colombian government.

Zoido rejected Petro’s characterization of the resolution’s supporters as far-right, insisting that a majority of the political parties that backed the measure are not. “What we want is for there to be a strong Colombia from a democratic point of view,” he said. “We have enough data to be concerned about the escalation of violence and insecurity in the country.”

The European Parliament’s resolution also calls for the protection of political candidates, human rights defenders, and members of the security forces, emphasizing that impunity for recent crimes only encourages further attacks.

European Parliament. Photo credit: Elekes Andor/Wikipedia.