The election took place during a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives, with 269 of the 286 members of Congress participating: 95 senators and 174 representatives. The other 17 lawmakers either did not attend the session or abstained from voting.

Laverde, a lawyer with ties to the Partido Liberal, had served since 2015 as secretary of the Senate’s Sixth Committee, which handles matters related to public services, transportation, education, communications and technological development.

He will now lead the Contraloría General de la República, Colombia’s highest fiscal oversight body, for four years. His main responsibilities will include overseeing the management of public funds and assets, determining fiscal liability when resources are misused and pursuing proceedings aimed at recovering state funds.

“We will adopt global standards to pursue assets and fight corruption anywhere in the world. We will be the home of transparency and a technical institution at the service of the Colombian people,” Laverde said after his election.

“I will defend all citizens under an unwavering premise: zero political persecution, zero impunity. The Contraloría will not be a political weapon, but it will have all the resolve and authority necessary to punish, without distinction, anyone who touches public funds,” he added.

An election without direct government backing

Laverde’s candidacy received support from several parties backing the new government, although neither Salvación Nacional, De la Espriella’s party, nor the executive branch directly participated in selecting the candidate.

The president and his interior minister, Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, chose to remain on the sidelines to avoid becoming involved in another political dispute with the opposition after the executive branch suffered a defeat in the election of the Senate president at the beginning of the new legislative term.

Lara publicly acknowledged the government’s decision not to participate in the comptroller general election and urged its allies not to strike deals with or support the Pacto Histórico, which he described as an “opposition party and enemy of the government.” A similar situation occurred during the election of the Senate president, when the government lost because of an alliance between the Centro Democrático and the opposition Pacto Histórico, led by former President Gustavo Petro.

Laverde’s candidacy, however, ultimately drew support from different political sectors.

Before the vote, the Centro Democrático, Partido Liberal, Partido Conservador, Partido de la U and Cambio Radical issued a joint letter saying Laverde possessed “the highest professional, technical and personal qualifications to exercise this important responsibility,” backed by “a recognized career, extensive experience and deep knowledge of public affairs.”

Even the Pacto Histórico, the main left-wing opposition force led by former President Gustavo Petro, announced its support for Laverde hours before the vote.

“Our decision responds to the need for an independent, transparent Contraloría that firmly defends public resources,” the congressional bloc said on Facebook.

A key position in the system of checks and balances

Although Laverde received the backing of parties allied with the executive branch, his election also puts Colombia’s system of separation of powers and checks and balances to the test.

The Contraloría General de la República is the state’s highest fiscal oversight body, primarily responsible for ensuring that public resources and assets are managed efficiently and transparently and for determining liability when they are misused.

Its oversight extends to resources administered by the different branches of government, including the executive branch headed by De la Espriella, as well as Congress and the judiciary. The election of the comptroller general is therefore particularly sensitive for any administration because the officeholder must exercise fiscal oversight over the national government throughout the four-year term.

The election takes on additional significance in the current political landscape: Although the new government has allies in Congress, no political force holds a sufficient majority on its own, requiring agreements among different parties to secure major legislative and institutional decisions.

Before joining Congress, Laverde worked as a judicial attorney at the Procuraduría Regional de Risaralda and served as a member of the Caldas Departmental Assembly, in his home department.

His more than a decade working inside Congress has given him extensive knowledge of how the legislative branch operates. Since 2015, he had served as secretary of the Senate’s Sixth Committee, a position from which he participated in the consideration of initiatives involving some of the country’s major areas of public policy.

That career now presents a significant shift in responsibilities: After more than 10 years working within Congress, Laverde will lead one of the institutions responsible for overseeing the use of public resources, including those administered by the same branch of government where he previously worked.

President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella has completed the formation of his Cabinet ahead of taking office on August 7, assembling an 18-member team that includes nine women and nine men in compliance with Colombia’s gender parity law. The appointments complete the lineup of officials who will lead the country’s executive branch during his first year in office.

The Cabinet’s composition offers the first clues about the profile the new administration may adopt, becoming the first Colombian government led by a politician identified with the far right.

Throughout the presidential campaign, De la Espriella portrayed himself as a political outsider, describing himself as one of “los nunca”, those who had never governed before, while referring to his rivals as “los de siempre,” a label for Colombia’s traditional political class.

One of the central questions is whether he will govern following the models of leaders he has cited as references, such as Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, or whether he will ultimately rely on the traditional right that has governed Colombia repeatedly within the constitutional framework and the country’s system of checks and balances.

That debate had already emerged during the campaign when he selected José Manuel Restrepo, an economist and former minister under President Iván Duque, as his running mate. Widely regarded as a technocrat, Restrepo’s nomination was interpreted as a signal of moderation to voters who questioned the presidential candidate’s limited political and government experience.

The final Cabinet combines ministers who served in previous administrations, representatives of traditional political dynasties, business leaders, figures aligned with the MAGA movement and President Donald Trump, representatives of evangelical churches and Christian communities, and several officials with no previous experience in the national government. It also includes a number of politicians who were outspoken opponents of the outgoing administration of Gustavo Petro.

Top row, from left: Elsa Noguera (Transport), Mauricio Gómez Amín (Commerce, Industry and Tourism) and Viviane Morales (Education). Bottom row, from left: Jaime Andrés Beltrán (Housing), Juliana Gutiérrez Zuluaga (Sports) and Iván Cancino (Justice and Law). Photos from the ministers’ social media accounts.

The most technocratic appointments

Among this group, one of the appointments that generated the greatest expectations was Ana María Vesga as health minister, one of the country’s most sensitive portfolios after years of debate over Colombia’s health care system.

A lawyer and representative of the business sector, Vesga previously served as executive president of ACEMI, the association representing Colombia’s leading EPS or health insurance providers. From that position, she became one of the country’s main voices on the health system crisis, its financing and proposals to strengthen it. Eliminating the EPS system was one of the main objectives of the unsuccessful health reforms promoted by the government of Gustavo Petro.

Another top priority for the incoming administration will be security, which De la Espriella says has deteriorated because of “the failure of Petro’s Total Peace policy.” He appointed retired Gen. Jorge Mora as defense minister. With more than 35 years of military service, academic credentials and technical expertise, Mora will lead the government’s strategy against illegal armed groups, which the president-elect has given an ultimatum to abandon criminal activity. Mora also unsuccessfully ran for public office with the endorsement of Centro Democrático, the right-wing party founded by former President Álvaro Uribe.

María Nohemí Arboleda, appointed minister of Mines and Energy, represents a profile that bridges technical expertise and politics. Since 2016 she has led XM, the company responsible for operating Colombia’s national electricity transmission grid, after spending much of her career at ISA, the state-controlled energy company based in Medellín. One of her main challenges will be the possible reactivation of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a method of oil and gas extraction criticized by the outgoing government for its environmental impact.

Representatives of traditional political dynasties

Among figures affiliated with Colombia’s traditional political parties and family political clans, those De la Espriella has referred to as “los de siempre”, Elsa Noguera stands out as the incoming transportation minister. She previously served as mayor of Barranquilla, governor of Atlántico and housing minister, while building much of her political career within Cambio Radical, the party linked to the Char political clan, one of the new president’s main political allies.

Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, the incoming interior minister, also fits that profile. He served two terms as a senator for Cambio Radical and has maintained close political ties with former Presidents Álvaro Uribe and Iván Duque, as well as former Vice President Germán Vargas Lleras, all leading figures of Colombia’s conservative right.

Indalecio Dangond, who will head the Ministry of Agriculture, advised the administrations of Ernesto Samper (Partido Liberal), Andrés Pastrana (Partido Conservador) and Álvaro Uribe (Centro Democrático), and also worked for Fedepalma, the palm oil producers’ federation that he will now oversee as minister.

Mauricio Gómez Amín, appointed minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, served two terms as senator, was a member of the House of Representatives and a city council member. He also managed De la Espriella’s presidential campaign and is considered a key political ally of the Char clan in Barranquilla.

Also in this group is three-term Centro Democrático Senator Paola Holguín, who will become culture minister. Although she sought her party’s presidential nomination, she distanced herself after Paloma Valencia was selected.

Holguín also maintains close political ties with Medellín Mayor Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, whose sister, Juliana Gutiérrez, has been appointed sports minister. They are joined by Natalia López, the incoming labor minister, who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate under the Creemos movement led by Fico Gutiérrez.

Fabio Arjona, the incoming environment minister, served as deputy environment minister during the Ernesto Samper administration from 1997 to 1998. He later led Conservation International in Colombia for two decades.

Rounding out this group is Miguel Gómez, the incoming finance minister. He belongs to one of Colombia’s traditional Conservative families: he is the nephew of slain Conservative leader Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, grandson of former President Laureano Gómez and brother of current Senator Enrique Gómez.

President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella poses with his Cabinet during a leadership retreat ahead of his inauguration. Photo published on X by the incoming administration.

Those who had never held government office

Five Cabinet members most clearly embody De la Espriella’s campaign concept of “los nunca”: Jorge Mora (Defense), criminal lawyer Iván Cancino (Justice and Law), audiovisual expert Alexandra Falla (Information and Communications Technologies), Omar Bula (Foreign Affairs) and Claudia Benavides (Science, Technology and Innovation).

Omar Bula’s appointment has attracted particular attention. Although De la Espriella has pledged to strengthen relations with the United States, the incoming foreign minister’s most significant international experience came between 1989 and 2012 through several missions with the United Nations World Food Program. At the same time, in recent years he has become a strong critic of the UN, describing it as a “left-wing directory” with an “anti-Western globalist agenda.” On social media he has also defended positions associated with the MAGA movement and argued that climate change is a false “woke idea.”

Claudia Benavides, meanwhile, was selected through a digital “talent hunt” platform created by De la Espriella to receive applications from citizens interested in joining the government. According to the president-elect, she was chosen from more than 300,000 applicants and had no previous relationship with him.

Signals to religious sectors

The presence of leaders linked to religious and Christian groups is another defining feature of the Cabinet.

The most prominent figure is former Senator and former Attorney General Viviane Morales. Although she built much of her political career within Partido Liberal, she has embraced conservative positions on same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, euthanasia and abortion. She also led a referendum initiative seeking to prohibit adoption by same-sex couples, although it was rejected by the House of Representatives.

Her appointment as education minister has raised concerns among academic and liberal sectors, particularly after stating that schools should “remove Marx and bring God back into the classroom.” Morales is also the wife of Carlos Alonso Lucío, a former M-19 guerrilla member who helped shape the ideology behind the Salvación Nacional movement and De la Espriella’s government.

Also, in this category is Jaime Andrés Beltrán, the incoming housing minister. The removed former mayor of Bucaramanga, Christian pastor and outspoken admirer of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele reflects the growing political influence of Christian movements within the governing coalition.

Between change and continuity

The Cabinet’s composition partially contrasts with one of De la Espriella’s central campaign messages: governing with “los nunca,” referring to people who, as he repeatedly said, had “never lived off the state’s payroll” and had never belonged to Colombia’s traditional political class.

Beyond the individual appointments, the Cabinet provides the first concrete indication of the governing model De la Espriella intends to pursue over the next four years.

The combination of figures drawn from the traditional political establishment, technocrats, private-sector representatives, leaders close to Christian movements and several officials with no previous government experience suggests a strategy focused more on governability and institutional stability than on political disruption.

That balance will be tested from the beginning of the administration in a highly fragmented Congress where no political force holds a majority, forcing the new president to negotiate each of his major reforms while confronting challenges including security, economic recovery, health care reform and strengthening relations with the United States.

Colombia’s National Electoral Council (CNE) has officially certified the members of the country’s new Congress for the 2026 – 2030 legislative term, which was sworn in on July 20, through Resolution 3328 of 2026, concluding the national vote-counting process for the legislative elections.

More about Colombia’s electoral process? Colombia Officially Certifies President-Elect Abelardo de la Espriella. Here’s How the Country’s Vote Validation System Works

The resolution confirmed the election of 102 senators chosen by popular vote following the official tally of 19,478,739 ballots. The Senate will also include former presidential candidate Iván Cepeda, who was awarded the opposition seat guaranteed under Colombia’s Constitution after finishing second in the presidential election.

In the Senate, the Pacto Histórico coalition, led by outgoing President Gustavo Petro, emerged as the largest bloc with 26 seats, although well short of an outright majority. It is followed by the Centro Democrático party with 17 seats, the Partido Liberal Colombiano with 13, the Alianza por Colombia coalition, led by the Partido Verde (Green Party), with 11, the Partido Conservador with 10, the Partido de la U with eight, the Cambio Radical-ALMA coalition with seven, the Ahora Colombia coalition with five, and the National Salvation Movement, President Abelardo de la Espriella‘s party, with four seats.

The remaining two Senate seats correspond to Indigenous constituencies and are held by representatives of the Indigenous and Social Alternative Movement (MAIS) and the National Organization of Indigenous Authorities of Colombia.

The CNE also certified the composition of the House of Representatives, which consists of 183 lawmakers elected from Colombia’s departments, the Capital District of Bogotá and the country’s special electoral constituencies.

Unlike the Senate, which is elected through a nationwide constituency, members of the House of Representatives are elected from territorial and special constituencies, resulting in a more geographically diverse chamber with stronger representation from regional political parties.

The 183 House seats are distributed as follows: 161 represent Colombia’s departments and Bogotá; 16 are reserved for victims of the country’s armed conflict through the Special Temporary Peace Constituencies; two represent Afro-Colombian communities; one represents the Raizal community of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina; one is reserved for Indigenous communities; one represents Colombians living abroad; and one additional seat is reserved for the opposition and will be held by Aida Quilcué, the vice presidential running mate of Iván Cepeda.

Coalition alignments begin

With the installation of the new Congress, the deadline also began under Law 1909 of 2018, known as the Opposition Statute, requiring political parties represented in Congress to formally declare whether they will support the government, join the opposition or remain independent. The deadline expires on August 20, 2026.

So far, President Abelardo de la Espriella has secured the support of four political parties: National Salvation, Cambio Radical, Centro Democrático, and the Partido Conservador.

The backing of Cambio Radical is particularly significant because newly appointed Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara Restrepo belongs to the party and will be responsible for building legislative majorities for the new administration. The Char clan, the influential political and business group based in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla, has supported De la Espriella since the beginning of his presidential campaign, is also part of Cambio Radical.

By contrast, the Pacto Histórico announced it will serve as the main opposition force under the leadership of former President Gustavo Petro and Senator Iván Cepeda. Meanwhile, the Liberal, Green Party, and De La U have yet to decide whether they will join the government coalition, remain independent or declare themselves in opposition.

Read more: De la Espriella Begins Building Congressional Support with Interior Minister Appointment and Early Political Alliances

A fragmented Congress

Combined, the Pacto Histórico will hold the largest congressional caucus with 69 lawmakers (43 in the House of Representatives and 26 in the Senate), followed by the Centro Democrático with 47 seats, and the Liberals with 37.

The distribution confirms a highly fragmented Congress, with no political force holding an outright majority in either chamber, where 52 votes are required in the Senate and 92 in the House. As a result, both the government and the opposition will need to negotiate support for each bill individually, a situation similar to that faced by the outgoing administration.

The first legislative session provided an early example of that dynamic. During the vote for Senate president, widely considered the most influential position in Congress, De la Espriella’s government backed Senator Alfredo Deluque of Partido de La U in an effort to strengthen ties with the party, which has yet to define its relationship with the new administration.

Instead, Senator Honorio Henríquez of the Centro Democrático won the post with 56 votes, defeating Deluque, who received 45.

The outcome underscored the absence of stable legislative majorities and suggested that relations between the executive and Congress will depend on continuous negotiations over the next four years within Colombia’s constitutional system of separated powers and institutional checks and balances.

Just over a month before president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella takes office, Colombia’s political landscape is beginning to take shape as the incoming administration seeks to build congressional support, a key requirement for governing after August 7, 2026.

The first step in that strategy was the appointment of Rodrigo Lara Restrepo as minister of the Interior, the first Cabinet nomination announced by the far-right De la Espriella since his victory in the presidential runoff.

The appointment is no coincidence. The president-elect’s party, Salvación Nacional, will hold only four seats in the new Congress, an insufficient number to advance its legislative agenda without reaching agreements with other political parties.

In that context, the Ministry of the Interior takes on a central role, as it will be responsible for managing the executive branch’s relationship with Congress and negotiating the majorities needed to pass legislation and reforms.

Lara Restrepo, once widely known as Colombia’s “anti-corruption czar,” served as director of the Presidential Program for Efficiency, Transparency and the Fight Against Corruption from 2006 to 2007 under then-president Álvaro Uribe. He later served two terms in the Senate (2007-10 and 2018-22) and one term in the House of Representatives (2014-18), experience that has given him extensive knowledge of how Colombia’s legislature operates.

He is also the son of former Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who was assassinated in 1984 on the orders of drug leader Pablo Escobar after leading the government’s war against the Medellín Cartel.

“No more backroom deals. No more hidden pacts. No more corruption,” De la Espriella wrote on X when announcing the appointment. The president-elect also said that, with the support of the new minister, his administration would begin “an era of harmony, transparency and major social reforms.”

Lara Restrepo responded by saying, “We will forge a broad agreement around the fundamental issues that unite us and that can endure over time.”

El que NUNCA abandonó lo que más ama.

Emprendedor, abogado, docente universitario, senador de la República, presidente de la Cámara de Representantes y zar anticorrupción.

El que NUNCA, a pesar de haber sido víctima de la violencia, dejó de trabajar por su Patria; el que NUNCA… pic.twitter.com/K2QYhpjvV7

— Abelardo De La Espriella (@ABDELAESPRIELLA) June 26, 2026

Political coalitions begin to take shape

Alongside the appointment of the interior minister, political parties have begun defining their positions toward the incoming administration.

Law 1909 of 2018, known as the Opposition Statute, requires political parties represented in Congress to declare whether they will join the government, remain independent or enter the opposition within one month of the installation of the new Congress, scheduled for July 20, 2026.

The first formal endorsement of the incoming administration came from Centro Democrático, the party led by former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, which will become the second-largest bloc in Congress with 46 seats: 17 in the Senate and 29 in the House of Representatives.

That decision was followed by Cambio Radical, the party to which Lara Restrepo belongs, which, despite its relatively weak electoral performance, will hold 19 seats in Congress, six senators and 13 representatives. In recent days, Creemos, the political movement led by Medellín Mayor Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, also announced its support. The party will hold two seats in the House of Representatives.

Although these endorsements strengthen the president-elect politically, they remain far from guaranteeing a legislative majority. Moreover, De la Espriella has not issued any public statement regarding those endorsements.

Attention is now focused on the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and the Party de La U, none of which has yet decided whether it will support the incoming administration, remain independent or join the opposition. Under the legal deadline, those parties have until August 19 to formally announce their decisions, a development that could significantly reshape the political landscape.

Attention is now focused on the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and the Party de La U, none of which has yet decided whether it will support the incoming administration, remain independent or join the opposition. Under the legal deadline, those parties have until August 19 to formally announce their decisions, a development that could significantly reshape the political landscape.

Meanwhile, Pacto Histórico, the largest political coalition in the new Congress, has announced that it will serve as the opposition under the leadership of former presidential candidate Iván Cepeda.

The coalition holds 66 seats across both chambers and could coordinate with other center-left groups, including Alianza por Colombia (20 seats), representatives elected through the Special Peace Constituencies (16 seats) and other smaller progressive parties.

A fragmented Congress

The fragmentation of the new Congress makes the Ministry of the Interior one of the most strategic Cabinet posts in the incoming administration.

De la Espriella’s government will need to build permanent coalitions to advance any legislative initiative, particularly during its first months in office, when it must submit both the National Development Plan and the General Budget of the Nation to Congress.

In addition to parliamentary opposition led by Cepeda, the incoming administration will also have to contend with the outgoing President Gustavo Petro‘s continued ability to mobilize public support.

Colombia’s Congress consists of 103 senators and 183 members of the House of Representatives. Depending on the type of legislation, bills require simple majorities, absolute majorities or, in the case of constitutional amendments, approval by two-thirds of both chambers.

In the coming weeks, De la Espriella is expected to announce the remaining members of his Cabinet, which must be finalized before his inauguration on August 7.

Want to read more? After a Polarized Vote, Colombia’s Next President Must Navigate a Fragmented Congress

The difference between the two candidates was 673,125 votes, equivalent to 2.84% of the total, a relatively narrow margin that points to a closely contested runoff in a highly polarized political environment.

For De la Espriella, the election marks an unprecedented moment in recent Colombian political history: it is the first time a far-right candidacy has reached a presidential runoff with a realistic chance of winning the presidency. For Cepeda, the race represents an opportunity to continue the political project launched by President Gustavo Petro, the first democratically elected left-wing president in Colombia’s history.

A system designed to limit presidential power

Colombia now finds itself divided between two political visions that appear difficult to reconcile. Regardless of who wins, the next administration is likely to face a period marked by political division, social mobilization and sustained confrontation, reflecting the concentration of support behind two ideologically opposed movements.

Beyond ideological differences, however, the key question for markets, institutions and the international community is how governability would function under either scenario.

Colombia operates under one of Latin America’s most stable institutional frameworks, built on a system of checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches. This structure has allowed for political alternation, regular elections and the absence of prolonged institutional breakdowns throughout the country’s contemporary history.

In that context, neither candidate has a clear path to implementing major structural reforms without building broad political agreements.

De la Espriella would begin with legislative disadvantages

De la Espriella enters the runoff as the frontrunner after winning the first round, but he faces a significant legislative constraint. His political movement, Salvación Nacional, secured only three seats in the Senate and one seat in the House of Representatives, a level of representation insufficient to pass major reforms without broad congressional coalitions.

Colombia’s Congress consists of 103 senators and 183 representatives. Depending on the type of legislation, bills require simple majorities, absolute majorities or, in the case of constitutional amendments, support equivalent to two-thirds of both chambers.

Given that reality, a De la Espriella administration would depend heavily on alliances with other political forces. His first major endorsement came from Centro Democrático, the party of former President Álvaro Uribe, which holds 46 congressional seats (17 in the Senate and 29 in the House).

He could also seek agreements with conservative parties such as the Conservative Party (29 seats), Cambio Radical (19) and the Party of La U (19).

Even so, legislative arithmetic suggests that each reform would require separate negotiations and continuous political bargaining, including with smaller parties, potentially increasing political costs for the executive branch, as has occurred under Petro’s administration.

Even so, legislative arithmetic suggests that each reform would require separate negotiations and continuous political bargaining, including with smaller parties, potentially increasing political costs for the executive branch, as has occurred under Petro’s administration.

De la Espriella remains far from the numbers needed to secure congressional majorities. As a result, he could seek to appeal directly to voters through referendums or popular consultations. However, such mechanisms involve lengthy procedures and have not always been successful because of participation thresholds and voting requirements.

Examples include former President Juan Manuel Santos’ 2016 peace plebiscite, which reached the participation threshold but was rejected by voters, the 2018 anti-corruption consultation, which failed to obtain enough votes to enact legislation, and former President Álvaro Uribe’s 2003 referendum proposal aimed at reducing the size of the state. For those reasons, this route appears difficult to pursue successfully.

Cepeda would have a broader legislative base

Cepeda’s situation would be different, though not necessarily easier, since he also lacks an outright congressional majority.

In fact, reaching the runoff already represents a significant achievement given that he finished second in the first round. A similar situation occurred in 2014, when Juan Manuel Santos overcame a first-round deficit through multiple political alliances and a campaign centered on national unity around the peace process.

Cepeda is backed by the Pacto Histórico coalition, which emerged as the largest political force in the new Congress with 64 seats across both chambers. Additional support could come from center-left groups such as Alianza por Colombia (20 seats), representatives elected through the Special Peace Constituencies (16 seats), and other smaller progressive parties.

Although that configuration would bring him closer to legislative majorities, it would still fall short of guaranteeing automatic approval of complex reforms.

Petro’s administration offers a useful precedent. Through temporary political agreements, it managed to pass several significant initiatives, including labor reform measures, peace-related policies and a tax reform package. However, it struggled to advance more ambitious projects, including healthcare reform, agrarian and land policies, and the consolidation of the Ministry of Equality.

Cepeda would also inherit part of the political burden associated with the current administration, particularly on issues related to security, public health and economic management.

Proposals such as a future constituent assembly, an initiative championed by Petro, have already generated opposition among political rivals and segments of the electorate, potentially creating additional challenges for a Cepeda administration.

Under either scenario, the next president will need an Interior Minister capable of navigating Congress and building multiple legislative agreements for each major policy initiative.

On March 8, Colombia elected the Congress that will exercise legislative authority during the 2026–2030 term. From more than 3,200 candidates, voters chose the 102 senators (upper house) and 182 members of the House of Representatives (lower house) who will make up the country’s legislative branch.

According to preliminary reports from the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil (RNEC), with 98.4% of polling stations counted, equivalent to 19,220,365 votes tallied, the new Congress has been defined electorally, however, it should be noted that these seat projections correspond to the official preliminary count, which still must go through several formal procedures before the final results are certified.

How the Senate Race is Shaping Up?

The Pacto Histórico, the party of current President Gustavo Petro, obtained around 22% of the vote (4,402,601), which would allow it to increase its representation from 20 senators in the current legislature to approximately 25 seats in the next term.

In second place is the Centro Democrático, the party of former President Álvaro Uribe, with about 15% of the vote (3,020,459), potentially increasing its representation from 13 to 17 seats.

The Partido Liberal would rank third with 13 seats (2,268,658 votes). It would be followed by the Alianza por Colombia, led by the Green Party, with 10 seats (1,899,096 votes), and the Partido Conservador, also with 10 seats (1,859,493 votes).

Other wins in the Senate include Party of La U (9 seats), Cambio Radical (7), the Ahora Colombia coalition (5), which backs presidential candidate Sergio Fajardo, and Salvación Nacional (4), the movement of presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella. The two remaining seats correspond to the special indigenous constituency.

In terms of losses in representation, the Partido Conservador would be the most affected, losing five of its current 15 seats. Cambio Radical would lose four, the Greens three, La U two, while Liberals and Ahora Colombia would each lose one seat.

Among the prominent figures who would be left out of the new Senate is former President Álvaro Uribe, who occupied position number 25 on his party’s list and would not obtain a seat if the Centro Democrático secures only 17 seats. Green Party senator Angélica Lozano, known for promoting legislation related to transparency, would also lose her seat.

Likewise, movements such as the coalition that supported Juan Daniel Oviedo and the Partido Oxígeno, led by former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who was kidnapped for years by the now-defunct FARC guerrilla group, would fail to surpass the minimum threshold required to obtain Senate representation (3% of the total vote).

On the other hand, the performance of the Salvación Nacional movement, led by presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, stands out. In its first participation in a congressional election, the party would surpass the electoral threshold and secure four senators.

What About the House of Representatives?

The allocation of seats in the House of Representatives follows a different process from that of the Senate, making it difficult to project the final distribution in the early stages of the vote count.

This is because the calculation is conducted department by department, once the RNEC determines the seat allocation formula and electoral quotient in each of the 32 States and the Capital District of Bogotá.

According to report number 45 from the RNEC, with 99.03% of votes counted, the main parties have obtained the following preliminary nationwide results:

• Centro Democrático: 2,551,706 votes.
• Partido Liberal: 2,101,877 votes.
• Partido Conservador: 1,967,996 votes.
• La U: 1,044,778 votes.
• Pacto Histórico: 913,990 votes.
• Cambio Radical: 803,721 votes.
• Alianza Verde: 654,071 votes.
• Salvación Nacional: 436,365 votes.

Because the House of Representatives elections involve parties, movements, and coalitions with strong local and regional influence, several smaller political organizations are expected to win seats, as they must surpass regional thresholds rather than a national one.

The Highlight: a Fragmented Congress that Will Require Coalitions

With the preliminary distribution of seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, projections suggest that Colombia’s next president will need to govern through legislative coalitions, as has occurred under President Gustavo Petro and his predecessors.

Presidential candidates Iván Cepeda, of the Pacto Histórico, and Paloma Valencia, of the Centro Democrático, would begin the next political phase with the largest congressional blocs, although neither would have enough seats to govern alone.

Traditional parties such as the Liberal, Conservador, Cambio Radical, and La U, which together could account for more than 40% of the new congress, have not yet decided which presidential candidate they will support, a situation similar to what occurred in the previous election. These parties could therefore become kingmakers, capable of facilitating, or blocking, governability depending on the alliances and coalitions they choose to form.

For that reason, the coming weeks are expected to be marked by intense political negotiations, as presidential contenders attempt to build alliances that would allow them to secure legislative support.

For candidates such as Sergio Fajardo, whose Ahora Colombia coalition would obtain only five senators, or Abelardo de la Espriella, whose Salvación Nacional movement would have four, the challenge will be significantly greater.

Above photo: Polling station during Colombia’s congressional elections. Photo courtesy of the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil.

President Petro called for a criminal investigation against President Donald Trump, which stunned many observers. The demand stemmed from a US military operation in the Caribbean, where missiles were fired at vessels suspected of illicit activities. Petro asserted that the occupants were not traffickers but “simply poor young people from Latin America who have no other option.” The US delegation reportedly exited the assembly hall during Petro’s speech.

“With the forgiveness of those who dominate the United Nations, criminal proceedings must be opened against those officials from the United States, including the senior official who gave the order: President Trump,” Petro declared. He also framed his speech from the position of a leader wronged by US policy, stating, “I speak to you as a president decertified by the same President Trump, without him having the right to do so.”

Gustavo Petro at the UN. Photo credit: Juan Diego Cano -Presidency.

The Colombian president’s remarks extended to broad condemnations, labeling the United States a “white and racist” country leading humanity toward “destruction.” His confrontational rhetoric was not limited to the US, as he also defended Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and controversially downplayed the nature of the transnational criminal organization, Tren de Aragua.

Petro seemed to call for an armed invasion of Palestine and against Israel:

“I invite the nations of the world and their peoples above all, as part of humanity, to unite their armies and weapons.

Palestine must be liberated. I invite the armies of Asia, of the Slavic peoples who so heroically defeated Hitler, the Latin American armies of Bolívar, of Garibaldi, who also had one in Italy, of Martí, of Artigas, of Santa Cruz. Words are no longer necessary in Bolívar’s hour of the sword of freedom or death, because they will not only bomb Gaza, not only the Caribbean, as they already do, but also humanity that cries out for freedom, because from Washington and NATO, they are killing democracy and reviving tyranny and totalitarianism on a global level.

We must raise the red and black flag of freedom or death that Bolívar raised, without forgetting the white color he raised alongside the red and black, the color of peace as hope for life on earth and in the heart of humanity. The United States no longer teaches democracy; instead, it kills it with its migrants and its greed. The United States teaches tyranny.

The UN must begin its change by stopping the genocide in Gaza with the effectiveness of a world-saving army, voted on by the United Nations General Assembly without veto. After saving Gaza, we will move on to the plan to decarbonize the planet’s economy, so that it becomes a democratically constructed global project and establishes global democracy.”

Widespread Condemnation from Colombian Opposition

The reaction from Colombia’s political opposition was swift and severe. Lawmakers from various parties accused Petro of embarrassing the nation on the world stage and irresponsibly damaging crucial diplomatic ties.

Lina María Garrido, a representative from the Cambio Radical party, offered a direct rebuke: “In the name of the majority of Colombians, I offer an apology to the world for the shameful spectacle that Gustavo Petro is putting on at the UN.”

En nombre de la mayoría de los colombianos, le ofrezco disculpas al mundo por el bochornoso espectáculo que está dando @petrogustavo en la ONU. De entrada, les quiero informar que Petro está dispuesto a todo por unos cuantos "me gusta" en sus redes y por tener un reconocimiento,…

— Lina Maria Garrido (@linamariagarri1) September 23, 2025

Representative Katherine Miranda from the Alianza Verde party described the speech as “Ideologized, erratic, and highly confrontational against the US and Europe. He said nothing about Colombia, about the increase in homicides of public forces, recruitment of minors, kidnappings, and extortions.”

“President Petro didn’t speak like a head of state. He didn’t even wear the Colombian flag on his shirt. He’s only interested in the presidency as a podium, a platform to repeat his apocalyptic rhetoric, denounce universal greed, and launch a vapid call for a global revolution. He doesn’t care about his country. ‘Global leader,’ every state office repeats, while the president speaks to an empty audience,” said Petro’s own former education minister, Alejandro Gaviria.

Senator Carlos Fernando Motoa of Cambio Radical suggested Petro was acting as a defender for criminal syndicates. “Now he goes to the United Nations to act as a defender of the Cartel de los Soles, or organizations like Tren de Aragua,” Motoa stated. “This is unprecedented conduct that threatens to destroy our international image and put us on the side of the worst regimes on the continent.”

¡Lo de @PetroGustavo ya es patológico! No sólo defiende criminales con tarimazos en Medellín o mediante políticas infructuosas como la #PazTotal en el resto del territorio colombiano. Ahora acude a las Naciones Unidas para hacer las veces de defensor del Cártel de los Soles u… https://t.co/Qc4hkx1aqc

— Carlos Fernando Motoa (@senadormotoa) September 23, 2025

The criticism continued from Daniel Briceño, a Bogotá councilman for the Centro Democrático party, who posted on X, formerly Twitter, “Fortunately, this is the last time Petro will embarrass Colombia before the UN.”

Petro es un activista de micrófono cobarde y mediocre.

Mientras viaja por el mundo tratando de “solucionar” los problemas de la humanidad, en Colombia se arrodilla ante los peores criminales, los nombra gestores de paz y se acobarda ante la delincuencia.

Apátrida

— Daniel F. Briceño (@Danielbricen) September 26, 2025

Governor of Antioquia, Andrés Julián Rendón, sharply criticized Petro’s assessment of Tren de Aragua. Petro had claimed, “It’s a lie that the Tren de Aragua is a terrorist. They are just common criminals in the form of a gang, enlarged by the stupid idea of blockading Venezuela and keeping its oil.” Rendón retorted that Petro acted “more like an ambassador and spokesman for the narco-dictatorship of his ally Maduro and its criminal structures, than as the representative of millions of Colombians.”

Qué irresponsabilidad la suya Presidente @petrogustavo. Es sabido que le quedó grande gobernar, pero disimule y preocúpese por combatir a Mordisco, Calarcá, Clan de Golfo y cuanto bandido con el que está negociando. Son criminales peligrosos para el pueblo colombiano: desplazan,… pic.twitter.com/X2YvuMd55P

— Andrés Julián (@AndresJRendonC) September 26, 2025

Math professor and former mayor of Medellín and governor of Antioquia, Sergio Fajardo, called Petro’s words “lamentable.”

“President Petro’s performance at the United Nations General Assembly was, once again, lamentable. Trapped in his personal demons and delusions, instead of acting rationally in the country’s interests, the president reiterated his childish confrontation with Trump. Petro stopped governing a while ago and dedicated himself to campaigning, faithful to his anything-goes philosophy. The chaos grows day by day. He will leave, and we will all pay the bill. And what’s missing,” Fajardo tweeted on X.

El espectáculo del presidente Petro en la asamblea general de las naciones unidas fue, de nuevo, lamentable. Atrapado en sus demonios y delirios personales, en lugar de actuar racionalmente en función de los intereses del país, el presidente reiteró su infantil enfrentamiento con…

— Sergio Fajardo (@sergio_fajardo) September 24, 2025

Current senator and aspirant to the 2026 presidential elections, Paloma Valencia, said that Gustavo Petro has surrendered Colombia to violent actors. He has done nothing against drugs. Under him, Colombia has seen its lowest seizures in 12 years, homicides have increased by 8%, kidnappings have doubled, and extortion has skyrocketed. He has handed over the territory to the violent.”

Administration Defends “Disruptive” Speech

Members of Petro’s cabinet staunchly defended his address. Interior Minister Armando Benedetti praised the president’s words as a “courageous and historic intervention with a lot of dignity,” arguing that few leaders have the moral authority to speak so candidly.

Foreign Minister Rosa Villavicencio stated that Petro’s speech was “disruptive in the sense that he has said what many people think but do not dare to say.” She highlighted his critiques of migration policies that criminalize migrants and his call for a new approach to the global drug problem that addresses consumer countries’ roles.

Ex-Diplomat Warns of “Explosive” Consequences

Providing a more measured analysis, former Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo described Petro’s declarations as “quite explosive” in an interview with BLU Radio. While acknowledging the president’s apparent frustration near the end of his term, Murillo warned that such a stance “strains the relationship with the United States a great deal.”

Murillo emphasized the need for pragmatism in a volatile global environment, noting that a country’s capacity for maneuver is more critical than being right. “Colombia has to be very pragmatic in managing its relations with the United States,” he urged, pointing to the deep historical, economic, and social ties between the two nations. He suggested the speech could have been an opportunity to evaluate progress on his administration’s established foreign policy goals rather than seeking to assign blame.

The former chancellor also found the public discussion on the nature of Tren de Aragua unhelpful, arguing that such matters are best handled through technical and intelligence channels. The fallout from the speech continues to unfold, leaving Colombia’s political landscape deeply divided and its foreign policy at a critical juncture.

Petro’s full, translated UN speeches follow:

New York, September 23, 2025

Mr. Speaker, this is my last speech as President here. It’s already my fourth. In my first, I announced to the Assembly that a conflict could very well break out alongside Ukraine in Palestine. I called for a peace conference.

Those of us without bombs or big budgets are not heard here, but four years later, today, the horrific situation in Palestine led me to think that the same thing, or almost the same thing, could happen in the Colombian Caribbean, when they throw missiles at unarmed young people in the sea.

So now we are facing a different situation, perhaps more global. The barbarism today is global; today it falls upon all of humanity. The missiles targeted 17 unarmed young people in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, perhaps some Colombians. The persecution, imprisonment, chaining, and expulsion of millions of migrants. The missiles that fall on the 70,000 people in Gaza and kill them.

The lack of action on the climate crisis, whose words are being erased at Trump’s orders, is linked to and responds to the same cause. Migration is an excuse for a rich, white, racist society to believe itself a superior race and ignore the fact that its leaders are leading it, along with all of humanity, to the abyss of its own extinction.

They say the missiles in the Caribbean were to stop drugs. That’s a lie. Said here, on this very spot, in 2023 and 2024, were the years in which the most cocaine was seized, and more than 700 drug lords were extradited to the United States and Europe. I extradited them, and my government seized the cocaine.

And we didn’t fire a single missile or kill any young people. These were years in which I proved that voluntary substitution with coca leaf crops is more effective than forcibly eradicating them with glyphosate and using force on Colombia’s poor farmers. I replaced the failed and violent war on drugs with an effective anti-drug policy, which is different from confusing the dead substance with the greedy person.

But they need violence to dominate Colombia and Latin America. They need to destroy dialogue and impose and launch deadly missiles on poor young people in the Caribbean. Anti-drug policy is not about stopping cocaine from reaching the United States.

Anti-drug policy is intended to dominate the people of the South in general. It doesn’t focus on drugs; it focuses on power and domination. That’s why I speak before you as a president deserted by President Trump himself, without any right to do so, neither human nor divine, and without any mental reason.

They want to violate and coerce tens of thousands of farmers from the United States government, which is influenced by powerful Colombian mafia politicians.

Hundreds of thousands of Colombian peasants have been massacred, just as children are massacred in Gaza.

The massacres in Colombia were carried out by politicians who were senators, presidents, and ministers, linked to and bribed by the Colombian drug mafia.

At once allied with the far right in Florida, in the United States, and now allied with the Trump administration, allies for decades with the cocaine drug lords in Colombia—true scumbags, as the Italians say.

Anti-drug policy is made in Washington, United States, by allies of the cocaine mafia. I don’t know if Trump knows that his foreign policy toward Colombia, Venezuela, and the Caribbean is advised by Colombians who are political allies of the cocaine mafia.

I myself denounced these drug-trafficking paramilitary politicians personally, and for a decade in Congress as a senator. They tried to kill me many times for it. They wanted me not to be president and to keep me quiet, and now they want to prevent a new progressive government from continuing. And because of that, they almost denigrate me personally and slander Colombia.

The largest amount of cocaine in the history of the world has been seized in Colombia, and this government did it, and they’re making me a desert.

In Colombia, we have managed to stop the growth rate, the growth rate of coca leaf crops, which was 43% annually during the government of (President Iván) Duque, and I have lowered it this year to 3%, and they did not desertify Duque, who had a drug trafficker financier in his campaign, but they did desertify Petro, because he says things and says the truth.

Therefore, anti-drug policy is not for the public health of society but for the politics of power. They don’t want light to shine in Latin America and for the time of the people to come again. The young people killed by missiles in the Caribbean were not from the Aragua train—perhaps no one here knows its name—or from Hamas; they were Caribbean, possibly Colombian.

And if they were Colombians, with the apologies of those who dominate the United Nations, criminal proceedings should be opened against those officials who are from the United States, even if the highest-ranking official who gave the order, President Trump, who allowed the missiles to be fired at young people who simply wanted to escape poverty, is included. Young people on a boat, if they had an illicit cargo, weren’t drug traffickers; they were simply poor young people from Latin America who had no other option.

Drug traffickers live somewhere else, not in Latin America. Trump launches missiles at unarmed boats of immigrants and accuses them of being drug traffickers and terrorists, even though they don’t have a single weapon to defend themselves. Drug traffickers live in New York, right here, just a few blocks away, and in Miami.

And they make agreements with the (Drug Enforcement Administration) DEA, which allows them to traffic in Africa, Europe, Russia or China but not in the United States, a country that stops the growth of cocaine consumption without reducing it, only because its sick drug addicts went –and are sick– to consume the deadly drug of humanity’s counterculture in times of extinction due to the climate crisis, fentanyl.

This fentanyl is produced in the United States’ industrial apparatus, here, near here, and for consumers, it’s American self-consumption, resulting in the worst understanding of drugs in human history since we first knew wine, alcohol, or beer.

Fentanyl and gasoline addicts: the total poisons of life in the world. Gasoline is worse than fentanyl.

Only the Black people here, ancestral here, more than 20,000 years old, the youth, the women who don’t want to see their children die en masse; white, Black, of all colors who still think, people who still think, who don’t sleep under fentanyl or under lying television, and who can stop the tyranny within the United States itself.

And around the world, citizens are taking to the streets in California, in New York, in Philadelphia, where the bell of liberty was rung despite the armies Trump sends against his own people to intimidate them, in the states of free citizens, in the same states that are no longer united today in the face of the tyranny of evil, of the worst kind, the president of the United States.

Don’t they see that a million Latin Americans have been murdered among themselves, the majority of them Colombians? And another million Americans will die from fentanyl.

Ten years ago, cocaine killed 3,000 people a year in this country, due to poisons mixed with it. Today, fentanyl kills 100,033 times more. The United States has improved—or worsened—with 50 years of absurd policies, and is leading its society to the Dantesque death of the drug that kills the brain and lungs in this death of humanity.

Genocide in Gaza

Trump not only lets missiles fall on young people in the Caribbean, but also imprisons and chains migrants, and allows missiles to be launched at young children, women, and the elderly in Gaza. He makes himself complicit in genocide because it is genocide, and we must shout it out again and again.

This building is a silent witness, and an accomplice, to a genocide in today’s world. When we thought it was Hitler’s sole property, Trump doesn’t talk about democracy, he doesn’t talk about the climate crisis, he doesn’t talk about life; he only threatens and kills, and allows tens of thousands to be killed.

However, during my administration in Colombia, we haven’t increased the homicide rate. We have the lowest unemployment rate of the century in the country, we have the lowest poverty rate of the century according to our statistics, and we boosted our agriculture to 10% annual growth, and our industry to 5% annually, and tourists came like never before, by the millions, to admire our immense beauty.

In a land of beauty and natural, human, and cultural diversity, we seek peace by talking with drug traffickers and rebels. I’m not ashamed to talk, always talking to save lives, putting as a principle the total eradication of illicit economies and the eradication of coca leaf crops by the very will of the peasants who are tired of the violence.

We don’t allow ourselves to be bribed by drug traffickers, as happened under previous Colombian governments, and we’ve already voluntarily eradicated 25,000 hectares. We’re successful in our new policy, which isn’t about drugs, but rather about drug trafficking, which is different.

We are grateful to the countries that have helped us sow peace: Qatar, Cuba, Mexico, the Vatican City, Norway, Brazil, and Venezuela. We are not grateful to those who want to lead us to war among ourselves.

Listen, ladies and gentlemen of the world, Latin America is not just about cocaine, terrorists, or drug traffickers. Latin America potentially has 1,400 gigabytes of clean electric energy capacity annually based on water, wind, and the sun. The United States, in the north, demands 1,200 gigabytes of energy every year, which today is 70% fossil fuels, that is, based on coal, gas, and oil.

If Latin America develops its clean energy potential, it could clean up the entire United States’ fossil energy mix. Listen, all that’s missing is the money, and it would make the greatest contribution to overcoming the climate crisis.

Today, with almost no progress between the potential for clean energy and the enormous absorbent sponge of the Amazon rainforest, Latin America is the vanguard of humanity that could take the first decisive step toward saving the planet and all humanity. It only takes $600 billion to develop its potential.

Africa can do the same with Europe. The sum of this fundamental decarbonization aspect would give us $1 trillion 200 billion—or $1.2 trillion USD, as they say in English. This money is already in the coffers of the United States, Europe, and China, but not a single dollar is moving profitably.

Or worse, it may still be very profitable in terms of human life, including life in the United States, Europe, and China, but they don’t want to become interdependent with Latin America and Africa. They know that linking clean energy from Latin America and Africa to the fossil fuel economies of the North not only decarbonizes the planet and saves it from climate collapse, but also shifts global power.

The one who speaks here sometimes, but speaks every day, is doing so with bombs and not with words. Decarbonization is returning, a global democracy is returning to power, and the relations of production are changing, because life and humanity come first, taking priority over greed.

Greed is the poison of life; it is an antagonistic contradiction, as Mao Zedong (Chinese politician, philosopher, intellectual, military strategist, founder of the Communist Party and the Republic of China) once said, but not thinking about bosses and workers, but between greed and the very life of planet Earth.

According to science, we have 10 years to reach the point of no return. 10 years, and once we reach that point, nothing can be done. We will only observe the catastrophes and feel them, even in our own families, because it will be, because it will be, if you can tell me, irreversible, the extinction of life, including human life.

Irreversibility of the process, no technology, no political or social force, no human mind will be able to do anything to stop the collapse and we have 10 years left, says science, but here they don’t believe in science, said one of the most powerful in the world, they don’t believe in science and that is called irrationalism and Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Feuerbach, of Hegel, of Kant, was philosophically filled with irrationalism.

And today, the United States is being filled with irrationalism, and it was the prelude to Hitler in 1933.

The solution is to stop consuming coal, oil, gas, hydrocarbons, and quickly move to water, sun, green hydrogen, wind, but the word decarbonization now sounds subversive at the conferences of powerful groups of countries, the G7, the G20, and in Davos (Switzerland), the mega-rich, just as the word democracy sounded subversive five centuries ago.

Investing in decarbonization

Even here, in New York, Cartagena, Bogotá, or Paris, and even more so in Madrid, the sums I’m talking about here—$600 billion, $1 trillion, $200 billion—are one or two zeros higher than the amount promised by developed countries.

Giving and it’s alms and they haven’t complied since the COP in Paris, because they’re not interested in decarbonization and the excessive figure on the meager loans from multilateral banks is between zeros, which are just that, pure innocuous alms, pure ideology thinking that the profitability of capital cleans the atmosphere and saves lives, lies, ideological, phantasmagorical, fetishes so that we don’t look up and don’t act as humanity.

The climate crisis requires prioritizing investment in decarbonization and adaptation in all public budgets. It requires a completely different global financial policy and the abolition of the debt risk premium.

Whoever said that countries that emit the most greenhouse gases, like this one, the second or first on Earth, are risky rather than not risky, and that countries that absorb CO2 and have jungles and lots of water and absorb CO2 from the north in the south are risky, because the market says otherwise, if not, it is because it is wrong and is heading towards the abyss of life.

We need to forgive debt in the poorest countries and exchange foreign debt payments for investment in climate crisis adaptation and mitigation. Gentlemen of China, Germany, the United States, Wall Street, Paris, and the London Stock Exchange, if you want to collect the interest on our countries’ foreign debt, you will find cemeteries and dead bodies, and when you go to collect it, you too will find cemeteries and dead bodies. That money is of no use amidst corpses.

Here is another subversive word: plan, global plan. The word was forgotten by the market. Planning was not necessary, they said. When planning is for human beings, it is anathema. So much religious and false belief was unleashed on the market, a fundamentalist belief that the market led to happiness, said Walras, the Swiss economist, and the abyss.

But what the market leads to is not happiness, but death and the abyss, as we see it today. Walras was wrong, neoliberalism was wrong from the start, and we’ve been guiding our countries for 50 years under completely erratic and unscientific formulas, and we haven’t changed them.

The plan must be binding on nation states, carried out in a global democracy, supervised in its compliance by the Security Council, without veto, because let us know that the market does not solve the climate crisis, let us know it once and for all, because it was capital itself that produced it – which is an unequal human relationship between those who are the owners of the coal and oil-hungry machine and the salaried worker, man or woman, who has to produce more and more things for the boss to sell – those things made with the boss’s machine that needs more and more oil, which produced the climate crisis.

Make more, sell more, earn more, more and more, and use more and more, then, coal and oil until today, but not until eternity, because oil and coal have reached their end, which, perhaps, is the end of capital. If not of capital, then of humanity and life.

So, the owner of capital is a powerful human being, and he’s not a thing, he’s not a fetish. That human being, with his greed, with his total enslavement to greed, is the one who will seek approval here, the search for ever more oil, the search for ever more oil in every country, regardless of the poisoning of the atmosphere with CO2, which is the poisoning of all life on the planet.

Drill, drill, and drill, they say, without mercy. So, capital or life, my friends, or greed or life, or barbarism or local and global democracy, or freedom or death, as Bolívar said, and raised this red, black, and also white flag: freedom, red, death, black, white, peace.

World Revolution

A global revolution of the people is possible. What is needed to positively overcome the climate crisis and prevent it from spiraling from crisis to global collapse is a revolution of united peoples, of civilizations, who must engage in dialogue more than the states themselves. It is a revolution of humanity to remain alive on the planet and free, perhaps, allied with some governments that want to defend life today.

The United Nations sees its crisis and the need for its transformation. Here, nation-states that no longer have power gather, and no matter how much they vote, they are ignored, because the nation-state has also reached its decline, perhaps its final one.

It was invented some centuries ago and it no longer works, and it no longer works because capital itself became global, not state-based. The socialism of (Joseph) Stalin (Soviet politician, military man, revolutionary, and dictator) should have become global and not state-based, but Stalin did not have the understanding for it and believed more in the tribe and condemned in Yalta a world revolution in Spain, in Italy, in Greece, and perhaps it would have been Latin America and others.

Humanity is the new political subject that appears, not the nation-state, and therefore, the United Nations must return and transform into a united, although diverse, humanity. A new political subject is appearing in human history, and it is important, and it seems spectacular to me, and it is that we are overcoming the idea of ​​the nation-state to become humanity.

But for humanity to be united and united in action, it must have democracy throughout the world; it must have permanent dialogue amidst diversity. It is the difference that drives us to the possibility of effective coordination of action on a global scale—humanity in dialogue.

Yes, civil humanity, yes, profoundly democratic humanity, yes, hopefully, a humanity of free people, which is its definition, its synonym, because there can be no such thing as enslaved humanity. Enslaved humanity is not humanity; it is beastly. Beastly is the one who enslaves, chains migrants, launches missiles at young people, and riddles children with missiles in a town very close to where Jesus was born.

This can no longer be resolved by states that talk but don’t act; it can’t be resolved by rulers bribed by oil and ready to launch missiles at the peoples of the South. A new political entity then emerges: humanity united and diverse in its cultures. While collapse approaches, and while the old, white societies of Europe and the United States continue to applaud their new, fashionable Hitlers, they listen neither to their youth, nor to their children, nor to humanity, nor to the stars, nor to their grandparents who died as heroes in the fields of Europe, truly fighting against Hitler and his criminal idea of ​​a superior race.

Today, they do the same thing Hitler did: they build concentration camps for migrants and applaud electoral majorities, saying migrants are an inferior race, collectivizing blame on them, as they did with the Jews, calling them terrorists, inferior, and thieves—all drug traffickers, they say. When most drug traffickers are blond and blue-eyed, and keep their enormous fortunes in the world’s largest banks, they don’t live in Bogotá, Caracas, the Caribbean, or Gaza, but in Miami, they are neighbors of the President of the United States, and they live in New York, Paris, Madrid, and Dubai. They live where there is luxury, not poverty, yet they fire missiles where there is poverty, not where there is luxury. It’s a lie that the Aragua train is a terrorist organization; they’re just common criminals in the form of a gang, swelled by the stupid idea of ​​blockading Venezuela and seizing its heavy, already poisonous oil.

Migrants are not criminals; they don’t need to be taken to concentration camps and expelled in chains. Migration is merely a product of the blockade against poorer countries like Iraq, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela. The economic blockade is nothing less than genocide.

Migration is nothing more than the product of the impoverishment of the poorest countries due to unpayable and greedy debt. Migration is nothing more than the consequence of the wars and oil-fueled invasions unleashed by the United States and the European continent. Migration is nothing more than the consequence of the climate crisis, which is heading toward collapse and leaving tropical lands without water because the vital liquid evaporates as the heat increases.

The migration solution is nothing other than, or very different from, chains, prisons, or missiles. There is no superior race, gentlemen. There is no God’s chosen people.

Neither the United States nor Israel. Ignorant far-right fundamentalists think this way. God’s chosen people are all of humanity.

They use migration as an excuse to do nothing about the climate crisis that wipes out life every day. They leverage migration to win votes from whites and older men and women, but they hide the need to end coal and oil consumption from power, and they incentivize drilling and drilling and drilling. The UN needs to change now.

A different, humane UN must first and foremost stop the genocide in Gaza. Humanity cannot allow another day of genocide, nor can it allow Netanyahu’s genocidaires and his allies in the United States and Europe to go free. The United Nations must uphold international courts of justice, international law, which is the foundation of civilization and the wisdom of humanity encapsulated in history, and must enforce the judgment of its justice.

Diplomacy has already played its part, gentlemen, in the case of Gaza. It couldn’t solve it. It’s not true, and I apologize, Macron, that we can insist and insist on talking and talking when every second a missile falls and destroys the bodies of innocent babies, baby boys and baby girls, in the Arab country of Palestine.

Every day, emotions are vetoed in the UN Security Council; every day that passes, more children are bombed, every time you take bombs, every time you take dead people. The one who vetoes what he thinks is not a mother, is not a father, is not alive, perhaps comes from dark forces, is a robot because he has no heart to veto. The genocide must stop with what follows diplomacy.

It’s like a vote of the United Nations Assembly, not a vote of the Security Council, which vetoes. It’s like a United for Peace for Palestine, forming an armed force to defend the lives of the Palestinian people. It’s about words and weapons today.

They are not blue helmets, untrained and sometimes unwilling to do what they need. They are a powerful army of countries that do not accept genocide. Therefore, I invite the nations of the world and their peoples above all, as part of humanity, to unite their armies and weapons.

Palestine must be liberated. I invite the armies of Asia, of the Slavic peoples who so heroically defeated Hitler, the Latin American armies of Bolívar, of Garibaldi, who also had one in Italy, of Martí, of Artigas, of Santa Cruz. Words are no longer necessary in Bolívar’s hour of the sword of freedom or death, because they will not only bomb Gaza, not only the Caribbean, as they already do, but also humanity that cries out for freedom, because from Washington and NATO, they are killing democracy and reviving tyranny and totalitarianism on a global level.

We must raise the red and black flag of freedom or death that Bolívar raised, without forgetting the white color he raised alongside the red and black, the color of peace as hope for life on earth and in the heart of humanity. The United States no longer teaches democracy; instead, it kills it with its migrants and its greed. The United States teaches tyranny.

The UN must begin its change by stopping the genocide in Gaza with the effectiveness of a world-saving army, voted on by the United Nations General Assembly without veto. After saving Gaza, we will move on to the plan to decarbonize the planet’s economy, so that it becomes a democratically constructed global project and establishes global democracy. The body overseeing its rapid implementation will be the Security Council, but without vetoes. It will be binding on the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, and the private financial system, given the enormous capacity of the national and global financial system to centralize capital. It is from there that humanity can regulate capital to subordinate it to life and humanity—a capital regulated and subordinated to life and people.

Along this path, the United Nations will transition from an alliance of states to an alliance of diverse peoples and cultures that make up humanity. If we overcome the climate crisis, and we will only do so united as humanity, we will also achieve the United Nations’ transition toward an assembly of peoples, seeking to ensure that every person on the planet is free, seeking to ensure that the minds of every person reach their full potential and interconnect on the planet, because that great mind of humanity, as a powerful intelligence, illuminated by ever-deepening science, will be able not only to save life on the planet but also to fulfill humanity’s mission, expanding life to the stars. A united and free humanity can look to the stars and reach them, just as the Roman legionaries once thought, back when they invented the Latin words ad astra, ad astra to the stars, always in the hour of freedom or death. And death in missiles is real, but so is freedom in the human heart and its capacity for unity, rebellion, and existence.

Thank you very much.

New York (United States), September 24, 2025

Let’s say that, listening to (US President Donald) Trump’s speech yesterday, I remembered an old writer, from the 20th century, who died in 1971, his name was Gyorgy Lukács. Gyorgy was Hungarian and had been involved in the Hungarian revolution back in the 1920s. And he went through, like all intellectuals of that time, Nazi persecution.

And in 1954, he wrote a book called ‘The Assault on Reason.’ I was just talking about it with economist Jeffrey Sachs, who’s here too. Greetings to Joseph Stiglitz.

‘The assault on reason’ is the intellectual idea of ​​writing about how a social thought evolves in society and in these Nazi configurations that existed before 1933, which gives way to the emergence of (Adolf) Hitler in 1933, how some liberals of the Weimar Republic (a German city) decide to hand over power to him, because Hitler was never a majority or was not an electoral majority at that time, the electoral majority was social democrat and communist, divided and killing each other.

The Social Democrats of that time also shot Rosa Luxemburg in the 1920s; later, that division led to the rise of Hitler, but in addition to the political circumstances, there was also a mental circumstance in society, a kind of impotence in allowing irrationalism to take over the intellectual space in a country like Germany, which boasted of having the best philosophers in the world.

Last night, well yesterday, what I saw was that very thing.

In Trump’s speech, and I’ve asked many American citizens I’ve met here, what is the state of American society? Well, we know ours, but here, in a relatively libertarian city like New York, the center of enormous struggles in the past and still today, or California, etc., because if American society moves toward irrationalism, which is what Trump called for, not science, not reason, the assault on reason, then we are in circumstances predating widespread barbarism.

And in light of that, let’s say, if one goes back and looks at these totalitarian proposals throughout history, they have almost always been based on two axes: people’s fear and lies.

(Joseph) Goebbels is a lie. Today, the media is in the hands of big capital, a lie about the possibility of a much more brutal, much more brutal Artificial Intelligence, in terms of information manipulation. If knowledge, which they call the cloud, which is the general intellect of humanity throughout history accumulated here in the present, is privatized—and there’s a reason Trump was on his inauguration day alongside Mr. Elon Musk and the owner of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg), Microsoft (Bill Gates), etc.—then there’s a pending discussion here, which is global: Will there be private owners of the cloud, that is, of humanity’s accumulated intellect, digitized? Or will it be a global public domain? And that’s a first point of discussion that, I think, Europe can help us a lot with, more than we ourselves, who haven’t developed this topic much.

But this issue of lies and truth is a battlefield today, and we must give truth its weapons, and this means putting science on the side, reason on the side of unreason, and the battle has concrete instruments, debates, concrete spaces, and concrete forces.

The other part is fear.

The fears of humanity

What are you afraid of today? I’m going to finish, I’m already here finishing. Chileans are more disciplined than Colombians, aren’t they? We dance better, so we’re wasting time. We’re going to invite (former Chilean President Michelle) Bachelet to dance here at the United Nations, hopefully at the General Secretariat, wherever they invite us.

We have to go in strong, or else… That’s why I proposed an army to save the world, but so far, Indonesia has responded with a significant yes. We also need to talk about that. Because I learned in my youth that human beings aren’t understood through words alone, and especially now.

So, what fears?

I summarize the fears in three major fears, and they are not the only ones: fear of the climate crisis, it is evident, it is seen every day, even if you deny it, it appears.

There’s no need to explain it much, and it’s only going to get worse. From what we know from science, we’re approaching collapse, and that’s scary, scary to die, scary that your children will die.

Any woman in New York with children will be afraid. Overcoming the crisis allows us to avoid generating fear, and then we would have an alliance within humanity, but if humanity allows itself to be overcome by fear of the climate crisis and, above all, by what we propose to solve it. I’ll conclude.

We propose, in a way, as it’s read or as it can be manipulated, to put an end to comfort, and these are comfort societies. Europe, the Latin American middle classes, and the United States, comfort.

We’re going to get rid of the car, we’re going to get rid of the sooty house, we’re going to get rid of gasoline-powered transportation, etc. We’re going to get rid of everything made with oil, and almost everything is made with oil.

So, the world of wellness is carbonized. When we talk about decarbonization, it’s equivalent to taking away the world of wellness, and obviously, this implies a different discourse, because how comfort can be created with decarbonization, how art can be comfort, and so on—well, I won’t go into that further due to time.

The other fear is the fear of women. And the third fear is the fear of migrants. Fear of free women.

Oh, yes! The men I’ve seen around Colombia are, many of them, terrified of seeing a woman, per se, beautiful and intelligent; they’re overwhelmed. They like to see her beautiful, but not intelligent enough to dominate her.

But when beauty—and I’m not referring to the beauty imposed on us, but to the beauty that each human being has in their own spirit when they express it—combines intelligence, then the loss of power, which they have had for millennia, frightens man.

And that loss of power drives man to the extreme right. And that’s another of humanity’s fears.

And the third is the migrant.

A major current debate. The discussion about migrants has overshadowed the discussion of the climate crisis and has been premeditated, because the discussion about migrants brings in votes in racist societies, and many and majorities. And so, the left, progressivism, has clung to the need to win a majority.

It makes sense, but in racist societies, it sometimes involves bending the principles that say we are equal, free, and united.

So, a progressive discourse in Europe, especially—Pedro (Sánchez, President of the Spanish Government)—has to be very careful, right? It has to confront racism, not coexist with it, that is, an anti-immigrant policy, the same in the United States, the same in Colombia, because we have strong migrations, the same as (Chilean President Gabriel) Boric in Chile, excuse the discussion, and everywhere that grants rights to migrants.

He’s a human being, and every human being is subject to rights everywhere in the world, regardless of their skin color, and regardless of the racist reaction, even the majority of a society, progressivism must be there. Boric, excuse me.

Perhaps power is discussed in Europe not only with the ballot boxes, where only whites, Aryans, go, because the others don’t have the right to go to the polls, but also on the street.

That’s why we see massive European mobilizations and progressive defeats at the ballot box. If we combine the two: the streets and the ballot boxes in a political strategy, we unite the majority of the diverse European people, or the diverse people here in New York, or people everywhere in the world, and progressivism once again becomes the majority and, therefore, powerful.

I’ll leave these thoughts here. I went a little too far, Boric, but excuse me.

Video of the Colombian President’s speech. Video credit Colombian Presidency.

Throughout the summer, Turbay had been in critical condition, and intensive care at Bogotá’s Fundación Santa Fé Hospital as he underwent various brain and cranial surgeries led by neurosurgeon Dr. Fernando Hakim in an attempt to save his life. Though at the end of July it appeared his condition may be improving, things turned for the worse in early August.

At the age of five, Uribe Turbay (no relation to former president Alvaro Uribe) lost his mother, journalist Diana Turbay, who died while held kidnapped by Pablo Escobar.  Former President Julio César Turbay was his grandfather. Uribe studied law and public policy at University of The Andes in Bogotá and began his political career as a Liberal Party member of the Bogotá City Council at the age of 25.

Former President Álvaro Uribe invited Uribe Turbay to run for senate with his Centro Democrático party. Uribe Turbay won the seat in 2022 with strong support and served as senator until, at Alvaro Uribe’s invitation, announcing his run for the presidency, with elections next year.

Urbe, dead at the hands of a child assassin, lost his mother to Pablo Escobar when himself a child.

The Assassins

So far, several individuals have been detained for allegedly participating in Uribe’s murder:

• The 15-year-old assassin, who is being held in the Attorney General’s headquarters.
• Carlos Eduardo Mora, who drove the teen to where Uribe was speaking.
• Christian González Ardila, the man who was to drive the getaway motorcycle.
• Elder José Arteaga, “El Costeño” the organizer of the assassination.
• Katerine “Gabriela” Martinez, accomplice and lover of El Costeño, provided the handgun to the assassin.
• William González Cruz, “El Viejo”

The current hypothesis put forward by Colombian law enforcement is that Elder José Arteaga, “El Costeño,”was a local small time gang leader unaffiliated with any of the larger mafia groups that plague Colombia, but while serving prison time in Meta, Colombia, he met “Daniel” (nom de guerre), part of the “Teófilo Forero squad of the Segunda Marquetalia, a guerilla mafia made up of former FARC members who rejected the 2016 peace accord signed between the FARC and the government. Accomplice Katerine Martinez was directed to Caquetá after the shooting by José Arteaga, according to her, to seek protection from the Segunda Marquetalia, active in the area. There she was captured by Colombian authorities.

General Carlos Triana Beltrán, director of Colombia’s National Police, said in a press conference last week that they believe Luciano Marín Arango “Ivan Márquez” and “José Aldinever Sierra Sabogal “Zarco Aldinever,” leaders of the Segunda Marquetalia, are the brains behind the assassination and contracted with El Costeño to carry it out.

Unconfirmed reports from last week say that Zarco Aldinever was killed near the Venezuelan border during a battle between the Segunda Marquetalia and rival guerilla mafia, the ELN. Those reports have not been confirmed and could be an attempt to redirect attention, hopefully (by the Segunda Marquetalia) staving off military action by Colombian forces.

Analysis

The Petro administration had already been criticized for refusing to provide the additional security that Uribe Turbay had asked for. The government is responsible for providing security to presidential candidates and other public figures who may be under threat of political violence, such as social activists, witnesses, legislators and local officials.

Uribe Turbay was the leading of five candidates of Alvaro Uribe’s Centro Democrático party and promised loyalty to the party’s godfather. “I aspire to be the best version of Miguel Uribe for Colombia, but of course with the best advisor in Álvaro Uribe,” he told Medellín’s leading daily El Colombiano in April.

With Alvaro Uribe convicted of witness tampering and the current administration of Gustavo Petro facing its own scandals and unpopularity, Colombia is approaching an especially divided election cycle. Hard core “Uribistas” or Uribe Supporters insist he is innocent despite the evidence and an independent judiciary. One does not have to be an Uribe supporter however, to see that current President Gustavo Petro’s promise of “Total Peace” and an end to guerrilla violence has been a complete failure. Groups such as the ELN, Clan del Golfo and Segunda Marquetalia are gaining territory and becoming even more brazen.

Though Uribe Turbay’s death may have a “sympathy vote” effect, Uribistas were already going to vote for the Centro Democrático candidate, and “pura sangre” (pure blood) Petristas, or Petro supporters, never would. When it comes to the largest group of voters with allegiances neither to Uribe or Petro, it is likely that dissatisfaction with Petro’s handling of security along with a distaste for Alvaro Uribe’s criminal record may lead to the emergence of a candidate from one of the right leaning parties outside of the Centro Democrático, such as Cambio Radical.

To be clear, no one serious is blaming President Petro for being involved in the attack. Still, he is blamed not just by Uribistas, but by other opposition figures for his coddling stance towards guerilla groups like the Segunda Marquetalia, for not providing adequate security for opposition candidates, and a worsening security climate where an act like this assassination can take place.

While there is not yet conclusive proof they are the ones who ordered the attack, the motivation for Segunda Marquetalia could be to stop the likely Uribista candidate early in the electoral process, because of their pledge to eliminate the remnants of guerilla groups like the ELN and Segunda Marquetalia.

A family’s pain

Uribe Turbay leaves behind his wife, María Claudia Tarazona. They met when he was 24 years old. She was 10 years older and had three daughters, so at first didn’t take his advances seriously but over time working together, their bonds grew, and they formed a family, having one more son together.

Photo:Instagram account of  Maria Claudia Tarazona

She has the machinery of the Partido de la U party at her service, a party that under her directorship from 2020 until August 5 achieved broad influence in all regions and in decision-making positions in Bogotá.

Photo: Dilian Francisca Toro, frontrunner to win the October election to become governor of Valle del Cauca. (Credit: Partido de la U)

The only candidate within close proximity of her in recent polls, Tulio Gómez, is no longer in the race.

Despite holding nearly 25% in a recent poll of those who intend to vote by the firm MM Consultores, the Superinter founder was disqualified by the National Electoral Council (CNE) due to the fact that the football club he owns, América de Cali, has entered into multiple contracts with the mayor of Cali in recent years. Though he may appeal the decision, the vote was heavily against his ability to run in this election

The other main challengers — including Ferney Lozano, William Cruz, and Óscar Gamboa — have failed to register even 3% of expected voter, leaving a potentially easy path to victory if Gómez is in fact unable to participate.

Dilian Francisca Toro and Valle del Cauca

Valle del Cauca is the biggest and richest department in Colombia’s Pacific coast. Cali, its capital, is the third in the country (after Bogotá and Medellín) and receives the migratory flow from areas of the Pacific zone and southern Colombia. Additionally, on its coast of the Pacific Ocean is located the Port District of Buenaventura, where 44% of the nation’s foreign trade is moved.

Having an outlet to the Pacific also represents a challenge for the authorities because criminal drug trafficking organizations, heavily armed, seek this exit corridor for their illicit business and are in a continuous battle between them for territorial control.

In political terms, this part of Colombia holds special interest for Colombian President Gustavo Petro given that it was where he received his second-highest vote total when he was elected in 2022 with more than 1.3 million votes. (Petro received 2.25 million votes in Bogotá.)

Toro stood in first place in the race, holding favor with 31.5% of those with the intention to vote, in the MM Consultores poll on September 20 — even before Gómez was disqualified.

During her previous term, which began with her winning the election by more than 500,000 votes, she faced and solved social problems such as the increase in crime in the coastal city of Buenaventura and Palmira, a neighbor of Cali. Despite this, and financial instability of the region’s state hospitals, whose crisis had them on the brink of closure, she was selected as the best governor in the country by the Colombia Líder organization.

All those are known attainments that the inhabitants of this part of the country appear to remember and that they apparently recognize in terms of the favorability that backs her in the surveys. During Toro’s term, her manager of the Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation of Valle del Cauca, was Clara Luz Roldán, who won the election later in 2019 and is the current Valle del Cauca’s governor.

On her official website, she recounted that her political career began as Mayor of Guacarí —a city where she was born and is located in the center of Valle del Cauca— from 1992 to 1994. Afterward, she held the position of Departmental Health Secretary between 1995 and 1997 and from 2002 until 2010, she was elected as senator in the National Congress.

Toro lost in her first attempt to win the governorship election in 2000 before her success in 2015. Concurrently, she expanded her participation in the Partido de la U party until she was chosen as its director in the midst of the pandemic, in 2020.

Having become an important actor in the Colombian political scene, it has earned her the nickname The Baroness, which she already accepts, although reluctantly, as she hinted in an interview with La Silla Vacía on August 13. For the 2023 candidacy, she has the support of six other political parties. Toro is also backed up by the majority of the Cambio Radical party senators.

For the 2022 presidential elections, her name was considered as an option, but in the end she declined. Because of this, it is not ruled out that Toro will try again to run for the first position in the country in future political campaigns.

Gómez, a Formidable Challenger, Exits the Governor’s Race

Gómez, originally from Caldas before relocating to Valle del Cauca more than 50 years ago, looked like a formidable challenger who potentially could have prevented Toro’s return to office.

But in a surprise turn of events, on September 25 de CNE revoked his candidacy with a vote of 6-2, according to them, because there were merits to overthrow Gomez’s aspiration given that he would be disqualified by law from holding the position.

The CNE had a pending request asking them to revoke his candidacy (file #CNE-E-DG-2023-019080), in view of the fact that the electoral regulations emphasize that no candidate for popularly elected office can have a contractual relationship with the state, at least one year before the corporation to which he wants to aspire.

In Tulio Gómez’s case, he signed arrangements with the municipality of Cali, in the last year, related to spaces that he rented at the Pascual Guerrero stadium, home to América de Cali, of which he is the largest shareholder.

It is known that he was involved — as representative of América de Cali — in three contracts, between November 2022 and January 2023, with the Sports Secretary, which is part of the Cali mayor’s office. When notified of the decision, Gómez may appeal it through an appeal resource and the court would have two days to respond.

On Twitter, Gómez decried the decision: “I am not a state contractor, they want to disqualify me for a place that they were going to rent to us for the América de Cali’s merchandise, but that place was not the one we needed, therefore the contract was not finalized. Let them defeat me at the polls, not with tricks.”

Who Is Tulio Gómez?

Gómez has a reputation as a successful businessman and savior of lost causes, although no experience in politics, per a characterization by Huevos Revueltos con el Partido (Scrambled Eggs with Politics), a well-known podcast covering Colombian politics.

His popularity emanates from the football. More specifically, his tenure as the main shareholder and president of América de Cali has seen the team promoted from the second division back to the top flight after several embarrassing years in the lower level for the storied club.

In the business world, since 2019, he has been the owner of a well-known network of retail supermarkets called Agromercados La Montaña. He is considered a successful business person because he went from having a little grocery store in a Cali’s low-income city area to becoming, in 1990, the owner of Super Inter, a large chain of supermarkets with commercial premises in several cities of Valle del Cauca. Years later, in 2014, he sold it to the giant economic group Éxito, based in Medellín.

La Silla Vacía highlights on its website that Gómez, who was registered by signatures before the National Registry representing the Valle 2.0 movement, received support from politicians such as Senator Carlos Motoa, from the Cambio Radical party, and Duvalier Sánchez, from the Alianza Verde Party. Also, he is backed up by Ritter López, a former senator of Partido de la U party and old ally of Dilian Francisca Toro.

In like manner, Horman David García, who was in the race for Valle del Cauca’s next governor with the endorsement of the Verde Oxígeno political movement, renounced his aspiration and joined Tulio Gómez’s campaign.

Other Candidates Remaining in the Race

The rest of aspirants sit below 3% in the latest by MM Consultores. Ferney Lozano (2.74%), promoted by the Pacto Histórico, the current national government coalition, worked closely with President Gustavo Petro during his position as Bogotá’s Mayor (2013), and actively was part of his campaign in Valle del Cauca when Petro ran for President in 2022.

In turn, William Cruz (1.20%) represents the Fuerza Ciudadana movement and this is his first foray into politics.

With the same percentage in the MM Consultores firm’s survey (1.20%), Óscar Gamboa is seeking for the third time to become governor of Valle del Cauca after obtaining more than 100,000 votes in 2015 and again in 2019, when he achieved a little more than 22,000 votes. On this occasion, he is supported by the Dignidad & Compromiso party. He is a close friend of the Colombian ambassador in Washington, Luis Gilberto Murillo.

The representative of the traditional parties is Santiago Castro, who appears with 1.03% in the survey. Castro has been part of the Conservador party (founded in 1849), which he represented as a congressman (2002-2006), but currently represents the Centro Democrático party.

At the bottom of the named survey are Luis Velásquez (0.85%) for the Liga Gobernantes Anticorrupción party (the political group of Rodolfo Hernández, former presidential candidate in 2022) and Horman David García (0.68%) who, as noted, is working on Gómez’s campaign.

MOE Monitors Elections in Valle del Cauca

One other major factor that will surround the upcoming elections are concerns over public order, a threat that has unsettled the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE) in this department.

Alejandro Sánchez, MOE coordinator in Valle del Cauca, told Finance Colombia that their worries are about the upper area of ​​Jamundí (city neighboring Cali, in the south), in the western mountain range, where the Jaime Martínez mobile column of the FARC dissidents is present. In addition to this area, MOE is concerned about the central mountain range, bordering the department Cauca, a part known as “The Marijuana Triangle” that involves cities in Cauca and Valle del Cauca, such as Pradera.

Additionally, there are cities about which the MOE presented reports on political violence, such as Buenaventura and Cali, which are the ones that historically, in the last 10 years, were beset by the violence associated with the voting processes. However, in Tuluá, a city located in the center of Valle del Cauca, has also attracted the attention of the MOE due to recent situations of electoral violence, including candidates killed and threatened last August.

Char submitted his irrevocable resignation to Senate President Roy Barreras, where he explains that he feels the need to face the accusations as an ordinary citizen and focus all of his efforts in “preparing my defense, [and disproving] the accumulation of unfounded accusations.”

“While I was a congressman, I devoted all my time to it, even to the detriment of my family. At this moment I must dedicate all my energy to preparing my defense, disprove the accumulation of unfounded accusations that people with dark interests and a desire for revenge have made about me and my family and this is incompatible with the multiple responsibilities that arise from the function of Senator of the Republic,” he said in his resignation letter.

Barreras tweeted that the Senate has accepted Char’s resignation from the position, and that former governor of Huila Carlos Julio González will occupy Char’s vacancy in the meantime since the seats correspond to him electorally.

Char is being accused of electoral corruption and conspiracy to commit a crime after he allegedly helped buy votes as a favor for former senator—and former lover of his brother, Alex Char—Aída Merlano in the 2018 elections. Merlano, who herself was convicted in 2020 for running a vote-buying scheme in Barranquilla and sentenced to more than 11 years in prison, is currently facing extradition from Venezuela to Colombia. Merlano escaped from prison in Bogotá and fled to Venezuela by (incredibly) convincing prison authorities to take her from prison to a teeth-whitening appointment in a glamorous neighborhood in the north of Bogotá, then jumping out of the window and fleeing on a waiting motorcycle while prison guards waited docilly for her in the dentist lobby.

“More than four years ago, the Special Investigation Chamber of the Honorable Supreme Court of Justice opened an investigation against me and, last November, it issued a formal order for the opening of an investigation in which I was summoned to an investigation and, once this occurs, remain, formally linked to the process,” said Char.

“My principles and values lead me to be sensible and what better way than to defend myself before the Honorable Court with total transparency, from my position as a citizen.”

Char, who is a member of the Cambio Radical political party and who received some of the highest levels of voter support in the last election, thanked his party colleagues, his supporters, “members of my caucus, the citizens, and my family” for the trust that they gave him in electing him to the Senate, a position that he held for over 17 years before his resignation, Infobae reported.

“I will always answer the call of the Honorable Supreme Court of Justice, and my natural judge, when so required. It is clear to me that I have all the evidence that will allow me to disprove the hypotheses that affirm my connection to criminal acts in which I never participated. At this point in life, my goal is to restore my good name and provide all the necessary elements that will allow them to conclude that I have always acted in compliance with the law.”

Photo: Twitter