The contrast is the story.

“Gustavo Petro no quiso hacer ninguna de esas operaciones; quiere decir que Gustavo Petro se apadrinó con ellos.”

— Sen. Germán Rodríguez, Salvación Nacional party

A narco-influencer who taunted a sitting president

Pérez Toncel ran Los Pachenca, formally the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), out of Colombia’s La Guajira department. He didn’t operate quietly. He posted video of himself on social media boasting “Controlando todos los rincones, papi. Conquistador hasta la muerte” — controlling every corner, a conqueror until death — and, on the day De la Espriella was inaugurated, a photo of a gun captioned “limpieza por todos los territorios,” a promise of cleanup in every territory, according to El Heraldo’s review of his posts. He called De la Espriella “un gatito” — a kitten.

De la Espriella named him a high-value military target on July 9th. According to El Colombiano’s reporting on the operation, investigators already had a human source placing him in Riohacha’s urban zone, and Gerson Arias, an investigator with the Fundación Ideas para la Paz (FIP), says his downfall may also have come from inside his own organization — associates tired of a commander who kept drawing heat. The FBI then ran a counterintelligence operation, planting a false rumor in the Guajira underworld that Pérez Toncel’s own people had killed him. The rumor spread widely enough that Los Pachenca had to publicly deny it — and the panicked calls Pérez Toncel and his fiancée made to reassure relatives, plus a GPS tracker already on his vehicle, let investigators triangulate his location, with an MQ-9A Reaper drone from US Southern Command standing by overhead. Police ultimately raided the house on foot, about thirty officers from an elite unit called Los Lobos plus Dijín and Dipol, after ruling out a strike because of the residential setting and nearby airport fuel tanks.

Pérez Toncel died in the raid along with his fiancée, Rosa Angélica Tarazona, alias “La Bebecita,” who was already facing a criminal conspiracy charge tied to the ACSN and was out on house arrest at the time, and two men identified as bodyguards.

Petro’s reaction — and the four years before it

Petro didn’t celebrate the operation. He went to X to ask why all four people in the house had to die, and asked rhetorically whether Colombia’s constitution has the death penalty — it doesn’t, and never has; Article 11 bans it outright. Medellín Mayor Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez answered him directly, writing that the Fuerza Pública had finally “descongeló” — thawed out.

That word choice wasn’t incidental. Two days before Pérez Toncel’s death, Loren Moss’s Finance Colombia podcast covered a set of recordings published by Noticias Caracol from a 2022 meeting between Petro’s peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, and an envoy for the Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s largest criminal army. On the recording, Rueda proposes the two sides “jugar a los congelados” — play frozen, essentially a mutual stand-down. Colombia’s Ministry of Defense data, per Noticias Caracol’s reporting, shows no aerial bombardment against the Clan del Golfo for roughly two years after that meeting, while the group’s own ranks more than doubled, from roughly 4,500 fighters to nearly 10,000, spreading from about 165 municipalities to 338. FIP’s Gerson Arias and Human Rights Watch Americas director Juanita Goebertus have each separately attributed that growth to the ceasefire and the resulting collapse of state intelligence penetration of the group. Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación and Procuraduría are now formally investigating the episode, after Representative Christian Garcés filed a criminal complaint naming Rueda and two other officials and asking Congress to examine what Petro himself knew.

As for the ACSN specifically: Arias told El Colombiano the Petro government opened exploratory contact with the group in August 2022, but the formal resolution authorizing talks didn’t arrive until 2024, the entire negotiation sat with one lone negotiator, and no legal framework was ever built to answer what the group would actually receive in exchange for disarming. Colombian Sen. Germán Rodríguez, of the Salvación Nacional party, has a blunter read: he told Semana that “desde Gustavo Petro se tenían estas informaciones de inteligencia. Quiere decir que Gustavo Petro no quiso hacer ninguna de esas operaciones; quiere decir que Gustavo Petro se apadrinó con ellos” — Petro had this intelligence, chose not to run the operations, and got in bed with them.

Four weeks versus four years

De la Espriella’s government reports a cumulative security balance, as of September 5th, of 14,422 captures, 43,684 kilograms of drugs seized, 1,485 firearms recovered, and roughly 1,321 hectares of coca eradicated since taking office on August 7th. That includes Operación Azarías, which killed 23 members of an EMC front in Guaviare and captured six more, and 41 signed extraditions in nineteen days — among them Willington Henao Gutiérrez (“El Mocho”), Carmen Evelio Castillo Carrillo (“Muñeca”), Geovanni Andrés Rojas (“Araña”), Gabriel Yepes Mejía (“H.H.”), and Freddy Castillo Carrillo (“Pinocho”). All five had extraditions already approved under Petro’s government in 2025, then frozen while they sat at Total Peace negotiating tables, according to Finance Colombia’s own reporting on the decision. Two of them, Castillo Carrillo (“Muñeca”) and her brother Freddy (“Pinocho”), are themselves identified as top Los Pachenca leaders — Bendito Menor’s own organization — and remain at large.

The operations haven’t been without real cost. Colombia’s Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal confirmed two of the Azarías dead were minors, bringing to at least six the number of minors killed in Colombian airstrikes in under a month, according to El Diario de Pereira. Bogotá’s 34th Family Court, in a ruling by Judge Viviana Arciniegas Gómez, has ordered the government to halt airstrikes anywhere there is reasonably verifiable information that minors could be present — an order Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara is appealing, calling it “absurdo e inconstitucional.” Colombia’s Defensora del Pueblo, Iris Marín Ortiz, separately criticized the government for parading bodies from the Azarías operation for the cameras, arguing the state doesn’t need to resemble what it’s fighting.

A biographical irony

There is also a personal history worth naming directly: it’s biographical, not incidental. Petro was a member of the M-19 guerrilla; on October 25th, 1985, in Zipaquirá, he was arrested along with eight others in a raid that turned up firearms, homemade explosives, and propaganda. He was convicted of illegal possession of weapons and explosives under a state-of-siege decree, per case documents obtained by Semana, and released on February 5th, 1987, for pena cumplida — sentence served. Colombia’s 1991 Constitution later stripped state-of-siege convictions of much of their legal weight, according to Carlos Alonso Lucio, a former M-19 member quoted in that same Semana report, though Semana’s reporting also notes the question isn’t entirely settled under Article 197 of the Constitution.

What matters going forward

Two explanations for Colombia’s failure to stop groups like the ACSN and the Clan del Golfo under the Petro government aren’t mutually exclusive. One is institutional failure: a Total Peace framework that was underbuilt and understaffed, run against a two-year drift with no legal architecture behind it. The other is an active, documented choice by senior officials to trade state leverage for nothing, on tape, while the organizations they were negotiating with roughly doubled in size. The evidence for each sits in the public record — one in Gerson Arias’s institutional history, the other in a Fiscalía case file with Danilo Rueda’s name on it.

What matters going forward is which government’s incentives are actually governing security policy in Colombia: one whose peace architecture chose, on tape, not to fight the country’s largest criminal organization, or one moving quickly — even if unsustainably fast — in the opposite direction. Four weeks isn’t a track record. But four years was a policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A recording made inside the offices of Colombia’s national intelligence agency in July 2025 has become the center of a dispute over whether the government of then-President Gustavo Petro was negotiating with organized crime for its own protection, or whether two jailed drug traffickers manufactured a fake conspiracy to win their freedom. Semana published fragments of the recording on August 15, 2026, and Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) is now investigating whether the underlying plot was real or staged.

According to Semana, Jorge Lemus, then director of the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DNI, National Intelligence Directorate), met on July 18, 2025, with a retired police officer identified as Manuel Antonio Castañeda, who told him, “I’m the one they call the Narcochofer” — the narco-chauffeur. Semana describes Castañeda as having mafia connections and a history as a recurring source for Colombia’s intelligence units. Also in the room were Gustavo Arias, then the DNI’s counterintelligence director, and an analyst taking notes. It was, Semana reports, the first time Lemus had spoken with Castañeda directly.

Castañeda came to sell access to two men: alias Falcon and alias Fortuna, both Clan del Golfo bosses held in a US prison. Falcon is Juan José Valencia, arrested in May 2021 in a mansion in Llanogrande, in Rionegro, Antioquia. Investigators at the time linked him to trafficking routes running from Cartagena to Belgium, Holland, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, commanding more than 225 men inside the organization run by alias Otoniel. He was extradited, convicted in the United States, and released in late 2025, apparently for cooperating with American prosecutors, though Semana notes he still faces charges in Colombia. Fortuna is Andrés Mauricio Vélez, whom Colombian police classify as a narco invisible — an invisible trafficker who finances operations without direct involvement in trafficking itself. He served four years in the US and was recaptured on his return to Colombia in September 2025 on charges of money laundering, illicit enrichment and criminal conspiracy.

Both men were willing to hand over information, Castañeda told Lemus, in exchange for having some of the property held by the Sociedad de Activos Especiales (SAE, Special Assets Company) — the state body that administers assets confiscated from criminals — signed over to a tercero de buena fe, a third party acting in good faith, to manage on their behalf. Castañeda also said Falcon wanted an arrest warrant covering five members of his immediate family lifted.

The approach had already run through other channels. Castañeda told Lemus the first contact was made with Augusto Rodríguez, then director of the Unidad Nacional de Protección (UNP, National Protection Unit), the agency that assigns state protection details to people under threat. Castañeda calls Rodríguez “el Ingeniero” — the Engineer — on the recording, and said Rodríguez had asked for a first gesture of good faith that produced a weapons seizure in Puerto Boyacá, in the Magdalena Medio region, and that President Petro already knew about the arrangement.

Castañeda also told Lemus he had spoken that same morning with then-Army commander General Luis Emilio Cardozo, through the Presidency’s secretary of transparency, Andrés Idárraga. He said attacks were planned for July 20 — two days after the meeting — and that the traffickers would hand over two cylinder bombs, a mortar, an R-15 rifle with 100 rounds, a grenade-dropping drone and two grenades, all tied to a planned attack on Petro during a visit to the Sierra region, and separately, rifles intended for an attempt on then-Vice President Francia Márquez. The purpose, Castañeda said, was to generate a scandal resembling the assassination of Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay and blame the president for it.

Lemus’s own voice is on the recording responding to Castañeda’s complaints that the government had not delivered after the Magdalena Medio operation: “No, no — but I’m committing that we’ll do it.” When Castañeda raised concerns about creating friction with the UNP director, Lemus told him, “No, no, no, because I can handle things with the SAE itself, relax.”

Semana obtained responses from four of the officials it names. Lemus confirmed that SAE properties were offered to the Narcochofer in exchange for information, telling Semana such meetings happen routinely and that an offer is not the same as a delivery — the government waits for information before acting. He acknowledged that offering state assets for information is not part of his official function, but defended it as necessary given what he characterized as a matter of national security. Rodríguez denied any agreement, saying he only received data, passed it to the president, and had no further contact once the information was verified and the weapons found. Retired General Cardozo said he referred Castañeda’s warning to a Special Forces colonel for corroboration, and that a weapons cache was found in Santa Marta. Idárraga said the matter was routed through Petro to Angie Rodríguez, then head of the presidential administrative department, and to retired General Humberto Guatibonza, the president’s chief of protection, with the SAE’s director, Amelia Pérez, tasked with evaluating the property request.

Once the meeting ended, Lemus warned his own analyst to be cautious about Castañeda’s credibility, according to Semana.

“I’ve been following this kid for a long time. He talks about a reach in the Police he never had. I have my reservations about this kid.”

— Jorge Lemus, then director of Colombia’s DNI, quoted by Semana

The reservation appears to have been warranted. El Tiempo‘s investigative unit first reported the underlying dealings on January 30, 2026, and reported in mid-August where the case has landed. Sources inside the Fiscalía told El Tiempo that the alleged plot against Petro and Márquez, along with the weapons handovers in Puerto Boyacá, Santa Marta and Medellín, are being investigated as possible falsos positivos — manufactured results. One source described the motive: in exchange for staging the plot, the two traffickers wanted their arrest warrants lifted so they could return to Colombia. The Fiscalía has refused both men a principio de oportunidad, the legal mechanism for suspending prosecution in exchange for cooperation, and the SAE denied Fortuna’s property request outright. Both men are now under investigation for possible procedural fraud and illegal possession of weapons restricted to Colombia’s armed forces, and El Tiempo reports the Fiscalía is weighing whether other people belong in the case.

Either reading of the recording reflects poorly on the state. If the plots were real, Colombia’s intelligence service was negotiating its president’s physical safety with two Clan del Golfo bosses, offering confiscated mafia real estate as currency. If the plots were staged — which the Fiscalía is treating as the working theory — two traffickers led the UNP, the Army command, the presidency’s anti-corruption office and the national intelligence service in circles.

The broader record adds context. El Colombiano, citing intelligence figures, reported that Clan del Golfo grew from roughly 4,500 members in 2022 to close to 10,000, and expanded its territorial presence from 165 to 338 municipalities — close to a third of Colombia’s total. El Colombiano put coca cultivation at around 230,000 hectares in 2022; the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime measured 253,000 hectares in 2023, with potential cocaine production reaching 2,664 metric tons, a 53% increase in a single year. The Petro government ran 12 negotiating tables under its paz total — total peace — policy, and none ended in disarmament, in part because Colombia’s Congress never passed a ley de sometimiento, a submission law that would have given a purely criminal group a legal path to surrender. On October 24, 2025, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control placed Petro himself on its sanctions list on counternarcotics grounds. In April, the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Office of the Inspector General) opened a disciplinary investigation into Lemus over separate recordings in which he allegedly offered judicial benefits to the lawyer of contraband boss Diego Marín Buitrago, alias Papá Pitufo, as a way of bringing Marín into the paz total framework.

Not every assessment of the policy is damning. In a November 2024 report, ACLED, the conflict-monitoring group, described the result as a paradox: Petro’s approach reduced violence even as armed groups grew stronger. The Clan del Golfo eventually came to a negotiating table in Qatar starting in September 2025, and Colombia’s decades of pure militarization never produced a durable peace either. But a drop in violence purchased by the state standing down, while the group across the table roughly doubles in size, amounts to a truce on the cartel’s terms with no legal permanence. The Narcochofer recording exposes the mechanism underneath the policy: not a negotiation with defined limits, but an official offering assets he has since admitted he had no authority to offer, to a source he privately told his own analyst he distrusted, for weapons the Fiscalía now suspects were planted.

The recording’s release comes as Colombia’s new government begins its own campaign against the same armed groups. Abelardo de la Espriella took office on August 7 and moved quickly: his first order transferred 117 high-profile prisoners from paz total negotiating tables into maximum-security prisons. That same day, a vehicle bomb attributed to Iván Mordisco’s FARC dissidents destroyed a newly built toll plaza in Mondomo, in northern Cauca. On the night of August 10, two Kfir fighter jets bombed ELN camps between Tibú and San Calixto, in Norte de Santander. In Algeciras, Huila, an ambush on a Ninth Brigade unit checking a cylinder bomb killed two soldiers and wounded 19. Colombia’s Gaula Militar captured alias Bonito, second-in-command of the Comandos de la Frontera, in Guamal, Meta, and de la Espriella announced Friday night that alias Momo of the Clan del Golfo had been killed in Antioquia.

The Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsman’s Office), Colombia’s national human-rights watchdog, reported that four farmers in rural El Tarra were wounded during the August 10 bombing. Semana reports that military counterintelligence is investigating a possible high-level leak that would have allowed the ELN to anticipate the strike, and is separately examining whether the ELN itself dropped explosives from drones onto the civilians to discredit the armed forces.

The same intelligence apparatus now expected to run a national offensive against these groups — and to prevent that offensive from being compromised from within — is the one whose director spent an afternoon in July 2025 offering seized property for tips from a source he privately did not trust. In June, as president-elect, de la Espriella instructed his running mate, now-Vice President José Manuel Restrepo, to file criminal and disciplinary complaints against former High Peace Commissioner Danilo Rueda over a separate set of Clan del Golfo recordings published by Noticias Caracol, and to forward that material to the United States Department of Justice. Those cases will take years to resolve. The offensive against the same armed groups is happening now.

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

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

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

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The Candidates: Background and Context

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

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

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

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

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

The Electoral Map

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

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

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

The Political Context: From Uribe to Petro and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

What to Expect Before June 21

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

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

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

Winners and Losers by Sector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Outlook

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

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

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

Colombians face three sharply different futures in May 31 vote

Colombia votes on May 31 with its presidential race concentrated around three candidates whose platforms diverge on nearly every dimension of economic and security policy relevant to foreign investors. For corporate executives, institutional investors, and multinational operations with Colombian exposure, the choice between senator Iván Cepeda, senator Paloma Valencia, and defense attorney Abelardo de la Espriella carries direct, measurable implications for the regulatory environment, foreign direct investment (FDI) conditions, energy sector licensing, and geopolitical alignment through at least 2030.

No candidate is projected to clear the 50%-plus-one threshold required to win outright on May 31, making a runoff election on June 21 the expected outcome. The question that will determine the direction of that runoff — and by extension the next administration — is which of the two opposition candidates finishes second.

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A Race Reshaped by Late Polling

The final-week polling picture shifted substantially, and the trajectory matters as much as the snapshot. The CONDOR weighted aggregate — which incorporates surveys from six polling firms and applies greater weight to more recent data — placed the race as of May 23 at: Cepeda 36.3%, De la Espriella 29.1%, Valencia 16.7%.

Invamer, one of Colombia’s most established polling firms, surveyed 3,800 respondents across 152 municipalities between May 13 and May 20, registering Cepeda at 44.6%, De la Espriella at 31.6%, and Valencia at 14.0%. The Centro Nacional de Consultoría (CNC) published a survey conducted May 22 and 23 showing Cepeda at 33.4%, De la Espriella at 30.9%, and Valencia at 12.6%.

Comparing those figures to the Fundación Génesis Crea survey from May 4 through May 11 — which placed Cepeda at 35.1%, Valencia at 25.4%, and De la Espriella at 21.6% — indicates a multi-poll trend of De la Espriella gaining approximately nine to ten percentage points in three weeks while Valencia shed a comparable share. AS/COA’s poll tracker confirms the directional consistency across firms.

Atlas Intel, which published figures more favorable to De la Espriella, is currently under investigation by Colombia’s Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE) for potential methodology violations and could face suspension of its operations. Those figures are treated with caution in this analysis.

Runoff modeling diverges between firms. Fundación Génesis Crea showed Valencia defeating Cepeda 49.1% to 44.7% in a second-round matchup — meaning she was the stronger opposition candidate in that scenario. The Guarumo/Ecoanalítica survey found Cepeda losing all hypothetical runoff scenarios, including against De la Espriella. Two minor candidates — former senator Clara López and former Chocó governor Luis Gilberto Murillo — withdrew and endorsed Cepeda before the first round, a consolidation that appears to have had limited effect on his polling numbers.

Finance Colombia reported in May that the campaign has been marked by an unusual absence of traditional televised debates. Cepeda declined to participate in events organized by major media outlets, stating that proposed formats lacked neutrality. Former Bogotá Mayor Claudia López, herself a candidate, said publicly that Cepeda’s refusal was motivated by an unwillingness to defend his record as the architect of President Gustavo Petro‘s Paz Total security negotiation strategy.

Security Policy: The Three Approaches to Armed Groups

Public security is the top voter concern heading into the election. InSight Crime documented that the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) launched a major offensive against FARC dissident factions in Norte de Santander in early 2025, resulting in mass civilian casualties in the Catatumbo region. In Chocó and Antioquia, the ELN and the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC), commonly known as the Clan del Golfo, are competing for control of illegal gold mining corridors and drug trafficking routes. In Cauca, FARC dissident factions have established territorial control in areas where state presence has collapsed.

Cepeda’s approach to security is defined by his role as the principal legislative architect of Paz Total. As chair of the Senate‘s peace commission, he designed the framework that extended negotiating status to the ELN, FARC dissident groups, and the Clan del Golfo. His stated rationale is that targeting the financial leadership of drug networks rather than foot soldiers produces more durable results — a position that has academic backing in narcotics policy literature. In practice, Paz Total produced ceasefires that were repeatedly violated, and security indicators in conflict-affected departments deteriorated during the Petro administration. A Cepeda presidency is expected to continue the negotiated settlement model, with the military operating under political constraints.

Valencia’s security platform is based on reinstating Seguridad Democrática, the doctrine associated with former president Álvaro Uribe’s administrations from 2002 to 2010. The core elements are expanded military presence in rural conflict zones, dismantling of rural criminal networks, and resumption of extradition agreements with the United States — which Petro suspended, effectively shielding cartel leadership from US federal prosecution. The Uribe-era approach resulted in measurable reductions in homicide rates, forced displacement, and ELN and FARC territorial control, though human rights organizations documented serious abuses by security forces during that period.

De la Espriella has stated explicitly that his government would have no peace process. He advocates for a model similar to El Salvador’s under President Nayib Bukele: mass incarceration, construction of high-security prison facilities, classification of guerrilla and cartel organizations as foreign terrorist organizations, and broad military offensives. He has not detailed how such operations would be financed or how the mass detention model would interact with Colombia’s Constitutional Court, which has repeatedly constrained executive security powers.

For the armed groups operating in Norte de Santander and Cauca, the historical record indicates that Colombia’s criminal organizations respond more acutely to sustained, institutionally grounded military pressure and functioning extradition pipelines than to political rhetoric. By that measure, Valencia’s platform — which rebuilds the institutional security apparatus incrementally — represents a more structurally credible threat to the ELN and the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) FARC dissidents. For the Clan del Golfo leadership, extradition to the United States has historically been the principal deterrent, and Valencia’s program explicitly restores it.

Business Climate and Employment Conditions

The Petro administration enacted a series of minimum wage increases totaling more than 60% over four years — including a 16% increase for 2023, the largest single-year hike in Colombian history, and a 23.78% increase for 2026 — restructured labor regulations to expand premium pay requirements for night, weekend, and holiday shifts, and raised corporate tax rates to fund social spending programs. The Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia (ANDI) characterized the regulatory environment as adverse to private investment. Finance Colombia tracked a material decline in FDI in the extractive sector over the same period.

Cepeda supported those labor and fiscal reforms throughout their legislative passage. His platform extends the Petro model: increased state social spending, continued land redistribution programs, and maintenance of the current wage and labor cost structure. For companies with established Colombian operations, the regulatory environment is manageable; for companies evaluating market entry or operational expansion, the cost structure adds friction.

Valencia’s economic program emphasizes corporate stability and private sector investment as the primary mechanisms of job creation. Her vice-presidential running mate, Juan Daniel Oviedo — former director of DANE, Colombia’s national statistics agency — represents a technocratic orientation focused on reducing structural market distortions, streamlining public procurement, and scaling back state administrative overhead. Oviedo’s appointment is a direct signal to the business community that economic management would be data-driven rather than ideologically directed. Oviedo also publicly identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, a departure from the traditional social conservatism of Centro Democrático.

De la Espriella’s economic orientation is pro-business with protectionist elements. His vice-presidential candidate, José Manuel Restrepo — who served as Colombia’s Finance Minister and Commerce Minister — provides institutional credibility on fiscal and trade policy. Restrepo’s presence on the ticket signals commitment to fiscal discipline and regulatory reduction in the extractive and commercial sectors. De la Espriella’s personal style, however, introduces operational uncertainty; his campaign has generated multiple high-profile controversies, including a public altercation with Caracol Noticias journalist María Lucía Fernández during a live broadcast and a formal apology following misconduct allegations by journalist Laura Rodríguez of Piso 8 FM.

Foreign Investment, Oil, and Mining

Ecopetrol holds a 31.5% stake in the Gunflint oil field in the Gulf of Mexico.

The extractive sector is the most consequential economic policy dimension for international capital. Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC; BVC: ECOPETROL) — Colombia’s state-controlled energy company and the largest corporation in the country — has operated under exploration restrictions during the Petro administration, which has opposed new fossil fuel contracts on climate grounds.

Cepeda’s position extends the Petro framework: mandatory transition away from fossil fuels, heavy restrictions or outright prohibitions on new oil and gas exploration contracts, and stringent environmental licensing requirements for open-pit mining operations. Foreign investment would be directed by policy toward green hydrogen, ecotourism, and smallholder agriculture. For the multinational oil majors with Colombian operations and for institutional investors in the mining sector, a Cepeda presidency represents a continuation of the current constraints and, in some contract scenarios, an accelerated wind-down of Colombian portfolios.

In a related development, Finance Colombia reported in May that Ecopetrol’s president, Ricardo Roa, has been formally charged in connection with alleged campaign spending violations during Petro’s 2022 presidential campaign. The case will be inherited by whoever takes office in August.

Valencia’s position is that hydrocarbon revenues are essential to Colombia’s macroeconomic stability and that the country cannot exit the sector before alternative revenue structures exist. Her platform actively encourages FDI in petroleum exploration, is open to regulated fracking, and commits to clearing the environmental licensing backlog that has stalled multiple large-scale gold and copper mining projects. For energy and mining companies currently blocked by administrative delays, this represents the most direct path to project advancement.

De la Espriella’s position goes further: essentially deregulating the environmental licensing process for major extraction projects on the grounds that Colombia’s economic sovereignty takes precedence over environmental restrictions he characterizes as externally imposed. The practical constraint is whether a De la Espriella administration would have the institutional coherence and congressional support to deliver regulatory rollback, given that his movement has no established political party structure and entered the race through an independent signature campaign.

Foreign Policy: Washington Alignment vs. Multipolar Strategy

The US Embassy in Bogotá is said to be the 3rd largest US mission in the world (photo: Loren Moss)

Colombia’s relationship with the United States deteriorated materially under Petro, who aligned Colombia with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, pursued closer ties with China and Russia, and suspended extradition agreements. US counternarcotics cooperation was strained throughout the period.

Cepeda is committed to what he describes as a multipolar foreign policy — maintaining functional diplomatic channels with Washington and Brussels while deepening strategic and commercial relationships with China and Russia. His alignment with regional left-of-center governments in Mexico, Brazil, and Bolivia would position Colombia as part of a Latin American bloc that has grown increasingly skeptical of US regional leadership. For US companies operating in Colombia, this trajectory does not mean immediate operational disruption, but it reduces Colombia’s utility as a reliable counterpart on security cooperation, counter-narcotics intelligence sharing, and trade dispute resolution.

Valencia positions a return to the Western alignment as a core objective. She would prioritize restoring the US-Colombia relationship, reinforcing the bilateral Free Trade Agreement, and reestablishing intelligence-sharing mechanisms that were reduced under Petro. Her framing positions Colombia as a democratic anchor in a region experiencing authoritarian pressures.

De la Espriella takes the most explicit pro-US position in the race. La Silla Vacía reported that De la Espriella or entities linked to his campaign donated more than $90,000 USD to the US Republican Party, a fact that raises questions about the nature and expectations of those relationships. He has publicly aligned himself with the populist right in the United States, takes a hostile posture toward China, Russia, and Venezuela, and has characterized his security approach as consistent with a transactional alliance with Washington focused on counter-narcotics enforcement and cartel designation as foreign terrorist organizations.

“Ese pisco robó a 200 mil colombianos.” — Claudia López, former Mayor of Bogotá, referring to presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella’s legal representation of DMG pyramid scheme founder David Murcia Guzmán, during a presidential campaign event.

Corruption and Judicial Independence

All three candidates have stated commitments to fighting corruption, though their approaches and focal points differ in ways that are material to the institutional environment for business operations.

Cepeda’s legislative record includes serious, documented work investigating paramilitary infiltration of Colombia’s political institutions — the period known as parapolítica — and pursuing accountability for those cases. His blind spot, his critics argue, is corruption within the current administration. When Ecopetrol’s Ricardo Roa was formally charged in connection with Petro’s 2022 campaign, the response from the Pacto Histórico coalition was subdued. Cepeda has been Álvaro Uribe’s primary judicial antagonist in the Senate; a Cepeda administration would offer no institutional protection to Uribe and would be expected to support the full progress of judicial proceedings against him. For left-wing politicians facing legal exposure, including former Medellín mayor Daniel Quintero, a Cepeda administration would be expected to be more receptive to amnesty frameworks.

Valencia’s approach to anti-corruption is structural rather than prosecutorial: strengthening the independence of the Contraloría General de la República and the Fiscalía General de la Nación, implementing digital transparency in public procurement, and reducing informal executive influence over judicial processes. She would be expected to apply political and rhetorical pressure on behalf of Uribe — her political mentor and a close ally — though her legislative track record indicates a degree of institutional independence from Centro Democrático party orthodoxy.

De la Espriella’s anti-corruption rhetoric centers on severe criminal penalties for corrupt officials. The credibility of that position is complicated by his professional history, which is examined in detail below.

De la Espriella’s Legal Career: The Documented Record

De la Espriella’s campaign has faced sustained scrutiny over his client history as one of Colombia’s highest-profile criminal defense attorneys. The record is documented in reporting by El Colombiano, El Espectador, and the investigative outlet Corrupción al Día.

Abelardo de la Espriella (screen capture from Twitter video)

His documented client roster includes Salvatore Mancuso, the former supreme commander of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitary network; multiple legislators convicted in the parapolítica scandal, which established systematic infiltration of Colombia’s congress by paramilitary organizations; David Murcia Guzmán, the operator of the DMG pyramid scheme that defrauded an estimated 200,000 Colombian investors; the Nule Primos, convicted of large-scale public contract fraud; and Álex Saab, the Colombian businessman extradited to the United States on charges of acting as the primary money launderer for the Maduro government in Venezuela. According to Corrupción al Día, De la Espriella’s legal fees from Saab reportedly reached $12 million USD and included private aircraft travel.

De la Espriella’s response to this line of criticism rests on due process principles: that every accused person is entitled to vigorous legal defense regardless of the charges, and that his ability to navigate Colombia’s criminal code at its most complex levels demonstrates the expertise required to enforce the law from the executive branch. The argument has legal validity as a principle. The specific issue for foreign compliance officers and US government counterparts is the Saab representation: the same Nicolás Maduro whose regime De la Espriella’s campaign now characterizes as an ideological enemy received legal services from De la Espriella’s firm when the representation was commercially available.

The Fiscalía investigated De la Espriella in connection with alleged paramilitary links in 2009 and again in 2012; both investigations were dismissed for insufficient evidence, and he carries no convictions or active investigations on those matters.

Cepeda’s Family History and Ideological Background

Iván Cepeda (from Twitter)

Critics of Iván Cepeda, including Enrique Gómez of the Salvación Nacional party, have argued that his family background constitutes evidence of structural alignment with guerrilla movements. The record on this point merits examination.

Cepeda is the son of Manuel Cepeda Vargas, who served as Secretary-General of the Colombian Communist Party and as a senator for the Unión Patriótica (UP), a left-wing political movement that was systematically exterminated by a combination of state actors and paramilitary organizations during the 1980s and 1990s. Manuel Cepeda Vargas was assassinated on August 9, 1994. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights subsequently found the Colombian state responsible for his murder. The FARC-EP named its Frente Urbano Manuel Cepeda Vargas — an urban front operating within the Bloque Occidental — in the elder Cepeda’s honor.

The Fundación Paz y Reconciliación (PARES) has documented that Iván Cepeda’s relationship with his father’s political positions was more complex than the family lineage alone suggests. After studying in Bulgaria in 1981, Cepeda broke from his father’s Soviet-oriented communist framework and aligned with democratic leftists including Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, who publicly rejected the FARC’s armed strategy. Cepeda has repeatedly stated his repudiation of the FARC’s use of his father’s name. No documented evidence connects him to operational coordination with current armed groups.

What the family history does establish is the ideological framework through which Cepeda processes security policy: a belief, grounded in personal and political experience, that the Colombian state’s institutional violence has been as destructive as guerrilla violence, and that negotiated settlements are structurally preferable to military solutions. That framework generates Paz Total. It also generates a posture toward ELN and FARC dissident negotiators that prioritizes process continuity over verified compliance — a disposition that armed groups have demonstrably exploited to maintain territorial and operational positions while negotiation frameworks provided legal cover.

Paloma Valencia (image Twitter)

Valencia and the Uribe Question

The comparison to former president Iván Duque (2018–2022) comes up regularly in discussions of Valencia’s political independence. Duque, who had limited independent political standing before Uribe selected him, was perceived throughout his term as governing within constraints set by his patron — a dynamic that Colombian political cartoonists characterized as ventriloquism.

Valencia’s profile differs materially. She is the granddaughter of former Colombian president Guillermo León Valencia, carries her own political lineage, and has served in the Senate for over a decade, building positions on agrarian reform, judicial modernization, and indigenous land rights that have placed her at variance with standard Centro Democrático positions on those issues. She won the Gran Consulta por Colombia primary on March 8 with more than 45% of the vote — over 3.2 million Colombians — establishing a democratic mandate distinct from any party endorsement.

She would be expected to use institutional and rhetorical channels to support Uribe in the ongoing judicial proceedings against him, and to apply pressure on the trajectory of those cases. Whether that constitutes political interference with judicial independence or normal advocacy within democratic norms is a question on which observers disagree. What the legislative record does not support is the characterization of Valencia as incapable of independent governance.

Press Freedom and the Media Environment

Press freedom carries an indirect but measurable correlation with rule-of-law quality, which in turn affects operational risk for companies that rely on regulatory predictability and transparent legal processes.

Cepeda has maintained a posture toward critical media that mirrors President Petro’s practice of characterizing adversarial outlets as acting in the interests of economic elites. Under Petro, this produced a systematic exclusion of critical media from official information flows and persistent rhetorical delegitimization of independent journalism, though the press remained legally free to operate. A Cepeda administration would be expected to continue this pattern.

Valencia’s background in Colombia’s traditional political and intellectual establishment, combined with a decade in a party that has faced sustained critical coverage from Colombia’s major outlets, points toward a conventional institutional relationship with the press — adversarial at times, but within professional norms.

De la Espriella’s conduct during the campaign provides direct evidence of his approach. He publicly called Caracol Noticias journalist María Lucía Fernández “ignorant” in a live interview. He issued a formal apology after journalist Laura Rodríguez of Piso 8 FM made allegations of inappropriate conduct. His campaign strategy has drawn comparisons to the approach of Argentine president Javier Milei and US president Donald Trump in its use of direct digital channels to circumvent traditional media while publicly attacking outlets that publish critical coverage. The press would remain legally protected under a De la Espriella administration, but the operational environment for investigative journalism would be hostile.

The Ideological Spectrum: Market Liberalism to State Direction

The question of which candidate is most aligned with free-market principles requires a distinction that the international business press frequently elides: the difference between economic deregulation and political authoritarianism. These can, and in this election do, exist independently.

De la Espriella’s platform is often described in international coverage as the most pro-market. His deregulation proposals for the extractive sector and his corporate tax rhetoric support that reading in the economic domain. His security platform, however, involves a substantial expansion of state coercive power: mass detention operations, a mega-prison construction program, and the suspension of standard due process protections to facilitate rapid incarceration of criminal suspects. The Cato Institute‘s framework of economic freedom as inseparable from civil liberties would categorize a state powerful enough to detain people without standard procedural protections as a state that represents an institutional risk to property rights and contract enforcement as well.

Valencia’s platform, anchored by Oviedo’s technocratic program of structural market reform — reduced administrative barriers, streamlined procurement, smaller state overhead, maintained civil liberties — represents the closest approximation to coherent market liberalism available in this field. It does not carry the rhetorical force of De la Espriella’s deregulation proposals, but it has more institutional grounding.

Cepeda’s platform is the furthest from market liberalism by any standard measure: state-directed investment allocation, wealth redistribution through tax and transfer mechanisms, state expansion in healthcare and pension administration, and agrarian land redistribution. His program is continuous with the Petro administration’s economic framework.

Minor Candidates: The Rest of the Ballot

Claudia López, senator of Colombia. (Credit: Patty Suescún)

Several other candidates remain on the ballot and are drawing small but potentially consequential vote shares in a first round where the margin between second and third place could be narrow.

Claudia López, former mayor of Bogotá running under the Con Claudia Imparables coalition, positions herself as a progressive centrist with a documented anti-corruption record. Her polling has not broken 3.5% in major surveys, and her high polarization ratings from her mayoral term limit her growth ceiling. Her attacks on De la Espriella during the campaign — she publicly called him a “defender of the mafia” in reference to his client history — have been among the most pointed in the race, and factually grounded on the public record.

Sergio Fajardo, making his third consecutive presidential run under Dignidad y Compromiso, continues to represent a technocratic, education-focused centrism grounded in his work transforming Medellín in the early 2000s. He has not broken 3.5% in any major poll in this cycle.

Roy Barreras, running under La Fuerza de la Paz following his Frente por la Vida primary victory, is one of the most experienced political operatives in Colombia, having been part of multiple coalition governments across ideological lines over two decades. He polls below the threshold for meaningful first-round impact.

Miguel Uribe Londoño, running under Partido Demócrata, represents a younger-generation conservative platform emphasizing fiscal discipline and private sector growth, broadly consistent with Valencia’s program. He also polls below 3.5%.

Carlos Caicedo, running on a regionalist platform emphasizing decentralization away from Bogotá, draws support primarily from the Costa Caribe. His structural argument about Colombia’s administrative over-centralization is substantively grounded, though his national profile is insufficient to affect the first-round outcome.

Investment Implications

For international capital with Colombian exposure, the three-way race produces three materially different operational scenarios.

A Cepeda victory — which remains the single most likely first-round outcome based on available polling — would signal continuity of the Petro-era regulatory framework: sustained capital outflow pressure, high corporate tax rates, no new fossil fuel exploration contracts for Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC; BVC: ECOPETROL) or private operators, continued labor cost escalation, and a foreign policy trajectory away from Washington. Colombian equity valuations would be expected to remain under pressure. The mining licensing backlog would continue to accumulate. A Cepeda administration would not replicate Venezuela’s economic trajectory — Colombia’s independent central bank, Banco de la República, its functioning constitutional court, and its institutional depth provide meaningful buffers — but the investment headwinds would be structural rather than cyclical.

A Valencia victory would represent the sharpest regulatory reversal available in this field. Ecopetrol exploration contracts would be expected to advance. The mining licensing backlog would be addressed. US bilateral relations would be restored, reactivating security intelligence cooperation and trade facilitation mechanisms. The Colombian peso would be expected to strengthen as country risk premium declined. The path to that outcome now requires her to either close the gap significantly on De la Espriella in the first round or rely on runoff polling that showed her as the stronger second-round candidate — data that predates the most recent polling shift.

A De la Espriella victory introduces the widest distribution of possible outcomes. The upside scenario involves Restrepo managing fiscal and trade policy competently, genuine regulatory rollback in the extractive sector, aggressive extradition resumption, and security operations that reduce the physical risk premium in conflict-affected departments including Cauca, Norte de Santander, and Chocó. The downside scenario involves recurring crises generated by De la Espriella’s personal conduct, conflicts of interest arising from his former client relationships, and authoritarian security measures that attract international human rights attention and complicate bilateral relationships. Restrepo’s presence on the ticket reduces the probability of the downside scenario but does not eliminate it.

The current polling trend indicates that right-wing voters are consolidating around De la Espriella at Valencia’s expense. Whether that consolidation produces a runoff between De la Espriella and Cepeda — and whether the runoff produces a left or right-wing government — remains uncertain. What the polling data does not support is the scenario, widely assumed until recently, of a Cepeda-Valencia runoff in which Valencia was positioned as the structurally stronger opposition candidate.

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