Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez is preparing to take additional information to U.S. authorities as his administration investigates whether money allegedly diverted through corruption during the city’s previous government was moved through Panama and into the United States.

Gutiérrez said he has already provided evidence to U.S. government agencies and plans to deliver more information during an upcoming visit to the United States. The mayor says the material could help authorities trace the alleged movement of funds and identify people who may have benefited.

The allegations concern the 2020-2023 administration of former Medellín Mayor Daniel Quintero. They remain allegations, with responsibility for determining criminal liability resting with Colombian and U.S. authorities.

Alleged money trail leads beyond Colombia

The latest development follows a July 27 update from the Medellín government, which said investigations into alleged corruption during the previous administration had reached 666 findings, 165 more than the 501 previously identified.

According to the city, prosecutors and other authorities have collected more than 13,000 pieces of evidence and 157 witness statements and have conducted 97 expert assessments. The cases have so far resulted in 55 people being formally charged, three arrests, one conviction and 25 asset-forfeiture measures.

Gutiérrez has now placed particular emphasis on tracing what allegedly happened to money after it left Colombia.

The mayor said there is information about alleged business partners and nominees, including people who are reportedly living in Miami. He said the evidence provided to U.S. agencies is intended to help trace a potential route from Colombia to Panama and then to the United States.

If confirmed, an international financial trail could expand the investigation beyond Medellín and require cooperation from authorities in other jurisdictions.

Investigation covers multiple public entities

The corruption investigations extend across several Medellín institutions and public contracts.

The city has cited alleged irregularities involving Afinia, EPM’s Caribbean subsidiary, the Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley, Metroparques, the Institute of Sports and Recreation, Buen Comienzo and the maintenance of Parque de las Aguas, among others.

Gutiérrez’s administration says potentially directed contracting during the 2020-2023 period exceeded COP 1 trillion.

One investigation cited by the city concerns the alleged sale of the management position at Afinia. According to information presented by the administration, a witness alleged that the position was negotiated for $8 million in exchange for influence over company contracting. The case includes alleged international connections that are being examined by authorities.

Other investigations involve alleged contract steering, inflated costs and the improper use of public resources.

Quintero rejects the allegations

The accusations have also intensified the political confrontation between Gutiérrez and Quintero.

Gutiérrez has attributed the alleged corruption findings to the previous administration, while Quintero has rejected the accusations and accused his successor of using the Medellín mayor’s office to pursue political attacks.

The distinction between allegations and established judicial findings remains important as the cases continue through Colombia’s justice system.

U.S. cooperation could determine where funds went

The planned engagement with U.S. authorities could become a significant next step if investigators are able to verify the alleged international financial trail.

Gutiérrez said the information could ultimately contribute to legal proceedings against people allegedly involved in the schemes, including potential extradition requests. However, no U.S. authority has publicly established that illicit Colombian funds entered the United States based on the allegations described by the mayor.

For now, the alleged movement of corruption proceeds into the United States remains an investigative lead. The next stage will be determining whether Colombian and U.S. authorities can independently establish the origin, movement and destination of the funds.

(Headline photo: Medellin’s mayor, Federico Gutiérrez. (Photo by John Acosta via Wikimedia Commons)

The Contraloría Distrital de Medellín (Medellín District Comptroller’s Office) has opened a preliminary inquiry into whether a change of contractors on the final works of the Hidroituango hydroelectric project caused a presumed fiscal loss of $108.585 billion COP — 108,585,346,005.76 pesos, or roughly $33 million USD at mid-July exchange rates — to Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), the city-owned utility that operates the plant. The review centers on generating units 5, 6, 7, and 8, the final stage of the megaproject.

The matter reached Medellín’s comptroller from the department’s own auditors. Since February, the Contraloría General de Antioquia (Antioquia Comptroller’s Office) had been conducting a special audit of the contractor change. In June it reported that the Sociedad Hidroituango, the project’s owner, suffered no patrimonial harm from the decision, but that it had identified a presumed breach of the principio de planeación (planning principle) in the contracting process led by EPM. Because EPM does not fall under the departmental comptroller’s jurisdiction, the finding of more than 100 billion pesos was transferred to the Medellín district comptroller, which must now formally open a fiscal-responsibility investigation.

“The new contractor presented values in its proposal that are higher than the values EPM had in its official budget. That difference is what generates the patrimonial detriment.” — Paula Ortega, Comptroller of Medellín

Medellín Comptroller Paula Ortega said the possible harm did not arise from a direct increase in the contract’s value. “The new contractor presented values in its proposal that are higher than the values EPM had in its official budget. That difference is what generates the patrimonial detriment,” she told La FM. Ortega stressed that the process is only at the preliminary-inquiry stage, which could run about six months, and that no fiscally responsible parties have been named so far.

The office will need to reconstruct the contracting process and determine whether the decision to change contractors rested on sufficient technical, legal, and financial grounds, or whether it damaged EPM’s assets. Fiscal-responsibility proceedings move through several stages and can extend for up to two years, meaning a decision on the merits may not come until around 2028.

The decision under review was made between 2022 and 2023, when Daniel Quintero served as mayor of Medellín and chaired EPM’s board of directors. Quintero’s administration defended the change at the time, arguing that the firms then executing the project were under investigation over the 2018 Hidroituango contingency, which followed the collapse of the plant’s auxiliary diversion tunnel. On that basis, EPM awarded the completion of the works on turbines 5 through 8 to the Ituango PC-SC Consortium — made up of the Chinese firms Yellow River Co. and Power China International Group, alongside Colombian firm Schrader Camargo — which Finance Colombia reported was the sole bidder for the works. Quintero has rejected the comptroller’s finding. Finance Colombia has also reported on the earlier stages of the dispute, including the breakdown of mediation between EPM and its original consortium, the utility’s re-bidding of the Hidroituango works, and the broader turmoil at the utility under Quintero.

The inquiry adds to other oversight fronts surrounding Hidroituango and EPM, including an inspection of the company by the Superintendencia de Servicios Públicos Domiciliarios (Residential Public Utilities Superintendency) and judicial proceedings that already involve dozens of people over alleged irregularities during the previous administration. The Medellín district comptroller will ultimately decide whether the presumed detriment is confirmed and who, if anyone, must answer for it.

Above photo: Construction workers labor to complete the Hidroituango hydroelectric project (photo © Loren Moss)

Barring any post-election drama, President-elect de la Espriella will take over a very divided country, and if he is smart, he will understand that he was the first choice of only a minority of the electorate. He will have a choice. He can govern for the small hard core, or he can be a conciliator.

Colombia has a nasty history of political violence, going back to the country’s founding. The person most Colombians see as the founder of the nation, Colombia’s George Washington figure, Simón Bolívar, barely escaped with his life during what was known as the Septembrine Conspiracy, which was born out of a conflict in visions for the new country. For most of the country’s history, the hostility between the Conservatives and the Liberals, the two primary political parties for most of Colombia’s history, manifested itself with bullets every bit as much as with ballots. Even though Colombia has, for almost all of its history, been a real democracy; the country has had only one military strongman dictator, and even he tried to be something of a reformer; violence has always had a hand in politics.

“With less than half the vote, the only mandate he holds is for an inclusive, conciliatory approach.” — Loren Moss, Finance Colombia

I once was at a talk in Medellín, years ago, where the businessman Chris Daes was asked, “When will Colombia advance?” “When we learn to stop hating each other,” he said.

Last night, after the election results were announced, police stations in Kennedy and Bosa, low-income neighborhoods in the southwest of Bogotá, were attacked. Why? The police hadn’t done anything. Riot police were called out to Puerto Rellena in Cali after roads were blocked by Cepeda supporters. In Medellín, some supporters of the president-elect turned up with bats and clubs outside Plaza Mayor, one of the city’s main public squares, probably supporters of de la Espriella, and let me emphasize that this is my guess, but no violence was reported.

Outgoing President Gustavo Petro called for calm, but also complained about US President Donald Trump’s open support of de la Espriella, forgetting that just months ago he was in the US and called for the US military to turn against its own government. Petro and the losing candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda, have said that while they acknowledge the preliminary vote count, they will not concede until an official final count, and they are calling for a scrutiny of the ballots.

So what happened here?

Three weeks ago, Colombia held the first round of presidential voting. The early favorite, Paloma Valencia of the right-wing establishment Centro Democrático party, backed by former president Álvaro Uribe, came in third, behind the right-wing outsider Abelardo de la Espriella and the ally of outgoing president Gustavo Petro, Senator Iván Cepeda of the leftist Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact). In Colombia there is an open first round, which can field many candidates, but the top two vote-getters advance to a final round unless one candidate clears 50% plus one.

Most people thought Cepeda would come in first with a unified left, but de la Espriella came in first, Cepeda second, and Valencia third. My take on this is very clear: Colombians were saying that they reject Gustavo Petro’s collectivist socialist experiment, but that they also reject Álvaro Uribe as the flag-bearer for the right. A sort of “we don’t like them, but we don’t like you either.”

So what happened in the past three weeks? Exactly what I expected. The outgoing president’s political machine moved to mass mobilization: get the buses out, get the affinity groups, such as indigenous leaders and unions, to mobilize. Something interesting happened: a government worker I know in immigration was told, and convinced, that she would lose her job if de la Espriella won. Her union told her this, of course. Cepeda and Petro’s movement has counted on its ability to mobilize people through group affiliation, working through organized structures to get out the vote. It was very effective, but not quite enough.

On the other hand, the split vote between Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella came together, sort of, but not in a coordinated fashion. There was no real way to mobilize lukewarm people who were not already behind one of those two candidates. The business community had largely already opposed the Petro-Cepeda project, but it does not have the same mobilization machinery in place.

There will be time for a lot more journalism on this, but I want to get this initial reporting out quickly. Beyond that dynamic, what other factors came into play? Several:

• The outgoing president ran his administration like a game of thrones, or some kind of reality show. On average, he was bringing in a new cabinet minister every three weeks. It was nonstop drama and intrigue, and Cepeda’s message of “stay the course” ran up against that.
• Then there was the treatment of Vice President Francia Márquez. Petro used her to try to win the Afro-Colombian vote, but once they were elected, they tried to sideline her and treat her as a token. She rebelled against that and has called out her own administration for its corruption and racism. Over the past four years, Márquez has actually seemed more serious than Petro, who has a habit of crazy talk. By picking Aída Quilcué, Cepeda made it look like more of the same, and, fair or not, it made Quilcué look like a token candidate. Maybe it isn’t fair, but you can blame the Petro administration for creating that environment.
• Uribe’s first candidate choice, Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay (no relation), was assassinated on the orders of, according to Gustavo Petro’s own attorney general, the Segunda Marquetalia, a FARC dissident structure co-founded by Jesús Santrich, who was on his way to being extradited to the United States until that was allegedly blocked by Iván Cepeda’s efforts. Whether or not it is fair, for a lot of people in Colombia this is emblematic of Cepeda’s nurturing approach to the guerrilla groups, which have been growing stronger under the Pacto Histórico’s dialogue-first approach.
• The current administration is stained with several corruption scandals: the UNGRD scandal, in which money meant to bring water to poor, isolated families in the deserts of La Guajira was robbed for a political bribery fund; the ongoing scandals around Ricardo Roa and state petroleum company Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC), where Roa has been charged over alleged campaign-spending violations; the fiasco over the printing of Colombian passports; and a move that really angered the paisas (people of Antioquia and Medellín), the appointment of indicted former mayor Daniel Quintero to a government position supervising the finances of the country’s health system. Here you have a man with something like 40 counts of indictment for corruption, though let me be clear, he has not been convicted yet, and you appoint him to supervise the finances of the country’s primary health system? Usually when people are facing charges, they say something like “I am innocent, but I will resign to focus on clearing my name.” This one went full steam ahead. That undoubtedly cost votes among those who prioritize clean government.
• Cepeda’s running mate, Aída Quilcué, who never went to college, accused graduates of Colombia’s best universities of having “only learned to steal the people’s money.” She tried to walk that back after her statement blew up, but the damage was done. She was clearly attacking people who attended private universities in Colombia, many of which have no elite pretensions and specialize in educating low-income students.

What do I think will happen?

Assuming the vote count is not overturned, de la Espriella will take over the executive branch with no political machinery in Congress, so he will have to negotiate to get anything done. This is not a situation like El Salvador or Venezuela, where you come in and take over the whole government. To its credit, Colombia has strong institutions. Had Cepeda won, he would have come in with the largest bloc of legislators in Congress and might have found it relatively easy to push through his agenda. With de la Espriella, not so much, and I think this is a good thing. Personally, I like divided government as a concept, because it encourages moderation, consensus, and negotiation.

I expect the guerrilla groups to try to seize the initiative, and I expect their violence to increase in the short term as they try to assert their authority. Longer term, I think they are worse off, and they know the military will be after them soon, so they will make what hay they can while the sun shines. Expect them to try to “punish” the country for electing the candidate most hostile to them, a pattern that has already mocked the outgoing government’s “Total Peace” strategy.

Outgoing President Gustavo Petro will not shut up once out of office. He will become a full-time presence on social media and make as much noise as possible in opposition to the incoming administration. Unlike former President Juan Manuel Santos, Petro will be more like Álvaro Uribe, who has remained addicted to the spotlight, to influence, and to the thrill of power. In places where there is a tradition of former presidents ceding the spotlight, he won’t follow it. Petro will take every opportunity to travel around the world and throughout Colombia to speak, as he is entitled to, and to fashion for himself the role of dear father of the oppressed.

Petro and Cepeda and their movement will, if not explicitly then tacitly, reactivate the primera línea (front line), the aggressive activist youth street movement, not a formal organization, that mobilizes, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently, against whoever opposes the Pacto Histórico. Last night we already saw violence in the low-income areas of Bogotá, and we saw riot police called out in Cali. It is not always that someone gives an order to go out and protest, even though there have been accusations of exactly that, for example against Petro ally and senator Gustavo Bolívar.

Colombian law says the runner-up in the presidential election gets a seat in the Senate, so Cepeda will return to the Senate, where he will lead the opposition. He already has a bloc of some 30 legislators behind him and is a Senate veteran, so he will be a very powerful voice.

What do I hope will happen?

I hope de la Espriella will have a plan to lift up the poor and the marginalized, and Colombia has plenty. He says he will govern for all the people, and I hope so. This was a very polarized election. People who feel excluded from opportunity largely voted for Cepeda and now feel they have lost. De la Espriella has a window of opportunity to do what he said in his election-night speech and govern for all Colombians. I hope he understands that, with less than 50% of the vote, the only mandate he has is for an inclusive, conciliatory approach.

His administration is inheriting a fiscal mess, as the current government has run up the debt. I hope that, along with Vice President-elect José Manuel Restrepo, they can properly manage this and navigate Colombia’s economy through rough times. Because the government will need to find dollars to make these debt payments, the peso will eventually fall, unless the US does something stupid to wreck its own currency. The opposition will try to blame the new administration for this, even though they planted the seeds for these fiscal weeds that will soon sprout.

I hope Colombia becomes safer for Colombians, and that the guerrilla groups, the mafias, and the drug traffickers shrink. It may be utopian to think they will be eliminated in four years, but my hope is that Colombia becomes safer, especially for poor Colombians, who are by far the primary victims of these groups. In recent years, unlike in the old days, the rich have been largely insulated from the depredations of guerrillas and extortionists, but the poor continue to suffer. So I hope de la Espriella goes after these groups, but in a way that respects and protects human rights, something Uribe failed to do during his time in power, leading to many innocent people becoming victims not just of the guerrillas, but of state violence. I sincerely hope, and will be watching closely, that the state becomes a protector of the poor rather than a victimizer of them. Many poor Colombians suffered under Uribe’s watch, and many continue to suffer under the current Petro government, which has simply not protected them from the depredations of groups like the ELN, the Clan del Golfo, and the FARC dissidents.

People to watch

• Armando Benedetti. The interior minister has been Petro’s consigliere, but he also seems to hold some kind of strange power over Petro. The US government, or in other words Donald Trump, placed him on the Clinton List, which will complicate his life personally and professionally once he is out of office.
• Daniel Quintero. The former Medellín mayor is already battling serious corruption charges, and while he found a friend in Gustavo Petro, that protection will no longer be there. There will be no place for him in the incoming government, and he still has to face all these charges. With no power to protect his allies, many of them also indicted, will they turn on him and spill the frijoles?
• Álvaro Uribe. No doubt pleased, he didn’t get his first choice, which was his own candidate, but he and de la Espriella clearly share a fondness, and their families go way back. De la Espriella’s father was a Liberal Party supporter of Uribe, and Uribe rewarded him with a juicy notary appointment decades ago.

A win for the business sector

Objectively, this is a win for the business sector. Business groups like Fenalco and ANDI have expressed their support for de la Espriella, and he has expressed his explicit support for the petroleum and mining sectors. I just don’t see any major businesses or trade groups that came out in support of Cepeda. Certainly Cepeda and Petro have support from individual businesspeople, but as organized industry groups, I just haven’t seen it anywhere.

Anecdotes

The polls closed barely twelve hours ago, and overnight I tried to gather the opinions of a few people. This is not a scientific poll, and to be clear and fair, Finance Colombia is a business-oriented publication, and I simply know a lot more businesspeople and entrepreneurs than I know community organizers and militant activists. So this is not any kind of objective sample; it is simply personal feedback gathered the very night of the election:

• A member of the Wayúu community in La Guajira told me they went for Cepeda, so they are not pleased.
• In a split family, both spouses professionals from humble backgrounds, the husband, a labor lawyer who contracts with the government, went for Cepeda, but his wife, a middle manager at a bank, went for de la Espriella.
• A psychologist who originally voted for Sergio Fajardo in the first round told me she voted blank, because she saw both candidates as extremists, a left-wing extremist versus a right-wing extremist, and she was disgusted at her country’s polarization.
• A police officer commented to me, “Better this loco than the other loco,” meaning he would take de la Espriella but considered both of them crazy. I think this is a common sentiment; it was not an endorsement of one so much as thinking the other was the worse option.
• A domestic worker told me she voted for de la Espriella, hoping he will take action against rising crime and violence.
• There were pro-Cepeda protests and some street violence in the mostly poor southwest of Bogotá, but there were celebrations in parts of the north of the city, and in the high-income El Poblado area of Medellín the celebrations looked like Colombia had just won the World Cup. Even where I live, in a rural area about an hour from Medellín, you could hear spontaneous car parades and firecrackers all through the night.
• Small businesspeople and Colombian investors I know have, to a person, been celebrating.

The most important takeaway, and something Colombians should be proud of, is that they have just held a peaceful, free, and fair election. Not every country can do that. A lot of hard work remains, and a lot can still go wrong. Count on Finance Colombia to bring you timely updates and analysis.

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

An appointment the left now concedes “backfired”

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

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

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

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

An election-eve probe aimed at the opposition candidate

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

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

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

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

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

A fight that spilled inside the left

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

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

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

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

Why it matters

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

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

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

Two men. Both running to be the next president of Colombia. Both swear they are tough, that they are clean, that they are the answer to a country that is exhausted. And both of them have a problem with the company they keep.

One is a defense lawyer who built his career representing mobsters, paramilitaries, and at least one alleged front man for the Maduro regime — and he tells you those relationships were strictly professional. The other fought to spring a FARC commander out of a maximum-security holding cell — and he tells you that relationship was strictly professional too. One says, in effect, “I only knew the narco because I was his attorney.” The other says, “I only knew the guerrilla because I was a peace negotiator.” Same sentence, opposite ends of the political spectrum. It is the strangest mirror in Colombian politics.

This Sunday, June 21, Colombians return to the polls for the runoff. In the first round on May 31, the right’s Abelardo de la Espriella came first with about 43.7 percent. The left’s Iván Cepeda came second with about 40.9 percent. No one else is left. Whoever wins walks into the Casa de Nariño on August 7.

What follows is an analysis, not an endorsement. I am pro-business, anti-crime, and anti-communist, and I am not Colombian, so I will not presume to tell Colombians how to vote. What I can do is lay out who these two men are, where they came from, and the honest pros and cons of each — because both carry serious problems, and readers with capital, operations, or ties in Colombia deserve them laid out straight. Much of the biographical reporting here draws on the long-form profiles published by La Silla Vacía, among the best political journalism in the country, and on Finance Colombia‘s own coverage of the race.

Who is Abelardo de la Espriella?

Start with de la Espriella, since he holds a slight polling lead. His campaign events are not subtle: the lights go yellow, blue, and red, footage of tigers plays on the screens, smoke machines fire, the national anthem swells, and out he comes flanked by bodyguards in a bulletproof vest, declaring, “Here is your tiger, roaring and biting.” The tiger is his symbol — claw, territory, attack — and the crowd chant is ponle la raya al tigre, “put the stripe on the tiger.” It is a show, and he runs it the same way every time, with discipline.

According to La Silla Vacía’s profile, Abelardo was born in Bogotá in 1978 and grew up in Sahagún and Montería, in Córdoba on the Caribbean side. His mother calls the family riquitos de pueblo — “small-town rich.” A respected name and political connections, but not the rosca, the Bogotá elite, and not one of the great national fortunes. His father was a Liberal Party congressman and an early backer of Álvaro Uribe in Córdoba in 2001; when Uribe reached the presidency, he made the elder De la Espriella a notary. That is where the long relationship between the De la Espriella and Uribe families begins.

From childhood, Abelardo wanted to be seen. By his family’s account he sang opera in the bathroom, had a children’s radio program his father arranged, got himself onto regional television as a teenager, and promised his grandmother a limousine in Miami. He studied law at the Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá — not an academic powerhouse, but a real breeding ground for the Colombian right — and hustled the whole way through, selling whiskey, perfume, clothing, and emeralds on consignment. The man has always been building a legend about himself.

Here is the part he does not lead with on stage. De la Espriella made his name as a defense lawyer, and not for choirboys. His client list reads like a rogues’ gallery: politicians tied to paramilitary groups, the Nule brothers of the carrusel de contratos contracting scandal in Bogotá, the pyramid-scheme operator David Murcia of DMG, the disgraced Constitutional Court magistrate Jorge Pretelt, and — the big one — Álex Saab, the man the United States accused of being a front man for Nicolás Maduro. Early in his career, at 26, he did legal and public-relations work around the paramilitary demobilization at Santa Fe de Ralito through an NGO he ran. His childhood friend from Córdoba is Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary chief.

He will tell you — and it is a legitimate argument — that every defendant has a right to counsel, and that defending an unpopular client is not the same as committing the client’s crimes. Fair enough. We will return to it.

After the lawyering came the brand. He launched a rum called Ron Defensor, “the Defender,” with the vallenato star Silvestre Dangond. He launched a clothing line, released music, wrote books, went through an atheist phase, and then, roughly six years ago, underwent a very public religious conversion. Now he is the “God and family” candidate who calls himself “the Cyrus of Colombia.” By his own design he is a sybarite: Italian suits every year, a Miami mansion valued north of $5 million USD, a private plane, the whole production.

Three facts to keep in your carriel for later. First, he has never held elected office; he ran for a Bogotá council seat as a student in the 1990s, lost, and stayed out of electoral politics for nearly thirty years. Second, he holds three citizenships — American, Italian, and Colombian. Third, his running mate is José Manuel Restrepo, a name that returns in a big way when we reach the pros.

“The ‘tough on crime’ candidate has spent his career defending criminals, and the ‘human rights’ candidate stays silent on half the human rights abuses in his own backyard.” — Loren Moss, Finance Colombia

Who is Iván Cepeda?

If de la Espriella’s story is about a man who wanted to be seen, Cepeda’s is about a man shaped by a death.

On August 9, 1994, a young Iván Cepeda took a bus to Javeriana University, where he taught philosophy, after letting his father leave the house first. On the way he came upon ambulances, police cars, and a crowd around a bullet-riddled car. It was his father’s car. Manuel Cepeda, a senator for the Unión Patriótica, had just been assassinated.

The detail that explains Iván Cepeda is what he did next. He did not collapse over the body. He pulled from his jacket a column his father had written about another murdered activist, crossed the street to tell his wife, and then turned and spoke to journalists — composed, on message, calling on the president and the courts to act. “When my father was murdered,” he later said, “I already knew how I should act, what I should say.” He turned private grief into public, political language. La Silla Vacía describes his entire method of politics as organized around the truth of the victims, and that is exactly right.

Cepeda was born in 1962, while his father was in prison for interviewing a survivor of the army’s bombing of Marquetalia, the peasant enclave that became the founding myth of the FARC. His parents, Manuel Cepeda and Yira Castro, were journalists, communists, and revolutionaries; politics was the air the household breathed. At 13 he was in the Communist Youth. At 17, after his mother’s death, his father sent him to study philosophy in Sofia, Bulgaria. He returned in 1987, by his own account disillusioned with Soviet Marxism and the privilege he had seen inside the party there.

Abelardo de la Espriella is a millionaire defense attorney, singer & rum impresario. (photo: Twitter screencapture)

His father’s assassination was the turning point. The Unión Patriótica — a party born of a peace process, a vehicle for the FARC and the Communist Party to enter electoral politics — was then systematically exterminated, with thousands of members killed. Cepeda channeled all of it. He created the Manuel Cepeda Foundation, built memorial galleries with families of the disappeared, and founded MOVICE, the Movement of Victims of State Crimes. He pursued his father’s case until the Colombian state was held responsible and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the country.

Then he found his great adversary: Álvaro Uribe. For Cepeda, Uribe symbolizes the establishment he believes must confess its responsibility for paramilitarism and the killing of the left. He spent years pursuing Uribe — prison visits to extradited paramilitaries in the United States, the 2014 debate in Congress — and that work ultimately produced the witness-tampering case that put the former president on trial. Cepeda became, as La Silla Vacía puts it, the leftist who managed to put Uribe in the dock. That is the engine of his political career.

He reached Congress in 2010, famously arriving with a bucket, broom, and mop, promising to clean up a legislature stained by parapolítica — the scandal of lawmakers who colluded with paramilitary groups. He has been there ever since, four terms, mostly on the Second Committee, which handles military promotions, security, and foreign relations. The crucial point about his experience, and I will come back to it, is that he has never governed anything — no city, department, ministry, or large budget. His arena has been Congress as a moral and judicial forum. He was also the principal intellectual architect of Petro’s Paz Total, “Total Peace”; he coined the term.

His running mate is Aida Quilcué, an indigenous Nasa leader and senator who is herself a victim of state violence — her husband was killed by the military as they returned from a minga. One more thing matters because it is human and real: Cepeda is in fragile health. He has beaten cancer twice — colon cancer in 2018, liver cancer treated in 2022 — and people who have worked with him describe a worn body and an iron will. He is intellectually serious, sober, and predictable, the opposite of Petro’s chaos. Whatever you make of his politics, he is no lightweight.

The case for Abelardo de la Espriella

Let me make the genuine case for de la Espriella, as I see it.

He promises to be tough on crime — on the organized armed groups and on ordinary street crime alike. After four years in which armed groups roughly doubled in size under Total Peace, many Colombians are hungry for exactly that, and I understand why. He is pro-business and pro-investment, foreign and domestic, and he has built his whole pitch on the idea that prosperity comes from the private sector rather than the state. He is pro-US and promises to repair the relationship with Washington that frayed under Petro; he is, in fact, a US citizen himself, which tells you which direction he faces.

On the economy, I think he would restore investor confidence and likely work to repair Colombia’s diminished credit rating, which matters enormously for what the country pays to borrow. He supports lower taxes, which is a good thing when paired with genuine fiscal prudence — that is the caveat, but the instinct is right.

The strongest item on his ticket, for me, is his running mate, José Manuel Restrepo. Restrepo served as both Minister of Commerce and Finance Minister in Iván Duque’s cabinet and did the job well, even when Duque did not. He has few critics and brings a level of intellectual seriousness and economic credibility that the top of the ticket does not project on its own. A credible technocrat one heartbeat from the presidency is a real asset.

He wants to shrink the bureaucracy. Colombia’s is not as bloated as some in Latin America, but it can be streamlined — and the bigger problem than handing out sinecures is mermelada, the practice of spreading money through useless government contracts to friends and supporters. If he genuinely goes after that, good. He is also plainly intelligent; a successful defense attorney knows jurisprudence and procedure cold.

Two of his ideas deserve particular credit. He says he wants to promote home ownership for people of modest means, and El País reports a plan for below-market thirty-year mortgages. If that is real and it works, it is a genuinely good idea. The Peruvian author Hernando de Soto, in The Mystery of Capital, explains how broad asset ownership by ordinary people is what formalizes an economy and drives real progress: when you own assets, you can extract value from them, pass them to your descendants, and build lasting wealth. And on health care, he promises to fix the EPS system with financial oversight to root out corruption, rather than blow it up. That is far better than moving to a single-payer government scheme, which I think would be disastrous. The state has not shown the organizational competence to run one. Consider that Petro placed Daniel Quintero, the indicted former mayor of Medellín, in a role overseeing the EPS — and Quintero is accused of looting the city’s coffers. A couple of insolvent EPS providers is a manageable problem; a national government that cannot pay providers and collapses the whole system is not. Patching beats nationalizing.

He supports performance evaluations for teachers, which is reasonable even if FECODE will oppose it, and he wants to expand internet connectivity into rural and underserved regions, which is critical in a country with such a wide gap between rural and urban, rich and poor. Connectivity means opportunity. That is a real list — a coherent pro-growth, pro-security program. Now the other side.

The case against Abelardo de la Espriella

There is a lot here. Start with the Bukele worship. De la Espriella is an open admirer of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. Bukele has unquestionably cut crime, but he also shows clear authoritarian tendencies and no sign of willingly leaving power. More to the point, Bukele is no friend to a free press, and de la Espriella is notoriously thin-skinned: he uses the courts to file SLAPPs — Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — designed to force critics to burn money and time on their defense. Even meritless, such suits can bankrupt a person or consume so much of their time they cannot do their job. This is not hypothetical. La Silla Vacía documented dozens of civil suits and criminal complaints against journalists, several of whom admit to censoring themselves. That should worry anyone who cares about press freedom.

He may also turn out to be soft on crime — especially organized crime — which sounds backwards for the “iron fist” candidate until you look at his career. He built it defending mobsters, paracos, and the corrupt: the Nule family, Álex Saab. He is childhood friends with the paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso. And he has been linked to a paramilitary known as “Boliche,” Jorge Luís Hernández Villazón, on trial in the United States for narcotrafficking. De la Espriella denies any connection with Boliche and says he knows him only through his work as a defense attorney. Fine — but it is a fair question how tough he will really be on his friends and former clients. That is not a cheap shot; it is a reasonable thing to want answered.

I also do not see a plan for the poor. I have looked, and I find nothing in his platform that signals a comprehensive plan — or much compassion — for the underprivileged and those without access to opportunity in the remote areas: the Pacific coast, the rural zones, the Atlantic coast. Perhaps one exists and I have missed it, but if so, where is it?

He seems inconsistent. This is a man who craves attention — a recording artist, a clothing line, a rum called “Defensor” — who then suddenly finds Jesus and becomes the “God and family” candidate. Maybe it is sincere. Forgive me for being skeptical of a conversion that lines up so neatly with a presidential run.

On the peace process, he has pledged not to implement the 2016 accords that won former President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. To be fair, the last two administrations did a poor job implementing them too. But my concern is simple: the people who genuinely laid down their arms need protection. You do not want to teach the next generation that demobilizing gets you killed. He also wants to end the Jurisdicción Especial de Paz, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, arguing it is a political tool that does not deliver real justice. I do not know the JEP well enough to rule on that flatly, but I am skeptical of the claim; my sense is that it is doing some genuine good and should be reformed rather than scrapped.

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

Then there is the absence of a track record. He has never held any office, so there is nothing to go on. Does he become a statesman or a caudillo wannabe? We do not know, and that uncertainty is itself a cost. Finally, the persona. His public identity strikes me as a bit of a gomelo — Colombian slang for a stuck-up rich kid. People often cultivate a public character that has little to do with who they really are, so perhaps the private Abelardo is a prince. But he is asking voters to choose the public one, and the public one rubs me the wrong way.

The case for Iván Cepeda

Now the honest case for Cepeda. He will very likely put real attention on the marginalized and the forgotten parts of the country, and the map backs this up: in the first round he carried the entire Pacific coast, the forested borders with Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil, and most of the Atlantic provinces — the exception being Antioquia, whose population concentrates far to the south around Medellín. Much of that Atlantic coast, outside Barranquilla and the touristy parts of Cartagena, has suffered generations of corruption and chronic underinvestment. Someone paying attention to those places is not a bad thing.

He is consistent and predictable. He has a long career and a coherent, stable ideology. I may disagree with that ideology — you will hear about it in the cons — but no one can call the man unpredictable. You know what you are getting, and in politics that is worth something.

He would try to actually implement Santos’s 2016 peace accords. The pact has real flaws and lacked genuine commitment from the current and previous administrations, but it did demobilize thousands of fighters who are no longer in the bush kidnapping and bombing people. Pushing to finish that work honestly has value.

And to be fair, he is clearly more competent than the ally currently in office. He is more intelligent and more disciplined than Gustavo Petro. Consider how Petro has governed: unable to push through much of his agenda, running the Casa de Nariño like a reality show, cycling more than sixty ministers through nineteen ministries in under four years. How do you accomplish anything while swapping in a new minister roughly every three weeks? I do not think a Cepeda administration would bring the same chaos and palace intrigue. And he would command the largest bloc of support in Congress, so he would be more effective at moving his agenda; he knows how the machinery works. Credit where it is due — he does not stand up in cabinet meetings inventing his own physics. That is a low bar, but Petro keeps walking under it and Cepeda clears it.

Finally, he has a real, lifelong commitment to the victims of violence in Colombia. Whatever else you say about him, that commitment is genuine and it is the through-line of his entire life. That counts.

The case against Iván Cepeda

Iván Cepeda is a senator, former member of the Communist Youth, educated in Bulgaria during the Soviet era, and key player in the negotiation with armed guerilla groups. (photo: Colombian Senate)

And there are many cons. The first is the mirror I opened with: he has shady friends too. He was close to the Chavista senator Piedad Córdoba. Just as de la Espriella calls his contacts with Boliche purely professional, Cepeda says his ties to the FARC commander Raúl Reyes were purely those of a peace negotiator. But Cepeda went further. When the FARC commander Jesús Santrich was locked up and ready to be extradited to the United States on drug-trafficking charges, Cepeda worked fiercely to get him released from the Fiscalía‘s Bunker. Once out, Santrich fled into Venezuela and restarted the Segunda Marquetalia, a FARC dissident network. And here is the part that lands like a gut punch a year later: that same Segunda Marquetalia is the group Colombian prosecutors have now linked to the assassination of presidential candidate and senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, who was shot in Bogotá in June 2025 and died that August. I want to be careful and fair — that is an attribution by the Fiscalía, and serious analysts at Insight Crime have noted the public evidence is thin, so it should not be treated as settled fact. But the chain — Cepeda helps free Santrich, Santrich restarts the Segunda Marquetalia, the Segunda Marquetalia is tied to a magnicidio — is a heavy thing to carry into a presidential race.

Second, he is soft on the guerrillas, broadly. He has a proven record of leniency toward the FARC, the ELN, and armed groups generally, and he is an architect of Petro’s failed Total Peace. Under that nurturing approach those groups have flourished, and I think they would keep flourishing under a Cepeda administration. He seems to see them more as victims of state violence than as the kidnappers, narcotraffickers, extortionists, and terrorists that they are. La Silla Vacía’s own reporting — and they are not a right-wing outlet — concluded that Cepeda bears real political responsibility for the failure of Total Peace, having pushed a negotiation model that was too ambitious, legally ambiguous, and weak before armed groups. When the violence comes from the state, Cepeda sees structure and systemic responsibility; when it comes from the guerrillas, he tends to see context and a chance for peace. That blind spot defines him.

Former 2022 presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernandez (photo: candidate’s website)

Third is his health and his running mate, which is delicate but real. Cepeda has had cancer twice. The late Rodolfo Hernández, who lost to Petro in 2022, died in 2024 of cancer after also having had liver and colon cancer, so the risk is not hypothetical. If Cepeda did not finish his term, Aida Quilcué would take over, and her career — as an indigenous Nasa leader, minga organizer, and senator — has centered on those issues rather than monetary policy, foreign affairs, or national security, which makes her approach to them a genuine unknown. People also doubted Francia Márquez, and she turned out to be the articulate, level-headed one beside Petro’s wilder talk, so I will say nothing against Quilcué as a person. But a possible succession to a medically fragile president is an inarguable risk, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

Fourth, I cannot imagine investor confidence improving under a Cepeda presidency. A data point worth chewing on: the peso is currently strong. Part of that is the dollar’s broad global weakness, but part of it, in my read, is the market reacting to the strong polling of Cepeda’s opponent. Markets vote too, and they are nervous about the left.

Fifth, the father — and I want to be fair here. You cannot reliably judge a son by his father; my own father was a politician, and as an adult I spent most of my life in the party opposite his, with a great relationship and very different philosophies. So I will not convict Iván Cepeda for his father’s beliefs. The difference is that Cepeda does seem broadly aligned with them. His father was secretary general of the Colombian Communist Party, Iván studied in Soviet Bulgaria, and though he says he grew disillusioned with the hypocrisy of Soviet communism, he still appears committed to a far-left ideology. If that is your cup of tea, count it a plus; I have never been fond of Marx or Engels.

Sixth is crop substitution, and this one deserves a direct conversation. On paper it sounds marvelous: rather than spray coca with herbicides that wreck the environment and people’s health, offer farmers a legal alternative and a path out. If it worked the way it is drawn up, I would back it one hundred percent. The problem is the gap between the brochure and the dirt road — and that gap is built on a premise that simply is not true on the ground: the premise that the campesino is a free actor who chooses to grow coca and could, if persuaded, choose to grow something else.

In much of rural Colombia, the small farmer does not get to volunteer. Where the FARC dissidents and the ELN hold territory, the armed group tells the farmer he will cultivate coca, do the manual labor of harvesting it, and sell the leaf or paste to the group at a price the group sets — under penalty of death. Refuse, and the farmer is driven off his land or simply killed. This is not a lifestyle preference; it is coercion at gunpoint. The reporting bears out the broader pattern. Finance Colombia’s coverage, drawn from InSight Crime, documents how the power vacuum left by the FARC’s 2016 demobilization was filled by the ELN, the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces, and FARC dissidents fighting for control of coca zones, and how the state’s failure to deliver on substitution let armed groups fill the vacuum and tighten their grip. The human cost is staggering: after families signed substitution agreements, the murder rate of supportive social leaders rose by 546 percent, according to a study cited by InSight Crime, and only about 5 percent of the program’s 2023 budget was actually executed. You cannot ask a farmer to switch crops when the entity controlling his life and his land is not the government but a guerrilla faction that has already told him what he will plant.

That is why this is not a matter of asking farmers nicely to grow coffee or cacao. It is not their choice. Security has to come first. Crop substitution can only work where the state — not the guerrillas — holds the territory and can guarantee a farmer’s safety when he says no to coca. The armed groups must be displaced before substitution has any chance, and any candidate who treats substitution as a soft alternative to security has the sequence backwards. That is the simple truth of it, and it is the heart of my concern with the Total Peace approach Cepeda helped design.

Seventh, he wants to expand the state’s role across the board, including continuing Petro’s effort to take over the health sector. Before the pandemic, Colombia had one of the best reputations in the world for health-care quality. Is it unequal? Yes — care in an isolated hamlet does not match Cali or Medellín, and the south of Bogotá does not match the north. Then let the government build clinics and hospitals where they are missing. There is no reason to take over the parts of the private system that work in order to do that, unless one objects on ideology to doctors and dentists existing as small businesspeople. That is ideology, not health policy.

Eighth, if Cepeda wins he may well protect Daniel Quintero, the former mayor of Medellín under indictment on more than forty counts of corruption. That kind of debt-collection worries me. And ninth, the selective conscience. Cepeda is a former member of the Communist Youth — a plus if you are a communist, unsettling if you are not. The FARC and ELN are also communist groups; one wonders whether that is the root of his apparent sympathy. He casts himself as a human rights defender yet stays conspicuously silent on the abuses of the Chavista regime in Venezuela. La Silla Vacía documented this in detail: roughly a decade of avoiding criticism of Maduro’s repression, fraudulent elections, and alliances with Colombian guerrillas. Cepeda notices human rights violations committed by people he dislikes while exempting bad actors he is closer to, provided they are communist or socialist. The record on that is fairly clear.

So where does that leave us?

Two men. One built his life on being seen — a brilliant, theatrical defense lawyer for the powerful and the accused, now promising an iron fist while surrounding himself with at least one genuinely serious technocrat in José Manuel Restrepo. The other built his life on a single tragedy — a disciplined, consistent, ideologically committed man of the left who has fought for victims for thirty years, and who carries a blind spot the size of a guerrilla encampment.

Here is the paradox I cannot get past: the “tough on crime” candidate has spent his career defending criminals, and the “human rights” candidate stays silent on half the human rights abuses in his own backyard. Each is, in some way, the very thing he claims to oppose. This is not a runoff between an angel and a devil. It is a runoff between two men who each ask voters to trust that their inconvenient friendships were strictly professional.

I am uneasy about both candidacies, for very different reasons, and I am doing what I said I would: laying it out and handing it to the reader. For deeper background, see Finance Colombia’s earlier survey of how the leading candidates draw divergent maps for foreign capital, security, and the rule of law, its reporting on what is behind Colombia’s increased violence, and its account of the final push of the Total Peace policy. The runoff is Sunday, June 21, and the winner is inaugurated August 7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Health Superintendence oversees patients’ rights and regulates EPS insurers, a key pillar of the system that President Petro has sought to eliminate in his reform efforts

Former Medellín mayor and former presidential pre-candidate Daniel Quintero has been appointed as Colombia’s new National Superintendent of Health, a decision that has sparked controversy across political and social sectors due to ongoing judicial and disciplinary investigations against him.

The National Health Superintendence is responsible for safeguarding the rights of users within the health system, overseeing Health Promoting Entities (also called EPS) and Health Service Providers (IPS), and monitoring the use of public finances allocated to the sector, areas that President Gustavo Petro has sought to reform during his administration.

The appointment comes amid a complex situation in Colombia’s health system. During his administration, President Petro presented two structural reform proposals aimed at reshaping the system, including major changes to the role of EPS. Both initiatives were rejected by Congress.

Following these legislative setbacks, the government has pursued reforms through administrative measures and decrees, including the intervention of several of the country’s largest EPS, which together serve more than 23 million affiliates (More information: Colombian President Gustavo Petro Seeks To Restructure Colombian Health Care Despite Congressional Rejection by Finance Colombia).

During his swearing-in, Quintero said his administration would strengthen oversight of the system. “It is time to put an end to abuses by the EPS,” he said.

Criticism over qualifications and legal cases

The appointment has drawn criticism from organizations and political figures who question both his background as an electronic engineer and his legal situation. Transparency for Colombia said the designation “is inappropriate because it places a political figure widely questioned for using public office to favor private interests in charge of addressing the health crisis, instead of appointing individuals with the training, knowledge, and experience required to resolve it.”

The organization also called on the Attorney General’s Office to expedite ongoing investigations. “We respectfully call on the Attorney General’s Office (FGN) to ensure that cases involving Daniel Quintero move forward swiftly, respecting due process guarantees while delivering results in light of the seriousness of the allegations,” it said.

Quintero, who served as mayor of Medellín from 2020 to 2023, faces more than 40 criminal and disciplinary complaints related to alleged corruption during his administration. Among them is the “Aguas Vivas” case, involving the sale of a forest reserve land plot exceeding 140,000 square meters. In that case, prosecutors have already filed charges for alleged embezzlement, undue interest in public contracts, and misconduct in office, although no conviction has been issued.

Criticism has also emerged from within the government. Carlos Carrillo, head of Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, said that “Quintero is currently on trial for crimes against public administration. He has the right to defend himself, but the Pacto Histórico has no reason to bear the political cost of his legal troubles; we owe him nothing and he brings us nothing.”

Quintero will be the fifth health superintendent appointed during Petro’s administration. His tenure is expected to be temporary, as a new president will take office on August 7, 2026, and will have the authority to appoint a new head of the agency.

 An incident on April 12, 2026, has reignited diplomatic and security tensions in the Amazon border region between Colombia and Peru, following an exchange of gunfire between a Colombian civilian vessel and the Marina de Guerra del Perú, a Peruvian Navy River unit, on the Putumayo River. The incident left one Colombian citizen dead and one person injured on each side.

The episode occurred near Marandúa (Amazonas, Colombia), across from the Peruvian town of El Estrecho. According to Colombia’s Defense Minister, Pedro Sánchez, the fatal victim was identified “as José Miguel Gutiérrez Baquero, owner of the cargo vessel involved in the incident, and one of his sons was injured,” while two other crew members were detained by Peruvian authorities.

Conflicting accounts of the operation

According to the Peruvian government statement, “the incident occurred during a patrol operation aimed at securing the electoral process,” previously coordinated between the two countries. Authorities said two Navy speedboats requested that the Colombian vessel stop for identification.

Peru’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is leading the process, said that “the Colombian vessel refused to comply with the control order and opened fire on two Peruvian Navy units, which returned fire.” As a result, “a member of the Peruvian Navy was also injured, although he is out of danger.”

Colombian authorities, led by the Foreign Ministry, have requested a full clarification of the events and verification of the circumstances surrounding the exchange of gunfire.

Diplomatic channels activated

Following the incident, the governments of Colombia and Peru activated diplomatic and military channels. Colombia’s defense minister said that “preliminary measures were agreed, including prioritizing medical attention for the injured, facilitating the work of judicial authorities, and establishing a binational commission to investigate what happened.”

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry formally requested clarification of “the circumstances of time, mode and place” of the attack, while the Peruvian government expressed its “willingness to cooperate and maintain border coordination mechanisms.”

The detained individuals “remain in the custody of the Fiscalía Provincial Mixta de Putumayo, with access to consular assistance and due process guarantees.”

So far, no final responsibilities have been determined, and both countries agree on the need for a thorough investigation. Both governments said the issue will be addressed at the next High-Level Mechanism on Security and Judicial Cooperation meeting, scheduled for May 2026 in Bogotá.

Context of prior tensions

The incident comes amid sensitive bilateral relations. In recent months, Colombia and Peru have had disagreements over territorial issues in the Amazon, particularly regarding Santa Rosa de Loreto island.

The dispute dates back to August 5, 2025, when President Gustavo Petro said on X that the “government of Peru has taken over territory that belongs to Colombia” and alleged a “violation of the Rio de Janeiro Protocol, which defines the boundaries between the two countries.”

“The Rio de Janeiro Protocol established that the border is the deepest channel of the Amazon River and that any dispute must be resolved between the parties,” Petro said, referring to the emergence of new river islands “north of the current deepest channel,” which, according to his position, should belong to Colombia.

In response, Peru’s Foreign Ministry expressed its “strongest and most forceful protest,” stating that the island, home to about 3,000 residents, mostly Peruvians, is part of its territory and is key to regional river trade.

Tensions escalated days later when then-presidential pre-candidate Daniel Quintero traveled to the island and raised a Colombian flag during a campaign event broadcast on social media, saying: “I will not allow them to take the Amazon from us. Santa Rosa is Colombia.”

The Peruvian government described the act as an “unnecessary action” that “distracts from the cooperation efforts that Peru and Colombia must prioritize to jointly address urgent challenges.”

Headline photo: President Gustavo Petro, Vice President Francia Márquez and Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez at an event held in Leticia (Amazonas) to address tensions with Peru, Aug. 7, 2025. Photo courtesy of Colombia’s Ministry of Defense.

They will join three candidates who did not participate in the primaries because they already hold the official endorsement of their parties: Iván Cepeda (63) of the Pacto Histórico (left), Sergio Fajardo (69) of Dignidad y Compromiso (center), and Abelardo de la Espriella (47) of the Salvación Nacional (far right).

Beyond their immediate results, Colombia’s interparty primaries typically serve two main purposes: reducing the number of contenders and selecting the flagbearers of each coalition, while also measuring the electoral strength of political figures ahead of potential negotiations among parties and candidates. With 99% of polling stations counted, and preliminary results rapidly released by the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil, several political consequences of the vote are already emerging.

Paloma Valencia to Lead the Uribista Right

The right-wing consultation brought together nine candidates from different center-right and conservative currents. One of its main goals was to secure a strong turnout that could consolidate the sector in public opinion and counter the rise of far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who seeks to capture a portion of Colombia’s traditional conservative electorate.

The winner was Senator Paloma Valencia, who has campaigned nationwide alongside former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the leading figure of the Centro Democrático party.

Although polls had already projected her victory, the surprise was the scale of the result. With 99% of polling stations counted, Valencia secured 3,212,528 votes, representing more than 45% of the total votes cast across the three primaries.

She now faces three major challenges. The first will be unifying the right behind her candidacy and preventing conservative voters from drifting toward De la Espriella. In this context, the selection of her vice-presidential running mate will be crucial.

Among the names circulating is Juan Daniel Oviedo (48), a former Bogotá city councilor who unexpectedly finished second in the consultation with more than 1,200,00 votes, despite his well-known ideological differences with the Uribista movement.

The second challenge is symbolic: no woman has ever reached the second round of Colombia’s presidential election, making it difficult to break that historical barrier even with the political backing of Uribe, who still maintains strong favorability ratings.

Finally, Valencia will attempt to channel the anti-Petro vote, capitalizing on public dissatisfaction with the policies of President Gustavo Petro and his close political ally Iván Cepeda, who currently appears as the frontrunner in most polls for both the first and second rounds.

The Center Cools Around Claudia López

With 99% of votes counted, the centrist consultation recorded the lowest turnout among the three coalitions. Former Bogotá mayor Claudia López received more than 572,000 votes, representing just 8.14% of the total, well below polling projections that placed her above 12%.

For López, the result follows a long campaign that began more than a year ago, during which she sought to challenge Sergio Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellín who already holds the endorsement of the Dignidad y Compromiso party.

The key question now is her next political move: whether to remain in the presidential race or eventually join forces with Fajardo, whose polling numbers also remain modest, hovering around 5%.

The weak result may reflect the fragmentation of Colombia’s political center, often criticized for positions perceived as moderate or ambiguous. It may also indicate that Juan Daniel Oviedo attracted part of the centrist electorate within the right-wing consultation.

In any case, the outcome suggests the presidential campaign could once again polarize around two main narratives: “with Petro,” led by Iván Cepeda and the Pacto Histórico, or “against Petro,” a space still contested between Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella.

Roy Barreras Wins the Left Consultation, but Momentum Favors Cepeda

In Roy Barreras’s case, two key factors appear to have contributed to his limited result. First was his decision to maintain a primary that many within the left considered unnecessary, given that much of the progressive sector had already rallied behind Iván Cepeda.

Second is his long political trajectory across multiple governments and ideological camps, from the right to the left, which has led some voters to view him as a traditional establishment politician.

With 99% of votes counted, Barreras secured just over 255,000 votes, less than 4% of the total. During the campaign, Barreras had stated he expected to surpass 1,500,000 votes in order to negotiate a stronger position within the left-wing coalition. Following these results, his most likely option may be withdrawing his candidacy and endorsing Cepeda, signaling unity within the progressive camp.

Other Highlights from the Electoral Day

One of the most striking outcomes was the performance of Juan Daniel Oviedo, who finished second among the 18 candidates participating in the primaries with 1,251,428 votes. With this electoral capital, Oviedo has become one of the most sought-after figures for potential alliances.

His political alignment remains uncertain. It is unclear whether he will fully integrate into Paloma Valencia’s campaign and the Centro Democrático, with whom he has ideological differences, or attempt to move closer to the weakened political center.

Unlike many traditional politicians, Oviedo has built a relatively short but distinctive political career based on his technocratic profile, his experience in economic policy, and his attempt to position himself outside the traditional Petro-Uribe political divide.

Meanwhile, journalist Vicky Dávila (52), who has run a campaign with populist elements inspired by figures such as Javier Milei in Argentina and Donald Trump in the United States, received more than 236,000 votes, around 3.3% of the total, leaving her with limited negotiating leverage.

A similar outcome affected Daniel Quintero (45), the former mayor of Medellín, who received just over 226,000 votes (around 3.2%), with his campaign likely hurt by controversies linked to alleged corruption during his administration.

Under Colombia’s electoral law (Law 1475 of 2011), political parties may still modify or withdraw candidates until March 20. After that date, the presidential campaign will move toward the first round scheduled for May 31. If no candidate obtains an absolute majority (50% plus one), the two candidates with the highest vote totals will compete in a runoff election on June 21.

For now, the race appears likely to center on a left-wing coalition led by Iván Cepeda with the backing of President Gustavo Petro, and a divided right contested between Paloma Valencia and the ultraconservative Abelardo de la Espriella.

Above photo: Claudia López, candidate in the centrist primary, casting her vote in Bogotá. Photo courtesy of Claudia López’s campaign team.

This Sunday, March 8, 2026, Colombia will hold one of the most significant electoral events of the year’s political calendar. In addition to electing a new congress, voters will participate in the so-called Interparty Primaries, a mechanism through which political parties select their candidates for the presidential election scheduled for May 31.

According to the political analysis website Razón Pública, these consultations seek to “build broad coalitions composed of parties, movements, and independent candidacies.” In practice, they allow different political sectors to determine through open voting who will represent each coalition in the presidential race.

Political parties seek to boost their chances in the presidential race or strengthen their leverage in potential coalition negotiations.

In total, three separate primaries will take place, each with its own ballot. Citizens may participate in only one of them by requesting the corresponding ballot when voting for Congress.

The first is the “Solutions Primary: Healthcare, Security and Education,” made up of parties from the political center. In this contest, former Bogotá mayor Claudia López faces independent lawyer Leonardo Huertas. According to the latest Invamer poll, López is the clear frontrunner, with a projected 92.9% voting preference, compared with her only opponent.

The second consultation represents the political right and includes nine pre-candidates in the so-called “Grand Primary for Colombia.”

Among the contenders are former ministers of previous governments Juan Carlos Pinzón (Defense), Mauricio Cárdenas (Finance), and David Luna (Information Technologies); former Antioquia governor Aníbal Gaviria; former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa; journalist Vicky Dávila; and three senators representing their respective parties: Juan Manuel Galán (Nuevo Liberalismo), Juan Daniel Oviedo (Con Toda con Colombia), and Paloma Valencia (Centro Democrático).

Polls consistently identify Paloma Valencia as the favorite to win the primary. The Invamer poll projects her with 41.6% of the vote, Atlas Intel 44.4%, and Guarumo-EcoAnalítica 40.6%, while the firm Gad3 also places her first but with a lower estimated vote share of 17%. Valencia has been campaigning nationwide accompanied by former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the leading figure of the Centro Democrático, and previously won her party’s internal selection process through a member survey held on December 15.

The third primary corresponds to the coalition known as the “Front for Life,” made up of left-wing candidates, although without the official backing of current President Gustavo Petro, who under Colombian law is prohibited from participating in electoral politics or promoting candidates.

Candidates in this race include Héctor Elías Pineda, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla movement (the same group Petro once belonged to); Edison Lucio Torres of the Partido de los Trabajadores (Worker’s Party); and independent candidate Martha Viviana Bernal.

Former senator Roy Barreras; and embattled former mayor of Medellín Daniel Quintero Calle registered through the Movimiento de Autoridades Indígenas de Colombia. Polls by Guarumo-EcoAnalítica (47.6%) and Invamer (68.1%) place Daniel Quintero as the leading candidate of this Primary. However, the firm Atlas Intel did not measure this coalition, arguing that it did not surpass the statistical threshold required.

What comes next in the political landscape after the Primaries?

According to Razón Pública, “once the March 8 voting concludes, the political landscape will enter a phase of critical decisions. The results will determine alliances and realignments ahead of the presidential first round.”

Across the political spectrum, the winners of each consultation will attempt to consolidate support to compete against other candidates who registered directly without participating in the consultations. These include Abelardo de la Espriella, a conservative lawyer and businessman who registered through citizen signatures; Iván Cepeda, the official candidate of the Pacto Histórico coalition led by President Petro and currently leading voting-intention polls; and Sergio Fajardo, who registered with the party Dignidad y Compromiso.

Under Colombia’s electoral Law (1475 of 2011), political parties may still modify or withdraw candidates until March 20. After that date, the presidential campaign will move toward the first round scheduled for May 31. If no candidate secures an absolute majority of the vote (50% plus one), the two candidates receiving the highest number of votes will compete in a runoff election on June 21, where the candidate with a simple majority will be elected president.

Photos courtesy of the Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil