The decree, issued by the Ministerio de Defensa Nacional (Ministry of Defense), ends the additional special authorization that holders of an individual carrying permit had to obtain on top of their existing license during the suspension. It does not create new rights, authorize unrestricted or indiscriminate carrying, or alter the licensing requirements, restrictions and controls set out in Decree Law 2535 of 1993, Colombia’s foundational arms statute, according to the decree’s text. The state’s constitutional monopoly over weapons, war ammunition and explosives under Article 223 of the Constitution remains in force.

“For years, the citizen who obeys the law was restricted, while criminals kept arming themselves illegally to the teeth. That has to change,” de la Espriella wrote on his X account. He added that the change “does not mean indiscriminate carrying” and that strict controls, requirements and permits from the competent authorities remain in place. “What ends is the general suspension that turned the prohibition into the rule,” he wrote. “To the law-abiding citizen who strictly complies with the law, guarantees within the law. To the criminal illegally armed, the full weight of the law and the full legitimate force of the State.”

Firmé el decreto que levanta la suspensión general de los permisos para el porte de armas de fuego en Colombia.

Durante años se restringió al ciudadano que cumple la ley mientras los criminales siguieron armándose ilegalmente hasta los dientes. Eso tiene que cambiar.

Las cifras… pic.twitter.com/dsZAshWMWS

— DE LA ESPRIELLA STYLE (@DELAESPRIELLAE) September 8, 2026

The suspension traces to Decree 2515 of 2015, signed by then-President Juan Manuel Santos on December 24, 2015. “Colombians deserve a calm and safe Christmas and New Year,” Santos wrote on Twitter at the time, according to El País, which reported the measure was meant to guarantee tranquility and security for Colombians over the holiday season. It initially ran through January 31, 2016, but Santos’s government kept extending it, and every administration since has renewed it in turn. The measure was formalized into a standing, annually revisited policy under Decree 2362 of 2018, signed during the government of Iván Duque, which cited a declining trend in homicides and injuries linked to firearms between 2016 and 2018 as grounds for continuing it. Its most recent extension came from Decree 1482 of December 31, 2025, signed by then-President Gustavo Petro, which pushed the suspension’s expiration to December 31, 2026. Decree 1368 repeals both the 2018 and 2025 measures outright.

The general suspension power itself derives from Article 41 of Decree Law 2535 of 1993, as modified by Law 1119 of 2006, which authorizes Colombia’s competent military authorities to suspend the validity of carrying and possession permits nationwide. Colombia’s Constitutional Court upheld that authority in a 2010 ruling, finding it consistent with the state’s constitutional monopoly on arms.

De la Espriella defended the decision with seizure figures covering January 1 through September 3, 2026: Colombia’s security forces confiscated 15,700 firearms in that period, 14,179 of them linked to the commission of crimes, according to El Tiempo. Of the total, 980 weapons were tied to FARC dissident factions, 551 to the Clan del Golfo and 339 to the National Liberation Army (ELN), the president said, adding that the weapons linked to dissident groups alone included 380 rifles and 65 60-millimeter mortars.

“There is no justification for bandits being armed to the teeth while decent people cannot defend themselves.”

— President Abelardo de la Espriella

The decree specifies that the lifted suspension does not extend to weapons whose permits have expired, been individually suspended, canceled or revoked, been seized or placed under a judicial or administrative measure, or that are subject to a separate legal or judicial prohibition, nor to permits that authorize only possession rather than carrying. Colombia’s military authorities retain their power to issue, renew, suspend, cancel or revoke individual permits, the Policía Nacional (National Police) keeps its inspection and seizure authority, and the Ministry of Defense’s Departamento Control Comercio de Armas, Municiones y Explosivos (Department for the Control of Arms, Ammunition and Explosives Trade) will continue to maintain the registries used to verify which permits remain valid.

The distinction that matters going forward, according to attorney Fabio Humar, is between possession and carrying. “Proving you are licensed to have a weapon requires a permit. But possession is different from carrying, which is what was restricted. What this decree does is authorize carrying,” Humar told El Tiempo.

Former President Gustavo Petro, whose own government signed the most recent extension of the suspension in December 2025, criticized the repeal in a two-word post on X: “La necropolítica,” or “necropolitics” — a concept, Infobae noted, that links state policy to violence and exposure to death.

Above photo: © Loren Moss

Colombia’s Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications, or MinTIC) will create a specialized working group to monitor what social media platforms are doing to detect and remove content that criminal structures use to recruit minors, the ministry announced on August 28, 2026. The group will meet weekly to check whether the platforms and other digital-industry actors are meeting the commitments they have made.

Minister Alexandra Falla Zerrate made the announcement after meeting with representatives of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Internet (Latin American Internet Association, or Alai), a Montevideo-based industry association whose members include Meta (NASDAQ: META), TikTok, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), X and MercadoLibre (NASDAQ: MELI). According to the ministry, the meeting examined the growth of the problem and the way criminal structures use digital platforms to approach children and adolescents.

The announcement came four days after Human Rights Watch published a 124-page report on the recruitment of minors by armed groups in Colombia. Based on its analysis of data from the Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsman’s Office), the organization counted at least 1,500 children and adolescents recruited since 2021, with a sharp rise in cases since 2023, and found that dissident factions of the demobilized FARC were behind the large majority of reported cases, and that more than half of all reported cases were in the department of Cauca. The report’s researchers reviewed more than 70 accounts and 40 posts on platforms including Facebook and TikTok that glorified membership in armed groups or invited users to join them, and concluded that the platforms had not effectively detected or removed that content and that in some cases their algorithms appeared to promote it.

“Armed groups in Colombia are recruiting children with impunity, as protection systems are failing, and social media platforms have become a more effective recruiting ground,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, when the report was released.

Separately, the Defensoría del Pueblo registered 97 cases of forced recruitment of minors between January 1 and July 31, 2026, according to El Espectador, after 684 cases in all of 2024 and 428 in 2025. The agency cautioned that the lower reported figure does not necessarily mean recruitment has fallen, since many victims and families do not report out of fear, distrust of institutions or normalization of the violence.

Five measures

The ministry listed five measures coming out of the meeting. The first is the working group itself, which will provide permanent follow-up on the actions taken by platforms and other ecosystem actors and verify compliance with the commitments made to prevent recruitment.

The second concerns detection technology. Participants discussed the role of artificial intelligence in identifying and filtering recruitment-related content and concluded that, while automated tools catch and remove a significant share of posts, they must be complemented by interdisciplinary human review to catch material that slips past the filters. Falla urged the digital-industry participants to build teams of people who understand Colombian forms of communication, whether visual, verbal or written, so that they can recognize this type of messaging and act on it immediately.

The third measure is a push to stop the content from being published in the first place rather than removing it after the fact. Falla said she was concerned about the circulation of content that can be used to lure or induce minors into recruitment and called for technological tools, including properly programmed detection algorithms, that identify and block such posts before they go up.

The fourth addresses the share of content that evades detection. Raúl Echeberría, Alai’s executive director, told the meeting that platforms currently remove more than 90% of the identified content related to the problem. Falla responded that the challenge is to keep cutting the percentage that gets past detection mechanisms and to reach 100% neutralization of that content.

The fifth measure is coordination. The ministry and the industry representatives agreed that confronting the online recruitment of minors requires joint action by the authorities, the technology platforms, other digital-ecosystem actors and families.

What the platforms have said

In written responses to Human Rights Watch that were published as annexes to the report, both Meta and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, said their policies prohibit content that promotes, supports or champions violent organizations, including Colombian armed groups, and that they had removed the profiles the organization flagged. According to El Tiempo, Meta reported removing 16 Facebook profiles and TikTok reported removing 35 profiles and their associated content. TikTok also told the organization that between January and March 2026 it removed 99.4% of content in Colombia that violated its policy on violent organizations and individuals before it was reported, that it blocks search terms associated with criminal organizations, and that users under 16 cannot access direct messages or group chats where those features are available.

Human Rights Watch’s own conclusion was that the platforms have not been able to effectively detect and prevent the spread of this content. According to El Tiempo, the full report recommends that the platforms establish specific reporting channels adapted to children in Spanish and in relevant indigenous languages, preserve evidence when content is removed, and publicly report on their compliance with child-safety obligations under international standards and Colombian law.

Falla, a social communications graduate of the Universidad Externado de Colombia with more than three decades in the audiovisual and public television sector, took office with the administration of President Abelardo de la Espriella, which was inaugurated on August 7, 2026. The ministry said that for Falla the protection of minors is a priority issue. The announcement did not specify who will sit on the working group or whether the platforms’ commitments will be made public.

Headline photo: Minister Alexandra Falla Zerrate with representatives of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Internet and the digital industry at the ministry. (Photo courtesy MinTIC)

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.

The decision, announced from San Carlos Palace, the new seat of the Colombian presidency, underscores the new administration’s shift away from former President Gustavo Petro’s “Total Peace” policy and signals closer cooperation with the United States on extradition, drug trafficking and transnational crime.

De la Espriella said the five were individuals “whose extraditions had already been approved by the national government in 2025, but whose surrender remained suspended because of their participation as representatives in different processes, negotiations or dialogue initiatives conducted by the previous government.”

“From day one, I was clear: Peace cannot be a refuge for criminals or a mechanism for impunity,” he later wrote on X. “In 16 days in office, I have signed more than 30 extraditions, and I will continue to do so with absolute determination.”

Three in custody, two at large

The decision includes Willington Henao Gutiérrez, alias “El Mocho Olmedo,” considered the second-in-command of Front 33 of the FARC dissident groups; Carmen Evelio Castillo Carrillo, alias “Muñeca,” identified as a leader of Los Pachencas, also known as the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada; and Geovanni Andrés Rojas, alias “Araña,” who served as a negotiating representative for Comandos de la Frontera, another FARC dissident group.

All three are in Colombian custody.

The order also covers Gabriel Yepes Mejía, alias “H.H.,” considered the leader of Comuneros del Sur, an ELN dissident group, and Freddy Castillo Carrillo, alias “Pinocho,” identified as the top leader of Los Pachencas and the brother of “Muñeca.” Both remain at large.

“Those two criminals are not in the hands of justice, but we are going to find them,” De la Espriella said.

According to the president, US authorities are seeking the five Colombians on charges that, depending on the individual case, are related to drug trafficking, criminal conspiracy, money laundering, weapons offenses and narcoterrorism.

De la Espriella said his administration reviewed the cases with the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, which he also said would be renamed, and concluded there were insufficient grounds to keep the extraditions suspended.

“After reviewing each case with the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, we found no verified contributions or concrete results by these individuals toward achieving peace. Quite the opposite: They have continued committing crimes, mocking the justice system and Colombian society,” he said.

A break with the ‘Total Peace’ policy

The announcement also marks a break with the Petro administration’s strategy of negotiating with armed and criminal organizations.

“The so-called Total Peace failed in its fundamental purpose because it opened spaces and granted benefits to members of criminal organizations without, in cases such as those before us today, demonstrating verified contributions or concrete results toward achieving peace,” De la Espriella said.

The president said his administration would replace what he called a policy of “false peace” with an approach centered on security, the rule of law and state authority, under which dialogue processes cannot be used to evade justice.

“Anyone who wants to transition to legality will have to demonstrate it through concrete and verifiable actions, and under this government there is no other way to do so than by submitting to justice,” he added.

De la Espriella warned that those who remain involved in drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime would face “the full legitimate force of the state.” Those seeking to abandon violence, he added, must do so within the framework of the Constitution and the law and by submitting to justice.

“To the criminals, I say directly, clearly and unequivocally that there will be no hiding place, privilege, negotiating table or legal device that puts them above the law and allows them to evade the determined action of justice,” he said.

A signal of cooperation with the United States

The extraditions also send a message to the United States and other international partners as Colombia’s new administration seeks to strengthen cooperation against drug trafficking and transnational crime.

De la Espriella has said security and the rule of law will be priorities for his administration and that Colombia will maintain international cooperation on extradition and efforts to combat criminal organizations.

The move comes just 16 days into his administration and follows more than 30 extradition orders that De la Espriella says he has signed since taking office.

The announcement further highlights a key difference between the security policies of De la Espriella and Petro: While the previous administration used the suspension of some extraditions as a tool in negotiations with armed and criminal groups, the new government says such benefits should remain in place only when there is concrete and verifiable progress toward peace.

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

The numbers that elected him

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

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

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

A mandate Medellín paid for

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

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

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

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

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

A mandate without a legislature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The program, and what it will cost

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

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

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

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

Then the ground moved

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

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

— Don Ramon (@RuedaJohnn37191) August 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

— EL TIEMPO (@ELTIEMPO) August 14, 2026

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

Washington promises a billion dollars, and raises the tariff

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

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

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

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

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

Troublesome tendencies in Abelardo’s background

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

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

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

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

What to watch

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

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

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

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

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.

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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Nubia Carolina Córdoba, governor of Chocó, Colombia (photo from her Twitter account)

According to figures compiled by the Universidad Externado and reported by The City Paper Bogotá, Colombia has recorded 40,663 homicides during the first three years of the Petro presidency. Over 400 human rights defenders have been slaughtered between 2022 and 2025 according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights. Human Rights Watch reports that the ELN and FARC dissidents have expanded their territories by up to 55%. They are taking back over Colombia.

Under Gustavo Petro’s watch, Colombia has returned to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index top ten list of countries impacted by terrorism, along with Total Peace destinations like Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Syria. Just this past week, a Clan del Golfo poster was put up within walking distance from the Aeropuerto Internacional José María Córdova just outside of Medellín. This Total Peace nonsense is a failure.

Right now, in the neglected Pacific department of Chocó, the ELN has kidnapped whole communities. Petro ran a campaign promising that he was going to embrace these historically neglected communities—places like Chocó, Nariño, La Guajira, and Norte de Santander—but insecurity is increasing. Chocó’s governor, Nubia Carolina Córdoba, says 6,047 people are trapped inside of their homes because the ELN has announced an illegal armed curfew in the municipality of Bajo Baudó. Most of these people are already poor, and now they have been kidnapped en masse by this guerilla group that operates with impunity because Gustavo Petro coddles them with “dialogue.”

According to Governor Córdoba, they attacked the police station in the village of Santa Rita using grenades attached to drones. It has gotten so bad that Colombia has restricted the entry of drones into the country. These people are calling out for help, but the president insists on talking as the ELN grows and continues to menace the police forces, the Colombian military, and, most importantly, the innocent public.

There is currently public disorder where belligerents have completely blocked the roads in the north of Antioquia, in the region called Bajo Cauca, and also in the neighboring department of Córdoba. The city of Caucasia is under curfew. Antioquia’s Governor, Andrés Rendón, has urgently called on the national government to stop the talk and take action. Groups are attacking ambulances and burning people’s motorcycles as they try to get by the roadblocks, regardless of the emergency.

Governor Rendón stated: “There can be no dialogue amidst blockades and human rights violations. It’s been seven days now with the Bajo Cauca region paralyzed and the country held hostage by chaos.” He called on the Fiscalía General de la Nación to bring those responsible to justice and challenged the Minister of Defense, Pedro Sánchez, to order the immediate reopening of the roads. “We’re not talking about small-scale miners here; behind this are criminal structures, as everyone knows, that finance themselves through illegal mining and move billions of pesos,” Rendón added, demanding full authority against the criminals who use communities as a shield.

El gobernador de Antioquia, @AndresJRendonC, se pronunció sobre la situación de orden público en el Bajo Cauca, en medio de los bloqueos que ya completan varios días y afectan la movilidad y la seguridad en la región. @GobAntioquia pic.twitter.com/4SPQgTa68r

— MiOriente (@MiOriente) March 22, 2026

The current situation with these organized criminal groups—whether regular mafias like the Clan del Golfo or murderous Marxist guerillas like the ELN and the FARC dissidents—is reminiscent of a classroom where a substitute teacher has lost all control. Petro promised Total Peace, but the result has been Total Chaos. Investors do not want to deal with this mess. While the Petro government claims they want tourism to be a major economic driver, road blocks make many areas look like scenes out of Mad Max: Road Warrior. Whole zones of the Pacific coast are unsafe even for residents, met with pure impotence from the regime.

Ten years ago, it was safe to drive from Medellín to the beachside town of Coveñas in Sucre, but that is no longer the case. While it remains safe to visit Colombia for business or tourism in major hubs like Bogotá, Medellín, Santa Marta, or the San Andrés islands, the long-term outlook is concerning. My hope is that Colombians choose a future leader serious about law and order as a prerequisite for human rights. It is not only the government that we need to protect human rights from; those who kill, steal, kidnap, and forcibly recruit children are violating those rights as well.

Colombian anti-explosives experts inspect propaganda by the Clan del Golfo mafia group just minutes away from Medellin’s international airport in March, 2026 (image from Facebook).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Parliament. Photo credit: Elekes Andor/Wikipedia.