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

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

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

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

Who is Abelardo de la Espriella?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Iván Cepeda?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case for Abelardo de la Espriella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case against Abelardo de la Espriella

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case for Iván Cepeda

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

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

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

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

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

The case against Iván Cepeda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So where does that leave us?

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

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

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

Click on the above image to play the video.

Collective Mining keeps finding gold

First, some good news. Collective Mining (TSX: CNL, OTCQX: CNLMF, FSE: GG1), which is developing a gold mine down in the Caldas region in coffee country has five drill rigs operating at its Guayabales project, part of its 40 thousand meter drill program for this year. They are getting really encouraging results. This is the same team that developed Continental Gold and sold it to Zijin mining a few years ago for over a billion dollars. We published a more detailed update in Finance Colombia if you want to go over the numbers and assay results of this most recent update. I’m long on Continental because I believe in the team led by Ari Sussman.

Collective Mining Expands its Box Target Area with New High-Grade Samples; Drilling Continues

Petro threatens the private sector with “forced investments!”

President Gustavo Petro is once again terrifying investors, this time with an announcement that he plans to force private banks to loan money to projects and borrowers of his choosing. He said, and I translate:

 “I promised that we were going to present the measures to the congress of the republic to reactivate the economy which will consist, and I say it once and for all, in projects of law that generate FORCED INVESTMENT in the private financial system of Colombia destined to small, medium and large industry of agriculture and tourism in Colombia to reactivate the country.”

This is what Petro’s opponents warned about, and at least when it comes to intent, they were right. The question now is whether Colombia’s institutionalism can withstand more of his adventures. Statements and plans like this destroy investor confidence and scare away capital, just like what is happening with Ecopetrol.

“…and I say it once and for all, in projects of law that generate FORCED INVESTMENT in the private financial system of Colombia” – President Gustavo Petro

General Motors To Close Colombia Manufacturing Operations

Speaking of scaring away capital, General Motors is closing its Colmotores car factory after almost 70 years in Colombia. Now two years ago, GM said it was going to invest 50 million dollars to upgrade the factory to produce new models! What has changed? By the way, the Minister of Labor has told GM that they have to keep the workers employed even though the factory is closing, so we will see how that works out.

Alvaro Uribe is formally charged with witness tampering & bribery

Former President Alvaro Uribe, who in recent years has seen his once stellar legacy tarnished by a litany of revelations, is now formally charged with witness tampering in a drama that goes back to 2012. See the AP article here. https://apnews.com/article/colombia-alvaro-uribe-charges-witness-tampering-bd11a922142d000db1fcac178a1a147e

See also: Declassified US State Department Cables: “Uribe Almost Certainly Had Dealings With The Paramilitaries”

Bilateral harmony between Colombia & US leads to results

In some good news Colombia hosted a US State Department delegation last month for high level talks which led to several announcements. Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo, who actually was a US Citizen for a while, has announced that Colombians can now access almost 20 thousand United States non-agricultural work visas, and more than 1,000 summer job visas. We will do a write up on this both on Finance Colombia and Empleobilingue, the only source on the web for bilingual talent.

Colombia is going to open five new consulates in Phoenix, Dallas, Denver, Charlotte and Seattle. There are already 9 thousand Colombians studying in the US on Student Visas, and there is a family unification program already in effect between the two countries which has 6,000 current authorizations by the State Department.

The mammoth UNGRD scandal that threatens Petro

There is an ongoing scandal in the Petro Administration where the government paid the equivalent of $12 million US dollars for a fleet of water tanker trucks to supply water to citizens of La Guajira, the desert region on the Atlantic Coast near the Venezuelan border. Now, no water got to the residents of La Guajira, the trucks sat idle on a Colombian military base. But the money paid to a contractor by Colombia’s UNGRD (National Unit of Disaster Risk Management) was “allegedly” used to bribe Senate President Iván Name and Andrés Calle in the house of representatives to unblock opposition to Petro’s reform bills. According to Colombia’s comptroller, the Controller General (Contraloria), each tanker truck was purchased from the dealer, Kenworth de la Montaña, in Medellín, for about 600 million pesos, but then sold to the government for $1.2 billion pesos. This way they could launder money out for political purposes.

Former Deputy Director of the UNGRD, Sneyder Pinilla “prendió el ventilador-started the fan” (Colombian saying, like “when the shit hits the fan”) and accused former director of the UNGRD, Olmedo Lopez of using the UNGRD money through this conspiracy to pay the bribes, covering it up with this tanker truck contract, and that the payments were made at the direction of Petro’s Minister of the Interior, Luís Fernando Velasco, and the Councilor for the Regions, Sandra Ortiz, who was actually the bag man, or “bag woman.”

Now Olmedo López and Sneyder Pinilla are testifying and want immunity with Colombia’s attorney general, because they say that the tanker scandal is just the tip of the iceberg in a case that for Colombia, may be larger than the Odebrecht scandal.

According to these two, a political machine was put in place inside the Petro administration that would launder 380 billion pesos, or almost $100 million US dollars of “marmalade” or UNGRD funds into the hands of legislators and bureaucrats to bribe for passage of Petro’s reforms, all of which have failed so far, and to finance last October’s local elections, where again, Petro’s party and allies lost badly. Lopez says the tanker truck scandal just got discovered but according to him there is a whole infrastructure inside Petro’s government operating with this modality to bribe legislators and fund campaigns.

Now the scary thing is that the company that sold the trucks, Impoamericana Roger SAS was sold to Elmer Celis in 2019, and right before the contract for the tankers was being finalized, Celis was assassinated. So this scandal now has deadly implications.

Sura wants out of the EPS health system

Grupo Sura, the insurance and asset management giant has told the Colombian government that it plans to withdraw from the national EPS health insurance scheme. They are supposed to be meeting with the company to negotiate what happens.

Colombia wants the gold from a Spanish Galleón, so do Bolivians

In 1708 the Spanish galleon San José was sunk by the British during the War of Spanish Succession. in the Caribbean sea off the coast of Cartagena. The shipwreck was found in 2015 in about 600 meters, or 328 fathoms, or 2,000 feet of water, and Colombia is claiming it as its own and using the military to fend off any would-be treasure hunters. Last month, Colombia announced that it was launching a research and recovery project, aiming to prioritize the historical value of the wreck. There are complications though. The ship was Spanish, so Spain would need to renounce any sovereignty over the wreck. Spain considers the ship a graveyard that should not be molested out of respect for the dead.

Down in landlocked Bolivia, the Chicha, Caranga and Killaka people have filed claims with UNESCO saying that their enslaved ancestors extracted the treasure onboard from mines in what is now Bolivia, and have a right to share in whatever wealth is in the shipwreck.

This is going to be an interesting case. There is a treaty, the 2001 Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Spain is a signatory, so is bound by the treaty, but Colombia never ratified or signed it, so is not bound by it.

Colombia has (finally) outlawed bullfighting

The Colombian house of representatives has outlawed bullfighting, a 500 year old tradition of bovine torture inherited from the Spanish. There are still people who defend bullfighting. The bill is in reconciliation with the senate, and then goes to President Petro, who is sure to sign it into law.

Mafia guerilla groups flourishing, expanding under Petro’s “Total Peace” fiasco

Reuters is reporting that it got access to a secret report showing that all the major criminal mafias in Colombia expanded in 2023, making a mockery of President Petro’s “Total Peace” initiative. Those criminal organizations would be the Clan del Golfo, ELN, and the two former FARC groups Estado Mayor and Segunda Marquetalia. Petro ran his campaign promising “Total Peace” but these groups, three of the four are avowed communist guerillas, and the Clan Del Golfo a descendant of paramilitaries, just keep getting bigger. When is Petro going to start?

Reuters also reported on illegal road building in the Amazon rainforest, in some cases by these same groups, that the government is supposed to be stopping. For example, Chiribiquete, nobody is even allowed to go in there but there are at least 12 illegal roads built, according to Reuters!

These mafias, in this case it looks like the Estado Mayor – former FARC, is building these roads to conduct illegal activities in nature preserves, and the government is unwilling to do anything, or at least, so far it is not combatting the activity.

So that’s it for this week.

Remember to practice critical thinking

Stay mentally and physically active,

And above all, be kind to yourself and others.

Supporters of Petro had come out during the submission of the proposal pushing support for the healthcare reform bill, which centralizes the payment of private healthcare payment services into a single-payer system, but improving access to services in remote, rural areas in Colombia.

Opponents of Petro have criticized the bill, however, for its alleged anti-private-practice measures, saying that the reform could instigate economic instability in the country if it is approved.

Petro’s original proposal included removing private healthcare intermediaries known as EPS—similar to PPO or health insurance providers—altogether, but this was ultimately scrapped after opposition from his opponents.

Opponents of the measure and of Petro came out in droves after the submission of the proposal, and reports from the National Police showed that the anti-Petro protests drew a bigger crowd in Bogotá than the marches supporting Petro and for the health care reform.

Bogotá Mayor Claudia López revealed that while 2,000 people came to the pro-Petro marches, over 15,000 protestors came to the anti-Petro protests. She also reported that both of the events were largely peaceful, with no damage to public or private property during the marches.

“Today 15,000 people marched without any blockade or disturbance or damage to the city.

I thank all the citizens who marched yesterday and today for demonstrating that we can exercise political and democratic controversy peacefully. That is the true total peace that we must exalt,” she tweeted.

The protests have also revealed a bigger gripe that the right has against Petro’s overall policy of “Total Peace,” with many opposed to his proposal of suspending arrest warrants of certain drug traffickers in exchange for them to lay down their arms, with one banner reportedly saying that the administration “puts the trafficker before the merchant, the criminal before the businessman.”

“The change that the government is calling for favors criminals and is dividing Colombians,” elderly protestor William Castro said.

“The streets have spoken, they have spoken in a massive way and they are saying: ‘It (the government) is not going to impose a health reform… it is not going to impose a total peace on us,’” former Vice President Francisco “Pacho” Santos Calderón said.

Photo: Twitter

One of my best friends for many years was a Cuban fellow named Miguel Cárdenas who left the island much later than the Mariel boatlift, and somehow ended up in Ohio. At first he did very well for himself, but eventually got in trouble and lost his US residency privileges and was returned to Cuba. I was able to talk to him a couple of times after he was back in Cuba, but also stayed in touch with his family.

Once I visited Miguel when he was in Cali (long before I lived in Colombia) where his sister, an official in the Cuban government, was allowed to travel. At the time, a rendezvous in a third country was the only way they could meet. His sister, who had achieved a prominent position in the agriculture ministry, eventually left and resettled in Miami. She now tells me that her quality of life working at Walmart in Miami is much better than when she was a government bureaucrat in Havana. Because of her position, she was one of the first Cubans allowed to have an internet connection and actually had a Facebook account before everyday Cubans even had internet.

After Miguel was back in Cuba, he got in an auto accident, and was in pretty bad shape. This was around 2011. I remember getting a call from his sister (she was still in Cuba). Miguel was in the hospital, but there was no medicine, no bandages, no supplies, and and she asked me to find these items in the US and send them to her in Cuba for his treatment. What many people don’t realize is that medicines and food can be sent to Cuba from the United States, and that in any case, the US trade embargo does not prevent commerce in medical goods-or any products from any other countries. Cuban hospitals, like Cuban grocery stores are empty because their totalitarian, communist system is a failure.

My friend died shortly after I spoke to his sister, before I was able to ship medical supplies for his treatment. The “revolucionario” Cuban medical system cannot provide basic supplies; not because of any US embargo—remember during the COVID pandemic, all the supplies were coming from China?—but because the Cuban economic, political and health systems are BANKRUPT.

“There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.”—F.A. Hayek

Is this Francia’s idea of “vivir sabroso?”

Colombia’s Vice President Francia Marquez was in Cuba last week, where she continued to trash Colombia’s health system and pour accolades on the Cuban system.

“We are proposing a health reform where it is once again administered by the State. Of course, this is not going to be easy because there is a very strong dispute. It is taking away the business of the elite and private sectors that have turned health into a commodity and not a fundamental right. The preventive health that you (Cubans) have maintained as a central axis is what we want to do in Colombia today,” said Vice President Márquez.

Francia Márquez en ?? dijo que estamos proponiendo una reforma a la salud donde el Estado recupere su manejo y que se le quite a las “élites”que se han enriquecido. Alaba el sistema cubano y busca que aprendamos de su experiencia.

Es una vergüenza. pic.twitter.com/jwrxzav5D0

— Ani Abello (@ANIABELLO_R) February 13, 2023

Colombia has a mix of public and private hospitals and clinics, with many doctors in private and specialty practice. Doctors have a choice of participating in public or private healthcare plans or participating in no plans at all. The vast majority of doctors participate in the country’s EPS system.

In Colombia, clinics, or points of care where patients are seen, are called IPS – Institución proveedor de Salud, or health providing institution, in English. Colombians with formal employment choose from a number of health plans, called EPS – Entidad proveedor de Salud, which serve as intermediaries. EPS plans may be private businesses, for example the insurance giant Sura, or they may be government owned, like the city of Bogotá’s Capital Salud. Some EPS systems are poorly managed, corrupt and insolvent, others are very well managed. Doctors and IPS facilities can choose to accept one or more EPS plans, or accept none. Most accept multiple EPS providers. Some EPS providers are notoriously slow payers.

Colombians below a certain income level also qualify for Sysben subsides designed to allow those of the lowest income levels to access the same health care benefits as the rest. Victims of auto accidents are also covered by mandatory SOAT insurance, which covers death, injury, lost wages, and physical therapy due to vehicular accidents.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro presents his proposal for reworking the Colombian health system (photo

Higher income Colombians may also pay cash for services, or purchase a private, prepaid medical plan that usually, but not always, sits atop an EPS plan. The government mandates that all employees and independent contractors participate in EPS. There is also a worker’s compensation system called ARL that covers workplace accidents.

Doctors generally make a good living in Colombia, though the pay is not exorbitant. You might see a typical doctor making between the equivalent of $40,000-$60,000 USD which in Colombia is quite a bit. Specialists and aesthetic surgeons can make quite a bit more, with owners of successful practices pulling in several hundred thousand dollars per year, but this is the tiny exception. In Cuba? $32 USD per month.

No health system is perfect. In the US, there is groundbreaking treatment, but heartbreaking prices. Canada and the UK claim to offer “free” health care, which of course is not free, but disguised through taxation, and patients often have to wait years suffering painful conditions before treatment. Treatment may also be rationed based on cost and staffing limitations.

In Colombia there are several inadequacies, but the biggest is an unequal availability of services based on geography. Bogotá, Medellín and Cali all boast world class hospitals, and many modern specialized treatment centers. MRI, CAT scans, even PET scans are available. Many foreigners come to Colombia for knee replacements, back surgery, and of course, cosmetic surgery. The cost of the entire procedure might be less than the co-pay plus deductible in the patient’s home country.

On the other hand, travel to rural regions of Colombia, or tertiary cities, and it is a different story. Not only is there a lack of facilities, but a lack of medical professionals, especially specialists. Add to this a high incidence of corruption in regional EPS providers and local governments. This stark inequality means that in the same country, one may receive world-class treatment, or practically no treatment at all based on a combination of one’s income and geography.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of medicines or durable medical supplies. Pharmacies are plentiful and well stocked, and most medicines are affordable. The government maintains a list of critical medicines and has measures in place to assure that these critical medicines are available and affordable.

Marquez has been explicit in her desire to destroy the concept of healthcare as a business in Colombia. But fortunately, it is unlikely that she will ever get the chance. Grocery stores and pharmacies in Colombia are full, and there are mobile phones in every pocket in Colombia, because they are provisioned by businesses. Overall, Colombia has an excellent electrical grid compared to many other Latin American countries, and much of the electricity is provided by private businesses. Even the utilities like EPM or EEB that have government involvement are indirectly owned and must follow corporate government best practices. For example, petroleum giant Ecopetrol is between 80-90% owned by the Colombian government, but because a minority of shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: EC), the company must behave as a corporate citizen and cannot be treated by the Colombian government as a sinecure for friends and cronies. Voluntarily trading on the NYSE, the company, its employees and directors are subject to US securities law.

The good news

Leftist President Gustavo Petro, formerly a militant guerilla, would surely love to have an entirely government-controlled health system—an entirely government controlled economy if his wishes came true—but fortunately Colombia has enough institutionalism to prevent a Venezuela-style usurpation, or Cuban style “revolución,” though groups like the FARC and ELN did try.

Petro wants to get some kind of reform passed, and that still may be difficult. However, the president has pledged via the country’s official presidential website that:

“Complementary plans, prepaid medicine or health policies will continue to function normally and will not be affected by the project.”

This is critical. And let us also be clear, one of President Petro’s stated objectives to provide an equal basic level of care throughout the country is a very good thing. This is something the country currently lacks. People in Tumaco or Catatumbo do not have the same access to healthcare as people in the south of Cali or the north of Bogotá. However, increasing the quantity of health care throughout the country, should not come at the expense of the quality of health care.

Colombia is in fact a very unequal country, and this inequality should be addressed by creating more opportunities, providing better, more universal education, and yes, challenging the pretty awful class hierarchy that exists in Colombian society. However, Friedrich August Von Hayek admonished us all that:

Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality—an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.

Headline photo: Vice President of Colombia, Francia Márquez Mina (left) with Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel (Photo: Colombian Government) during her visit last week.