Colombia’s Ministerio de Defensa Nacional (Ministry of National Defense) lifted the decade-long general suspension on firearm-carry permits on September 8, 2026, through Decree 1368 of 2026, signed under the authority of President Abelardo de la Espriella. The decree took effect September 9, the day after its publication in the Diario Oficial (Official Gazette), and restores the ability of citizens who already hold a valid porte de armas (carry) permit to move through Colombian territory with their weapon, without the special individual authorization the suspension had required since 2015.

The suspension traces to Decree 2515 of December 24, 2015, issued under then-President Juan Manuel Santos, and was renewed by successive governments — including those of Iván Duque and Gustavo Petro — for nearly 11 years before de la Espriella’s decree ended it. Finance Colombia reported on the decree’s signing and the political reaction to it on September 8. What follows is a closer look at what the decree actually changes in the permitting system, who qualifies to carry a firearm under it, and how Colombian doctrine on ownership, carrying and self-defense compares with the framework used in the United States.

What the decree does, and explicitly does not do.

Decree 1368 is narrow by its own terms. Article 1 instructs Colombia’s military authorities to lift the general suspension nationwide. Article 2 states plainly that doing so “no crea nuevos derechos, no autoriza el libre porte de armas de fuego, ni modifica los requisitos legales, condiciones, restricciones y controles previstos” in Decree-Law 2535 of 1993 — it creates no new rights, does not authorize the free carrying of firearms, and does not alter the legal requirements, conditions, restrictions or controls already in force. What changes is procedural: permit holders no longer need the special, individual authorization the suspension had layered on top of an otherwise valid permit.

That narrow framing reflects Colombia’s underlying constitutional structure. Article 223 of the Constitution establishes a state monopoly over weapons, munitions and explosives and specifies that no one may possess or carry them without authorization from the competent authority. Decree-Law 2535 of 1993 — the framework law both decrees invoke — states in Article 3 that private citizens may possess or carry weapons only “de manera excepcional” (exceptionally), through a permit issued under the “potestad discrecional” (discretionary power) of the competent authority. Colombia’s Constitutional Court upheld that discretionary framework in Sentencia C-031 of February 2, 1995, and separately upheld the government’s authority to impose a general suspension in Sentencia C-867 of November 3, 2010; the preamble to Decree 1368 cites both rulings.

Ownership, carrying and use are three separate permissions.

Colombian law does not treat buying, keeping, carrying and using a firearm as a single bundle of rights that comes with ownership. Decree 2535 draws a sharp line between two base categories. Article 16 defines tenencia (possession) as keeping the weapon and its ammunition inside the specific property registered on the permit, for personal defense; the permit authorizes use of the weapon only within that property. Article 17 defines porte (carry) as the act of carrying the weapon, or keeping it within reach, for personal defense, under a separate permit issued by the competent authority.

Retired Major General Fernando Murillo Orrego, who directed the National Police‘s Dirección de Investigación Criminal e Interpol (Directorate of Criminal Investigation and Interpol, or DIJIN) from 2020 to 2022, described the practical difference in a broadcast interview the day the decree was signed: tenencia is bought from the state and kept in one place — a residence, a business, a farm, a store — and cannot be transported in a vehicle or carried on one’s person, while porte is acquired specifically so the weapon can accompany the holder through their personal or work activity.

A third, narrower category complicates the ownership-equals-use assumption further. Article 9 of Decree 2535 allows restricted-use weapons to be authorized to cash-transport companies, corporate security departments and specialized security services, subject to the Superintendencia de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada (Superintendency of Private Security and Surveillance). An employee issued a firearm under one of those institutional permits can hold and carry it on the job without being authorized to use it for their own personal defense — the permit belongs to the employer’s security function, not the individual. Murillo pointed to that gap directly, calling Colombia “the only country” where a weapon can be sold to someone legally who still cannot use it for their own personal protection, because the permit is tied to their employer’s business activity rather than to them as an individual.

This article is informational only, and does not constitute legal advice. Seek guidance from competent experts and authorities!

Who can apply, and what the process requires.

Under Decree 2535 and the rules the Departamento Control Comercio de Armas, Municiones y Explosivos (Department for the Commercial Control of Arms, Munitions and Explosives, or DCCAE) applies today, an applicant for an individual carry permit must be a Colombian citizen at least 25 years old, according to recent reporting from El Colombiano and Infobae. Article 33 of the decree requires the applicant’s cédula de ciudadanía (citizenship card), a judicial background certificate, and a medical certificate of psychophysical fitness; Article 34 additionally requires the applicant to justify the necessity of carrying a weapon for their own defense and physical integrity. In practice, DCCAE also requires a certified firearms-handling course.

General Murillo, describing the same vetting process, told interviewers the requirements come down to a psychological examination, personal references and a clean judicial record, all reviewed by a committee rather than decided by a single official. Meeting every requirement does not guarantee approval — Article 34’s “necesidad” (necessity) standard leaves the final decision to the discretion of the military authority. Permits are not issued for a uniform term: Murillo said validity runs one, three or 10 years depending on the type of firearm involved.

Renewing a lapsed permit:

Citizens whose permits had already expired can revalidate them through the DCCAE’s online platform, which the department’s own site identifies as SIAEM 2.0 (Sistema de Información de Armas, Explosivos y Municiones, or the Weapons, Explosives and Munitions Information System), reachable through the department’s 36 regional seccionales (branch offices). A spokesperson for the department said in a video statement that the platform runs verifications against the National Police, INTERPOL, the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) and the DCCAE itself, under Law 2535 of 1993.

DCCAE’s published fee schedule sets a graduated fine for late revalidation of a carry permit: one-quarter of a month’s minimum wage for a renewal filed within 45 days of expiration, half a month’s minimum wage between 46 and 90 days, and a full month’s minimum wage — $1,750,905 COP at 2026 rates — beyond 90 days. The department spokesperson’s own public description on camera was less precise, describing a flat fine equal to one month’s minimum wage for any permit expired more than 30 days; the published schedule on the department’s site is the more current and specific figure.

What the decree does not revive:

Article 6 of Decree 1368 excludes several categories of permit holders from the benefit of the lifted suspension. Carrying remains prohibited where:

• the permit has expired;
• the permit was individually suspended;
• the permit was canceled or revoked;
• the weapon has been seized or is subject to a judicial or administrative measure;
• a legal or judicial prohibition applies; or
• the permit authorizes only tenencia and not porte.

Article 7 preserves, without change, the inspection, control and seizure powers of the National Police and other competent authorities. Carrying a firearm without a currently valid permit remains porte ilegal (illegal carrying), a criminal offense, regardless of the general suspension being lifted.

Where non-citizens and permanent residents stand

Neither Decree 1368 nor Decree 2535 sets out a distinct application path for foreign nationals who hold Colombian residency. The requirement in Article 33 is specifically for a cédula de ciudadanía — the identity document issued to Colombian nationals, whether by birth or naturalization — rather than the cédula de extranjería issued to foreign residents. The only foreigner-specific provisions identified in Decree 2535 concern accredited diplomatic personnel, a separate and narrower category under Article 29. Neither decree, nor the coverage of Decree 1368 reviewed for this article, documents an equivalent civilian route for a foreign permanent resident.

This is a reading of what the published regulation does and does not say, not legal advice. A foreign national or permanent resident weighing a firearm permit in Colombia should raise the question directly with the DCCAE rather than rely on this or any other secondary account.

How Colombian doctrine diverges from the US framework

The contrast with the United States is structural, not just procedural. The US Supreme Court has treated the Second Amendment, since District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, as protecting an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, a right the Court incorporated against state and local governments in McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010. In 2022, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen extended that right to carrying a firearm outside the home and replaced the balancing tests lower courts had used with a historical-tradition standard, pushing most US states toward “shall-issue” or permitless carry regimes in which an applicant who meets objective, listed criteria is entitled to a permit.

Colombia has no analogous individual constitutional right to test a permit denial against. Article 223’s state monopoly, and Decree 2535’s framing of civilian possession and carrying as an exceptional grant made at the “discretionary power” of the military authority, mean that even an applicant who satisfies every documentary requirement is not entitled to a permit as a matter of right — the Constitutional Court upheld exactly that discretion in Sentencia C-031 of 1995. A valid Colombian carry permit is a conditional, revocable authorization, not a constitutional entitlement.

General Murillo framed the policy in terms of shared responsibility rather than individual right, telling interviewers that Colombians bear a corresponsabilidad (shared responsibility) for their own protection alongside the state, and that a citizen’s legal access to a firearm can itself deter criminals who know it exists.

“The mere fact that today’s ordinary criminal knows there are citizens who legally carry firearms is a deterrent against all the violent acts we are seeing.”

Retired Maj. Gen. Fernando Murillo Orrego, former director, DIJIN

That view is contested inside Colombia: former President Gustavo Petro criticized the decree in terms Finance Colombia reported on September 8, and Colombian security analysts remain divided on whether broader carrying reduces or increases armed violence. This article takes no position on that policy question; it describes what the regulation itself permits.

Carrying, using and Colombia’s “legítima defensa” doctrine

Colombia’s Penal Code (Law 599 of 2000) recognizes legítima defensa (self-defense) in Article 32, numeral 6, as a ground for the absence of criminal responsibility when a person acts to defend a right of their own or of another against an actual or imminent unjust aggression, using proportionate means. Colombian criminal attorney Javier Arévalo, speaking alongside host Felipe “Pipe” Caballero in a recorded legal discussion of the decree, addressed a scenario the new rules raise directly: if a person disarms an attacker and uses that weapon to repel the attack, Arévalo said, that does not by itself amount to illegal weapons carrying, because illegal carrying requires the voluntary, conscious decision to take up and carry a firearm in public without authorization — not merely the act of taking a weapon away from an aggressor in self-defense.

Arévalo was more cautious about firearms used to defend property alone. Shooting someone who breaks a car window to steal a bag, he said, would generally read as disproportionate; a firearm response becomes more legally defensible, in his account, only where the aggression also threatens the victim’s life or physical integrity, not merely their belongings. He also confirmed that legítima defensa extends to defending a third party, including a stranger, once the threat is real or imminent — but drew a firm line against citizens capturing a suspect and then assaulting or torturing them instead of turning them over to police, which he described as a separate, more serious offense than the original crime.

That proportionality-driven, case-by-case standard has no exact equivalent in Colombian statute to the “stand your ground” or expanded castle-doctrine laws adopted in some US states, which remove a legal duty to retreat before using force in self-defense in specified circumstances. Colombian doctrine keeps the proportionality analysis in place regardless of where the confrontation occurs, and Article 7 of Decree 1368 leaves Colombian police with full authority to stop, inspect and seize weapons independent of whether the carrier’s underlying permit is valid.

Above photo © Loren Moss

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 new government is trying to restart negotiations on an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Japan that formally opened in December 2012 and never reached signature, and it is pairing the trade push with a direct appeal to Japanese automakers to build vehicles in the country again. President Abelardo de la Espriella used a televised address on Sunday, August 30, 2026, to present the results of a mission to Tokyo by Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism Mauricio Gómez Amín, which produced a joint commitment with Japan to put technical teams back to work on the pact and opened talks with Toyota Motor Corporation (TYO: 7203; NYSE: TM), Mazda Motor Corporation (TYO: 7261) and Toshiba Corporation.

“After nearly 15 years of paralyzed negotiations, in the first 15 days of my government we managed to take significant steps to unblock the economic partnership agreement between Colombia and Japan,” de la Espriella said, according to El Tiempo. He added: “We want to open markets for our products, incorporate technology and generate new opportunities for our countryside and our industry. We are also working so that Japan looks at Colombia again as an investment destination.”

The Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo (MinCIT, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism) summarized the message in a statement issued August 31, 2026: “Colombia is once again making its way in the world: we are seeking markets for our products, investment to generate jobs, technology to transform our economy, and strong allies to accompany us in the reconstruction.”

“Japan is looking at Colombia again, and we are ready to capitalize on that confidence,” Gómez Amín said in the ministry’s August 25 statement on the first day of meetings.

What happened in Tokyo

Gómez Amín’s mission ran from August 22 to August 27, according to Infobae Colombia. On Tuesday, August 25, the minister met State Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Toshiro Ino of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). In its readout of the meeting, METI said the two exchanged views on potential areas for bilateral cooperation, including trade and investment, and agreed to continue deepening their cooperation; Ino also expressed condolences to the victims of the August 10 earthquake. MinCIT said the meeting advanced an agenda to reactivate and conclude the EPA, which Gómez Amín described in a message on X quoted by Semana as “a modern agreement that opens doors for our agroindustry, investment and technology transfer.”

Japan’s State Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Toshiro Ino (left) and Colombian Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism Mauricio Gómez Amín (second from right) during their August 25, 2026 meeting in Tokyo. (Photo courtesy MinCIT)

Two days later, on Thursday, August 27, Gómez Amín met for more than 40 minutes with Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, Semana reported. According to the readout published by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and cited by Semana, Motegi opened the meeting with condolences for the earthquake and said he welcomed a visit so soon after the new administration took office as a sign that it gives importance to relations with Japan. Gómez Amín thanked Japan for its support after the earthquake and expressed his firm desire to reactivate the EPA negotiations. On that basis, the two ministers confirmed they would instruct technical officials in both countries to continue discussions diligently with a view to resuming negotiations.

MinCIT said in a communiqué reported by El Espectador that the meeting “made it possible to take a new step in the bilateral relationship and establish a concrete route for the technical teams of both countries to continue the conversations on the EPA.”

The Motegi meeting also covered Colombia’s participation in GREEN×EXPO 2027, the international horticultural exposition that opens in Yokohama in March 2027. Motegi thanked Gómez Amín for the formal letter confirming that Colombia will take part, according to an EFE dispatch published by El Tiempo.

In another message on X quoted by Infobae Colombia, Gómez Amín wrote: “On the instruction of President Abelardo de la Espriella, we have taken on the responsibility of unblocking a trade relationship that for nearly 15 years was not able to advance as Colombia needed.”

A negotiation that predates three presidents

The “15 years” cited by the president and the minister refers to a process that formally began almost 14 years ago, during the administration of Juan Manuel Santos. EPA negotiations between Colombia and Japan began in December 2012, according to Colombia’s embassy in Tokyo, which states that the proposed agreement has 18 chapters, covering areas including cooperation, intellectual property, government procurement, trade facilitation and improvement of the business environment; that 16 of those chapters have been concluded and agreed; and that the chapters on rules of origin and market access remain pending. The talks were suspended in 2021, El Tiempo reported in September 2025, and Infobae Colombia reported that the two pending chapters have been outstanding since the government of Iván Duque.

The de la Espriella government is also not the first to announce a restart. On September 4, 2025, then-President Gustavo Petro asked then-Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, at a meeting in Tokyo, to speed up the signing of the EPA, calling it a “fundamental necessity,” according to an EFE dispatch published by Portafolio. Petro and then-Commerce Minister Diana Marcela Morales led a meeting in Osaka during Expo 2025 to reaffirm both countries’ will to reactivate the negotiations, and Morales held meetings with Japanese companies and with METI Parliamentary Vice-Minister Akiyoshi Kato, El Tiempo reported at the time. No agreement was signed.

Japanese foreign direct investment in Colombia totaled $766.9 million USD between 2000 and 2024, making Japan the third-largest Asian investor in the country after China and India, with more than 45 Japanese companies operating locally, according to figures reported by Infobae Colombia. Colombia’s non-mining, non-energy exports to Japan reached $293.4 million USD in 2024, including green coffee, fresh flowers, coffee derivatives and agroindustrial goods. Over the narrower 2010 to 2021 period, the Colombian embassy in Tokyo puts cumulative Japanese investment flows at $562.7 million USD, or 32.9% of all Asia-Pacific investment Colombia received, ahead of China at 21.2% and Australia at 14.6%, and describes Japan as the largest Asia-Pacific source of foreign investment in the country.

The automotive pitch

Also on August 25, Gómez Amín met Hiroshi Nanbu, president of Business Planning & Operation at Toyota Motor Corporation, and invited Toyota to expand its presence in Colombia through hybrid and electric vehicle assembly, charging infrastructure, and development of local suppliers, MinCIT said. Semana identified Automotores Toyota Colombia President Hiroshi Yonenaga as also attending. The minister also met executives of Mazda and Toshiba, with the discussions covering manufacturing, digital infrastructure, supplier development and technological innovation, El Tiempo reported; MinCIT’s August 31 statement listed manufacturing, electric mobility, energy, digital infrastructure, innovation and technology as the sectors explored.

“We are working, for example, so that Mazda can once again assemble vehicles in Colombia and so that Toyota evaluates our country as a destination for projects related to electric vehicles,” de la Espriella said in the address. He added, in a line El Tiempo reported was a reference to the incentives planned to attract that investment: “Here we are going to give them every guarantee.”

The Toyota meeting revisited a relationship of more than five decades, according to MinCIT. The first Toyota vehicles were registered in Colombia in October 1959, and the company formalized a local distributor in 1967, according to El Carro Colombiano. Sofasa, the assembler of Renault (Euronext Paris: RNO) vehicles in Envigado, Antioquia, signed a letter of intent with Toyota in 1989; assembly of Land Cruisers began there in March 1992, Hilux pickups followed the next year, and local assembly continued for 17 years until Toyota exited its shareholding in Sofasa in December 2008.

Mazda assembled vehicles in Colombia for three decades through the Compañía Colombiana Automotriz (CCA) at a plant in Bogotá. The last vehicle left the line on April 30, 2014, and the closure eliminated about 500 jobs, according to Infobae Colombia, which reported that the decision responded to falling exports to neighboring markets and lower import costs. Mazda now imports all of its vehicles for the Colombian market from Japan and México.

The pitch comes as vehicle sales grow. Colombia registered 213,377 new vehicles between January and August 2026, a 42.1% increase over the same period of 2025, with Toyota third in the market at 18,946 registrations, according to figures from the Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia (ANDI, the National Business Association of Colombia) and Federación Nacional de Comerciantes (Fenalco, the National Federation of Merchants) cited by El Tiempo. Cumulative registrations of new electric vehicles reached 29,347 through July 2026, a 231.2% increase over the same period a year earlier, according to ANDI and Fenalco figures reported by El Tiempo.

Headline image: A slide titled “Toyota Strategy in Colombia” is shown during Minister Mauricio Gómez Amín’s meeting with Toyota Motor Corporation representatives in Tokyo on August 25, 2026. The slide states that Toyota is expanding its electrified lineup in Colombia to a 61% xEV ratio in 2027. (Photo courtesy MinCIT)

A dissenting view

José Clopatofsky, director of Motor magazine, published by Casa Editorial El Tiempo, called the assembly proposal “improbable” in an analysis published by El Tiempo on August 31, citing the structural conditions of local demand and tax advantages that benefit other countries.

“It is quite unlikely that this will happen, because Colombia’s market is too small to support an additional plant, made worse by the fact that we have free trade agreements with a great many countries,” Clopatofsky said. “That is, except for Japan, India and China, they have to pay taxes on combustion vehicles; all the electric vehicles in the world pay no taxes to come to Colombia.”

Clopatofsky also pointed to the earlier closures of the Chevrolet and Mazda plants in Colombia, which El Tiempo reported were shut down years ago for lack of profitability, and said that because practically all brands face no tax burden on cars sold in Colombia, importing is favored over local production.

Earthquake assistance

The Tokyo mission began less than two weeks after the magnitude 7.4 earthquake of August 10, which struck Chocó department and caused heavy damage across western Colombia, as Finance Colombia reported. De la Espriella said Japan had expressed solidarity with affected families and its willingness to contribute humanitarian aid, and Gómez Amín wrote that the Japanese government’s support “will translate into aid and contributions for the families affected by the earthquake.” The statements from MinCIT did not specify an amount.

“I am deeply grateful to the Japanese people and government,” de la Espriella said.

The reconstruction burden is one of several pressures facing the administration, which took office August 7. Finance Colombia’s earlier analysis examined the security situation, the earthquake response and the government’s position in Congress.

None of the statements issued by either government reports a signed agreement, a specific investment commitment from Toyota or Mazda, or a date for a formal resumption of EPA negotiating rounds.

Above image: A slide titled “Toyota Strategy in Colombia” is shown during Minister Mauricio Gómez Amín’s meeting with Toyota Motor Corporation representatives in Tokyo on August 25, 2026. The slide states that Toyota is expanding its electrified lineup in Colombia to a 61% xEV ratio in 2027. (Photo courtesy MinCIT)

“I will not accept illegal migration here. Colombians first, Colombians second and Colombians third,” De la Espriella said during an extraordinary security council meeting Sunday, August 23, in Barranquilla.

During the meeting, the president said deportations were “a presidential order that must begin to be carried out this week,” adding that he would not accept any “illegal immigrant, wherever they come from, who is committing crimes. They are leaving, and we will deport them.”

“The order to Migración is clear, and we are calling them now to give it to them: They must begin operations coordinated with the Barranquilla police to locate illegal migrants,” De la Espriella said, referring to Migración Colombia, the government agency responsible for the country’s official immigration procedures.

So far, however, the government has not provided further details about how the operations will be carried out or whether the announcement will become a broader national policy or formal government position.

Providing additional details, De la Espriella said authorities should focus “first, on those who are committing crimes. Second, on those who have not regularized their immigration status,” adding that they “will have to be deported.”

He said the position was consistent with what he advocated during his presidential campaign and described it as both a political and administrative decision.

“I take responsibility for it. I will not accept illegal migration here,” he said.

The position follows statements De la Espriella made during the campaign. “Anyone who migrates to Colombia while respecting the law will be protected and will have every guarantee. Anyone who violates immigration law will be returned to their country without any consideration,” he said in June during an interview with journalist Luis Carlos Vélez.

His remarks are also consistent with his statements over the weekend in Barranquilla and with the positions of right-wing political leaders he has cited as models, including US President Donald Trump and his hardline immigration policies.

Venezuelans could be most affected

Although De la Espriella did not explicitly refer to Venezuelans, his announcement could have a particularly significant impact on the 2.8 million Venezuelans living in Colombia, who account for nearly 90% of the country’s immigrant population.

Of those, 848,000 were in an irregular immigration situation as of January 2026, according to official Migración Colombia figures. About 193,000 of them are children and adolescents.

At the same time, Migración Colombia data show that at least 82% of Venezuelan migrants in the country had regular immigration status as of January. The remaining population has yet to fully formalize its status and includes people in the country under temporary permits who have not been able to access the Estatuto Temporal de Protección para Migrantes Venezolanos (ETPMV), or Temporary Protection Statute for Venezuelan Migrants, created under the government of former President Iván Duque.

A sharp shift in Colombia’s migration policy

De la Espriella’s position represents a significant shift from the approach to migration taken by Colombia’s previous governments, including the right-wing Centro Democrático administration of Iván Duque from 2018 to 2022.

In 2021, Duque implemented the ETPMV to provide legal status for up to 10 years to nearly 2 million migrants and help guarantee access to social rights and services, including employment, education and health care.

His successor, leftist President Gustavo Petro, who governed from 2022 to 2026, expanded protections for migrants, both by facilitating the regularization of their status in Colombia and by broadening access to basic rights for adults and minors.

Petro’s government also restored diplomatic relations with Venezuela, the country of origin of the vast majority of migrants living in Colombia.

De la Espriella’s announcement therefore signals a potentially substantial change in Colombia’s approach: from policies centered largely on regularization and integration toward stronger immigration enforcement and deportation. The extent of that shift, however, will depend on how the presidential order is implemented and whether the government turns the measures announced in Barranquilla into a broader national immigration policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most technocratic appointments

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

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

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

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

Representatives of traditional political dynasties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those who had never held government office

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

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

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

Signals to religious sectors

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

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

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

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

Between change and continuity

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

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

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

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

The citizen committee promoting the convening of a National Constituent Assembly in Colombia announced the suspension of its signature-gathering campaign and the withdrawal of the initiative, in a move that comes during the final stretch of the presidential race and could benefit ruling-party candidate Iván Cepeda’s efforts to attract centrist voters ahead of the June 21 runoff election.

The decision was announced June 4 in a statement signed by Armando Wouriyu Valbuena, spokesperson for the committee leading the initiative, who said the measure resulted from a “process of collective reflection on the national situation and the political moment the country is experiencing.”

President Gustavo Petro publicly supported the decision.

“I support the decision made by the citizen committee for the National Constituent Assembly to suspend the signature-gathering process,” Petro wrote on X.

The president added that “the constituent assembly had no objective other than improving the living conditions of the Colombian people and finally guaranteeing their fundamental rights.”

The proposal had initially been included among political initiatives associated with the ruling coalition and appeared in preliminary versions of the government platform of Iván Cepeda, the Pacto Histórico candidate who will face far-right contender Abelardo de la Espriella in the presidential runoff.

The decision to withdraw the initiative comes as Cepeda’s campaign seeks to expand its electoral support among moderate and independent voters, many of whom have viewed the prospect of constitutional reform with caution and, in some cases, concern.

A recurring idea in Colombian politics

Although the proposal has recently been associated with President Petro and left-wing sectors, the idea of convening a Constituent Assembly has been supported at different times by political leaders from nearly every corner of Colombia’s political spectrum.

Petro himself promoted the idea during the 2022 presidential campaign but later moderated his position after signing a public commitment encouraged by political figures including Claudia López and Antanas Mockus. In that agreement, he pledged not to pursue constitutional changes of that nature during his presidency.

The event became known nationally because Petro signed the so-called “12 Commandments” on a marble plaque, a symbolic gesture that helped build a broad political consensus and secure the support needed to win the presidency.

The debate over constitutional reform, however, predates Petro by decades.

One of the most notable examples involves former President Álvaro Uribe, who today ranks among the most vocal opponents of a constituent assembly promoted by the current administration.

During his presidency, a constitutional amendment allowed immediate presidential reelection. Later, after Colombia’s Constitutional Court and various political sectors blocked some of his initiatives, Uribe proposed a Constituent Assembly focused on reforming the judicial branch.

In 2012, during a forum in Washington, he argued that a constituent assembly limited to judicial reform could respond to public demands at the time.

Three years later, in 2015, and now from the opposition, Uribe again proposed a constituent assembly restricted to reviewing the peace accords negotiated between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, with the aim of modifying aspects of the process.

In 2020, several lawmakers aligned with Uribismo, including Paloma Valencia, who recently finished third in the first round of the presidential election, again proposed a constituent assembly to reform the judicial system and review aspects related to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, or JEP.

The proposal came after Colombia’s Supreme Court ordered Uribe’s preventive detention as part of an investigation into alleged witness tampering, a case that originated from complaints filed by current presidential candidate Iván Cepeda.

De la Espriella also supported the idea in the past

The concept of a constituent assembly has not been foreign to Abelardo de la Espriella, the current far-right presidential candidate.

During a 2017 interview on the local program Semblanzas con Toño Sánchez Jr., De la Espriella defended convening a Constituent Assembly to reform sectors such as justice and health care, while redefining structural aspects of the Colombian state.

“What must be promoted is the elimination of that (…) through a new strong-handed government that repeals that farce by decree and convenes, through the most expeditious legal means, a Constituent Assembly that reforms justice, reforms health care and lays the foundations for a more equitable system for those who are less favored within society,” he said, referring to the elections held that year, which were ultimately won by Iván Duque of the Centro Democrático party.

During the 2026 presidential campaign, however, De la Espriella adopted a completely different position and declared himself firmly opposed to a constituent assembly, associating the proposal with the political left and with Cepeda, his opponent in the runoff.

At a campaign-closing rally in Medellín before the first round of voting, he argued that Colombia’s Constitution should be defended “with tooth and nail” and questioned any attempt to modify it through a constituent assembly promoted by the government.

Why does a constituent assembly remain so controversial?

The controversy surrounding a Constituent Assembly is not solely a matter of who proposes it. It is also linked to the place occupied by the 1991 Constitution in Colombia’s political history.

The current Constitution emerged from a citizen movement known as the “Seventh Ballot,” (Séptima Papeleta) a mobilization that brought together people from different ideological backgrounds to replace the Constitution of 1886.

The current Constitution emerged from a citizen movement known as the “Seventh Ballot,” (Séptima Papeleta) a mobilization that brought together people from different ideological backgrounds to replace the Constitution of 1886.

For many Colombians, the process represents one of the most important moments of democratic consensus in the country’s recent history.

As a result, any effort to amend it tends to generate strong reactions, both in support and in opposition.

In addition, political leaders from different ideological traditions have often turned to the idea of a constituent assembly during periods of high popularity or when they encounter institutional obstacles to advancing particular reforms. This has contributed to a perception that the mechanism can be used to alter rules that certain political sectors find inconvenient.

The intense political polarization that has characterized Colombia since the early 2000s has also complicated efforts to build broad consensus around constitutional reform. The first round of the presidential election once again reflected that division, with less than a 3% gap separating the two leading candidates.

A debate likely to continue

Although the initiative has been withdrawn for now, the debate is far from over.

Colombian law establishes a complex procedure for convening a Constituent Assembly, requiring citizen participation, congressional involvement and approval by a significant number of voters at the ballot box. Under the current electoral roll, that threshold would exceed 12 million votes.

In a deeply fragmented political environment, achieving that level of consensus appears difficult in the short term. Yet recent history demonstrates that the idea periodically resurfaces across the ideological spectrum whenever political conditions change.

For that reason, even after the suspension of the current signature-gathering effort, discussion of a possible constitutional reform is likely to remain part of Colombia’s political debate, regardless of who wins the presidency on June 21 and who ultimately leads the opposition to the next government.

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.

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

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

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

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The Candidates: Background and Context

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

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

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

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

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

The Electoral Map

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

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

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

The Political Context: From Uribe to Petro and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

What to Expect Before June 21

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

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

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

Winners and Losers by Sector

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Outlook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two decades of fiscal data show that Colombia’s gross general government debt has moved through four distinct macroeconomic phases, ending the current cycle at a level that is materially higher than its pre-pandemic baseline. Persistent annual fiscal deficits, currency volatility, an emergency spending shock and weaker-than-projected tax revenues have combined to push the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product from the mid-30s percent range in the mid-2000s to a band of roughly 60 to 62 percent at the start of 2026, according to figures published by the Ministerio de Hacienda y Crédito Público and the Banco de la República.

The shift carries direct implications for sovereign bondholders, multinationals operating in Colombia and any investor pricing country risk in the Andean region. All three major rating agencies — S&P Global Ratings, Moody’s Ratings and Fitch Ratings — now place Colombia in speculative-grade, or junk, territory, with consecutive downgrades through 2025 and into early 2026.

“The activation of the escape clause confirms that the deterioration observed in 2024 will not be corrected in 2025.” — Renzo Merino, sovereign analyst, Moody’s Ratings

The commodity cushion: 2006 to 2014

During the global commodity supercycle, Colombia benefited from sustained gross domestic product growth and steady government revenue. Hydrocarbon and mining receipts — channeled through Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC; BVC: ECOPETROL) and the broader extractive sector — supplied a substantial share of national tax intake. The debt-to-GDP ratio remained relatively stable during this period, generally hovering between 34 and 38 percent. Even with chronic primary deficits, nominal growth in the denominator absorbed new borrowing, masking the underlying structural imbalance that the Comité Autónomo de la Regla Fiscal (CARF) would later flag as the persistent driver of fiscal stress.

The currency and revenue shock: 2014 to 2019

The mechanics of the ratio changed sharply when Brent crude prices collapsed in late 2014. Reduced hydrocarbon royalties widened the fiscal gap just as the Colombian peso depreciated against the US dollar. Because a significant share of Colombia’s sovereign liabilities is denominated in foreign currency, the peso’s slide automatically inflated the local-currency value of outstanding external debt when measured against domestic GDP. The combined effect — wider deficits funded by new borrowing, plus a valuation effect on existing dollar-denominated obligations — pushed the ratio steadily higher through the late 2010s.

The structural revenue weakness that surfaced during this period has remained a recurring theme in subsequent fiscal assessments from Fedesarrollo and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Observatorio Fiscal, both of which have noted that successive tax reforms failed to fully close the gap between commitments and ordinary income.

The pandemic ceiling: 2020

The combination of emergency social spending under the Ingreso Solidario program, expanded health outlays and a sharp contraction in nominal GDP drove the ratio to a historic peak above 65 percent in 2020. The Ministerio de Hacienda reports the all-time high at 65.3 percent of GDP that year. The government activated the escape clause of the regla fiscal — Colombia’s fiscal rule, codified in Law 1473 of 2011 and modified by Law 2155 of 2021 — to accommodate the spending response, suspending the rule for 2020 and 2021.

That episode also triggered the first sovereign downgrade cycle: S&P Global Ratings cut Colombia’s long-term foreign currency rating to BB+ from BBB- in May 2021 after the administration of then-president Iván Duque withdrew a tax reform bill following street protests, costing the country its investment-grade status with that agency.

The new baseline: 2023 to 2026

Strong post-pandemic nominal growth briefly pulled the debt ratio down toward 57 percent in 2023. The decline did not hold. Structural spending pressures, elevated international interest rates and tax collections below budgeted projections pushed the ratio back up, establishing a new operating band around 60 to 62 percent of GDP. The Ministerio de Hacienda reported government debt to GDP at 61.3 percent for 2024.

The administration of President Gustavo Petro and Finance Minister Germán Ávila Plazas activated the regla fiscal escape clause for a second time in June 2025, with the Consejo Superior de Política Fiscal (Confis) approving a three-year suspension covering 2025 through 2027. The decision came despite an unfavorable technical opinion from the Comité Autónomo de la Regla Fiscal, which concluded that legal conditions for activating the clause were not met outside of a national emergency. The clause had previously been invoked only during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Marco Fiscal de Mediano Plazo (MFMP) presented by the Ministerio de Hacienda, net public debt to GDP is projected to rise from 53 percent in 2023 to 61.3 percent in 2025 and approximately 63 percent in 2026. The fiscal deficit for 2025 was initially projected at 7.1 percent of GDP and later revised to roughly 6.2 percent of GDP, with the administration targeting a deficit below 6 percent of GDP for 2026.

Debt service consumes a larger share of the budget

The cost of servicing this debt has reshaped the structure of the national budget. The 2026 draft budget presented by Minister Ávila totals $557 trillion COP, equivalent to roughly $134.7 billion USD, and represents 28.9 percent of GDP. Of that, debt servicing costs are projected at $102.5 trillion COP, or 5.3 percent of GDP, down from 6.2 percent of GDP in 2025.

The figures published by the Ministerio de Hacienda for domestic debt service in 2026 are higher when measured against tax intake alone: of an estimated $130 trillion COP in domestic debt service, $79 trillion COP corresponds to principal that can be rolled over through new issuances, while $51 trillion COP represents interest payments funded directly from the budget. Against projected tax revenue of approximately $300 trillion COP, that implies roughly one in every three pesos collected by the central government is allocated to interest on existing debt.

Rating agencies reprice the sovereign

The rating cycle has accelerated alongside the fiscal trajectory. Moody’s Ratings downgraded Colombia to Baa3 and subsequently into junk territory in 2025, citing the suspension of the fiscal rule. S&P Global Ratings issued a further downgrade in April 2026, its second cut in less than a year, on the same persistent deficit and debt concerns. Fitch Ratings also moved Colombia deeper into speculative grade in December 2025.

The Banco de la República reported external debt — combining public and private liabilities — at $238.7 billion USD at the close of November 2025, equivalent to 54.8 percent of GDP, an increase of $15.8 billion USD from January of the same year. The Colombian economy is currently valued at approximately $435 billion USD.

What investors are watching next

The Comité Autónomo de la Regla Fiscal has stated in its most recent reports to Congress that the 2025 primary balance target was missed by a wide margin even after the escape clause was activated, and that incoming projections for 2026 raise the bar for any return to the original fiscal rule by 2028. Business groups including Fenalco and the Consejo Gremial Nacional have publicly opposed the suspension and signaled potential legal challenges.

The 2026 financing plan disclosed by the Ministerio de Hacienda includes approximately $4.6 billion USD in global bond issuances, primarily to refinance a one-year Swiss-franc Total Return Swap operation valued at roughly $9.3 billion USD. The ministry has stated that the issuance does not constitute net new external debt. Updated debt and deficit targets are scheduled for release in the next iteration of the Plan Financiero.

For executives operating in Colombia or evaluating new investment, the baseline shift from a mid-30s to a low-60s debt-to-GDP environment alters several variables simultaneously: peso volatility tied to refinancing cycles, the trajectory of corporate tax policy as Congress weighs successive reform proposals, and the path of domestic interest rates set by the Banco de la República as it manages inflation alongside elevated sovereign funding costs. Detailed historical and forward-looking debt data is published by the Investor Relations Colombia office of the Ministerio de Hacienda.

Colombia’s General Government Debt-to-GDP Ratio (2006-2026) (image: Google)