GeoPark (NYSE: GPRK) has said it is ready to take part in hydraulic fracturing in Colombia, joining state-controlled Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC; BVC: ECOPETROL) and coal producer Drummond’s energy unit, Drummond Energy, as companies seeking to develop unconventional oil and gas while the government of President Abelardo De La Espriella reopens the door to the technique. Felipe Bayón, GeoPark’s chief executive and a former president of Ecopetrol, made the announcement on September 22 in Bucaramanga at the XXIII Congreso Colombiano de Petróleo, Gas y Energía (23rd Colombian Petroleum, Gas and Energy Congress), organized by the Asociación Colombiana de Ingenieros de Petróleos, Energía y Tecnologías Afines (Colombian Association of Petroleum, Energy and Allied Technologies Engineers, Acipet).

According to Caracol Radio, Bayón named the regions GeoPark is looking at: “We are convinced that in the Middle Magdalena Valley, but also in other regions of the country, Cesar-Ranchería, among others, in Catatumbo, there are possibilities to do unconventionals and to do fracking.”

Of the three companies, Ecopetrol and Drummond have the most concrete routes to drilling Colombia’s first fracking well, while GeoPark has so far only expressed interest, according to a September 27 analysis by Portafolio. Drummond Energy has set 2027 as its target for a first well in the department of Cesar.

GeoPark cites Vaca Muerta but has no defined project

According to Portafolio, GeoPark is concentrating its analysis on the Middle Magdalena Valley and the Cesar-Ranchería basin, where it sees opportunities for both oil and gas from unconventional reservoirs. The outlet reported that the company has not defined blocks, municipalities, investment amounts, schedules or potential production volumes for any fracking operation in Colombia. No environmental license applications, specific contracts with the Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos (National Hydrocarbons Agency, ANH) or prior-consultation processes tied to a particular project have been made public.

Bayón told the congress that “energy sovereignty has to do with taking control of our destiny,” according to Valora Analitik. Red+ Noticias reported that Bayón wants to carry the company’s experience in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation to regions such as the Middle Magdalena Valley and Cesar-Ranchería.

“At GeoPark, I don’t want to speak for the industry, but we are ready. We are ready to accompany this development of unconventionals. We are committed, we believe we can do it in a rigorous way, and above all we believe it will be a very important change for the country.”

— Felipe Bayón, CEO of GeoPark

In October 2025, GeoPark completed its $115 million USD acquisition from Pluspetrol of the Loma Jarillosa Este and Puesto Silva Oeste blocks in Neuquén Province. Bayón said at the congress that production there rose from about 1,400 barrels per day to more than 5,000 between September 2025 and June 2026, Caracol Radio reported. Bayón’s figure of more than 5,000 barrels per day differs from GeoPark’s own second-quarter 2026 operational update, which reported average gross production in Argentina of 1,400 barrels of oil equivalent per day for the quarter, with hydraulic fracturing under way on five wells, 119 of 218 fracture stages completed by the end of June, and production start-up to follow. In the same update, the company said it and provincial partner Gas y Petróleo del Neuquén had applied to Argentina’s Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones (Large Investment Incentive Regime, RIGI) to support more than $1 billion USD in investment, targeting growth from 1,500 to 20,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day within three years.

In March 2026, Colden Investments S.A., an affiliate of Jaime Gilinski, invested approximately $107 million USD for about 20% of the company’s shares, becoming its largest shareholder. On September 2, GeoPark announced an entry into Venezuela’s Bare heavy-oil block, to be paid for with new shares issued to Grupo Gilinski that would give the group about 56.3% of GeoPark, according to El Colombiano. The transaction depends on a 25-year contract with PDVSA Petróleo S.A. taking effect, which GeoPark said is subject to approvals and sanctions-related compliance and estimated would take no more than 120 days.

Ecopetrol’s new president promises “responsible fracking”

Ecopetrol’s board unanimously named Joaquín Gutiérrez Caballero as the company’s president on September 24, and he formally takes office September 28, according to an Ecopetrol statement. Gutiérrez, a business administrator who managed De La Espriella’s presidential campaign, comes to the post without prior experience in the hydrocarbons sector, Infobae reported.

At a ceremony in Santa Marta ahead of that date, reported by Infobae on September 26, De La Espriella swore in Gutiérrez and restated his campaign position: “My government fully reopens the path to exploration and to the signing of new contracts, including fracking, a lo que dé [all the way], as I said during the campaign, with absolutely every criterion of environmental responsibility.” Gutiérrez said: “We will advance conventional and unconventional projects, implement responsible fracking and continue exploring offshore deposits.” He also pledged to guarantee consulta previa (prior consultation) with communities without allowing it to be used to delay energy-security projects, according to Infobae. The same report put Ecopetrol’s proven reserves at 1.94 billion barrels of oil equivalent at the end of 2025, equal to 7.8 years of production, with 6.3 years for gas. Finance Colombia reported earlier this month on De La Espriella’s pledge to rebuild Ecopetrol as gas reserves fell to a record low.

The two pilot projects Ecopetrol pursued with ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) in Puerto Wilches, Santander, known as Kalé and Platero, were contracted under ANH Contratos Especiales de Proyectos de Investigación (Special Research Project Contracts, CEPI), which permitted pilot studies but not commercial production. Portafolio, citing El Tiempo reporting, said that Kalé was awarded to Ecopetrol in November 2020 and its contract signed on December 24 of that year, while Platero was awarded to ExxonMobil in April 2021 and contracted that June. In March 2021, the ANH said the two pilots contemplated joint investment of about $130 million USD, subject to environmental licensing.

Kalé went furthest. The Autoridad Nacional de Licencias Ambientales (National Environmental Licensing Authority, ANLA) opened its evaluation in November 2021, held a public hearing in Puerto Wilches on February 22, 2022, and granted the environmental license through Resolución 0648 (Resolution 0648) on March 25, 2022. The ANLA opened its evaluation of Platero through Auto 1341 (Order 1341) on March 9, 2022. Portafolio reported that under the Gustavo Petro administration, Ecopetrol withdrew from the Platero licensing process, and that the Corte Constitucional (Constitutional Court) later conditioned the pilots’ continuation on prior consultation with the Afro-descendant community Afrowilches. Ecopetrol and ExxonMobil subsequently agreed with the ANH to terminate the research contracts early.

Drummond targets a first well in Cesar in 2027

Drummond Energy set aside plans for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification terminal in Ciénaga, Magdalena, to concentrate on unconventional gas in Cesar, Alberto García, the company’s country manager, told El Tiempo in an interview published September 1. García said the La Luna formation in the Cesar-Ranchería basin “can hold up to 20 trillion cubic feet of producible natural gas,” which he said would multiply the country’s current reserves more than tenfold. El Tiempo put those reserves at 5.9 years of supply.

Drummond holds four contracts written specifically for shale reservoirs, along with an association contract with Ecopetrol and a conventional contract for coal-bed methane, García told El Tiempo. Portafolio, also citing El Tiempo, reported that Drummond’s contracts include CR-2, CR-3 and CR-4, signed in December 2016 for the Cesar-Ranchería area, and that another contract, also signed in 2016, was suspended by the ANH on April 27, 2018. According to García, the contracts’ area of influence includes the municipalities of Chiriguaná, La Jagua de Ibirico, El Paso, Becerril, Agustín Codazzi and Bosconia, among others in Cesar.

García said the company’s environmental licensing is well advanced, but that Drummond still needs to work out with the ANLA how to modify existing licenses and apply for new ones. He put the initial investment at “hundreds of millions of dollars” that would later scale to billions, and said Colombia would need long-term legal stability and competitive fiscal terms to compete with Argentina and the United States for that capital. He also set limits on where the technique would be used: “Fracking will never be carried out in natural parks or in mountainous areas; it will be carried out exclusively in flat, open areas.”

García estimated that if fracking becomes viable, all operators together, including Ecopetrol, could invest about $10 billion USD during De La Espriella’s four-year term. “What we require now is solid political will,” he said.

Legal footing and objections

Fracking remains possible under the rules in force, Portafolio noted. In 2022, the Consejo de Estado (Council of State) upheld Decreto 3004 de 2013 (Decree 3004 of 2013) and Resolución 90341 de 2014 (Resolution 90341 of 2014), which set the technical criteria for unconventional reservoirs. Infobae reported that the Consejo de Estado and the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office) have nonetheless expressed reservations about the technique, arguing that it may not be compatible with the country’s development or with the protection of collective rights. The government has responded that any use of the technique will be subject to environmental-responsibility criteria and technical evaluation, according to Infobae.

Headline photo: A GeoPark drilling rig in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta formation, Neuquén Province. (Photo courtesy GeoPark)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Federico Gutiérrez, the mayor of Medellín, used a July 27, 2026, press conference to lay out what he described as a coordinated criminal structure operating inside the administration of his predecessor, former mayor Daniel Quintero Calle, and Quintero’s brother, Miguel Quintero Calle. Gutiérrez told reporters the network reached into nearly every district agency and directed more than $1 trillion COP in public contracting, based on findings the Alcaldía de Medellín (Medellín Mayor’s Office) has compiled since he took office in January 2024.

Prosecutors classify the alleged network as a grupo de delincuencia organizada, or GDO (organized crime group) — a designation Colombian law uses for entrenched, racketeering-style criminal structures. Gutiérrez has given it a public nickname, “Hermanitos Q” (Little Q Brothers), and said the case file, which stood at 501 findings in an earlier accounting, now includes 666 findings after his administration added 165 new files. He said the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) has formally charged 55 people, a number he expects to reach 59, and that the combined prison exposure of the group’s members, based on current charges, exceeds 750 years, according to Infobae Colombia.

Gutiérrez said the network coordinated in part through a WhatsApp group its members called “Los Amiguitos” (The Little Friends), which he said the implicated parties created themselves in 2020 and which prosecutors are using as evidence. He also displayed images he said documented purchases tied to the alleged scheme: an armored Toyota pickup truck Miguel Quintero acquired about two months into the administration, valued at $260 million COP, a swimming pool built at Miguel Quintero’s farm in Copacabana, Antioquia, valued at $160 million COP, and firearms, according to Infobae Colombia. “This wasn’t a government with corruption cases,” Gutiérrez told reporters. “It was corruption governing from different desks. As they say, not even Ali Baba dared so much.”

Quintero governed Medellín from 2020 to 2023. He now serves as Colombia’s national Superintendent of Health, appointed by President Gustavo Petro by decree in April 2026 despite the pending charges, according to El Espectador. The appointment drew public opposition from health-sector groups, including Change.org petitions that together gathered more than 17,000 signatures asking Petro to reconsider, according to Infobae Colombia. Quintero rejected Gutiérrez’s allegations the same day, calling the mayor “ridiculous” in a post on X: “The only government plan Mayor Federico Gutiérrez had was trying to screw me over because I denounced what happened at Hidroituango, where $10 trillion COP is still missing that people are paying for through their utility bills,” he wrote, according to Infobae Colombia. Hidroituango, EPM’s long-delayed and cost-overrun hydroelectric project, predates Quintero’s administration.

The Área Metropolitana and Itagüí’s fire department

The most legally advanced case centers on six contracts signed between 2020 and 2023 between the Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá (Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley, AMVA) and the volunteer fire department of Itagüí, a Medellín-area municipality, worth $17,645 million COP, according to Infobae Colombia. Prosecutors allege the money, meant to fund emergency and pandemic response, was instead diverted through inflated invoices. Juan Alberto Cardona Henao, the fire department’s former accountant, has already been convicted and sentenced to 19 months in prison; he is cooperating with prosecutors under a plea agreement. Miguel Quintero, his business associate Sebastián Ortega, former AMVA official Álvaro Villada and Vanesa Álvarez Restrepo face a hearing where prosecutors intend to formally charge them with embezzlement and undue interest in contracting — exposure of up to 22 years and six months. That hearing has been postponed three times: originally set for August 3, pushed to August 25 and then to August 31 at the request of Villada’s defense, and voided a third time on August 31 itself, after the presiding judge agreed with Quintero Calle’s defense that the case had been improperly transferred to her courtroom following the original judge’s medical leave. It is now scheduled for September 10, according to Infobae Colombia.

Afinia and EPM’s Caribbean coast utility

Gutiérrez also renewed a long-running allegation, first raised by his administration in 2024, that the general manager’s post at Afinia — a Caribbean-coast electricity distributor in which EPM (Medellín’s public utility) holds a stake — was effectively sold during Quintero’s term for between $5 million and $8 million USD, in a deal allegedly brokered at a restaurant in Medellín and finalized in meetings in Cartagena and Barranquilla. Gutiérrez said the buyers installed Javier Lastra Fuscaldo as general manager in August 2021 with the help of Emilio Tapia, a contractor already convicted in Bogotá’s unrelated “carrusel de la contratación” (contracting carousel) case. Lastra has denied the allegations since they first surfaced. “Nobody made conditions on my appointment at Afinia, and my management was carried out based on good practices,” he told El Colombiano in 2024, adding that he had not been formally notified of any complaint against him. Gutiérrez said Afinia has lost $1.5 trillion COP a year since; separately, EPM’s own board told El Colombiano in 2024 that Afinia was losing $80 billion to $90 billion COP a month and needed at least $1.5 trillion COP in fresh investment that year.

Medellín Mayor Federico “FICO”Gutierrez speaking on “Los Hermanitos Q.” (courtesy Alcaldia de Medellín)

Metroparques, the Aguas water park, and Inder

Prosecutors have filed a formal accusation against four people over maintenance contracts for the Parque de las Aguas water park, administered through Metroparques, worth close to $22 billion COP: Álvaro Villada, Jorge Enrique Liévano (Metroparques’ former general manager), Viviana del Valle Velázquez (the entity’s former purchasing chief) and contractor Juan Alexander Pino Jaramillo, who together face up to 33 years in prison, while three additional contractors face up to 16 years. Prosecutors allege contracting companies tied to Pino — Comercializadora J. Pino SAS, Soluciones SAS and Estructuras Zafiro SAS — received more than $4.5 billion COP, and that cost overruns on chlorine, floodlights and biosafety supplies alone caused more than $2.79 billion COP in damage. Authorities have already applied asset forfeiture to a car and a motorcycle tied to the case.

A separate, related matter involves a 2020 contract awarded to Sian Eventos y Logística SAS, led by Mauricio Jaramillo Botero, to supply sports equipment for youth recreation programs run by Inder (Medellín’s sports and recreation institute) through Metroparques. Gutiérrez said the contract ran up $3,705 million COP in cost overruns on balls, medals, uniforms and trophies, stretched from a planned two-and-a-half months to 26 months, and that roughly $200 billion COP in Inder funding was separately redirected to Metroparques through similar inter-agency contracts. Jaramillo faces up to 16 years in prison; Diana Paola Toro (Inder’s director), Liévano and María Eugenia Domínguez (another former Metroparques general manager) face up to 33 years.

Buen Comienzo, the early-childhood program

Gutiérrez said prosecutors have charged three people over an early-childhood nutrition and education contract awarded in October 2020 to Corporación Colombia Avanza, after Quintero appointed Vivian Cecilia Puerta Guerra to run the Buen Comienzo program. According to the accusation Gutiérrez cited, the contract exceeded the corporation’s demonstrated operating capacity by 2,816%, producing patrimonial damage of roughly $1,423 million COP — money Gutiérrez said could have fed more than 3,300 additional children for a month. Colombia’s Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office) has already barred former education secretary Marta Alexandra Agudelo from holding public office for eight years; she and Henry Paulison Gómez Montoya, Colombia Avanza’s general manager, face up to 33 years and 16 years respectively in the criminal case. Gutiérrez said four children ages 0 to 5 died of acute malnutrition in Medellín in 2023, the last full year of Quintero’s term, and that no similar deaths have occurred since.

The Jardín Botánico and a witness’s murder

A 2020 contract to maintain the city’s parks and green spaces, previously handled by the nonprofit Jardín Botánico de Medellín, was instead awarded through a private process to Reforestadora El Líbano SAS for $5,250 million COP, according to Gutiérrez. The Procuraduría has already disqualified former infrastructure secretary Natalia Urrego Arias and Liévano from public office for nine years over the contract; Luz Eliana Henao Rodríguez, El Líbano’s legal representative, faces up to nine years in the separate criminal case. Gutiérrez also renewed a request to the Fiscalía and national police for protective measures for witnesses in the broader investigation, citing the March 14, 2024, killing of Asdrúbal Vélez Orozco, a businessman linked to El Líbano and the husband of Henao. Gutiérrez said other witnesses and their families are currently being threatened and pressured.

Aguas Vivas and the international money trail

The Aguas Vivas case, the one that directly names Quintero, is separate from the broader “Hermanitos Q” file but factors into Gutiérrez’s overall tally: 13 people, including Quintero, face embezzlement and abuse-of-authority allegations tied to $42 billion COP in alleged patrimonial damage and more than 4,000 pieces of evidence. Gutiérrez has also pointed to an alleged international money trail: a Medellín businessman’s Miami-based gold-trading company reported revenue of roughly $112 billion COP over the last three years of Quintero’s administration, then reported no income after Gutiérrez took office in 2024, according to Telemedellín.

US Ambassador to Colombia Hugo Guevara visited Gutiérrez’s office in Medellín on August 21 for talks focused on combating child sexual exploitation, during which Gutiérrez also raised the corruption findings, according to Telemedellín. Gutiérrez then traveled to the United States, meeting Homeland Security Investigations personnel in Phoenix on the same child-exploitation cooperation before flying to Miami, where he met for more than two hours on August 31 with the FBI‘s International Anti-Corruption Unit. He handed over a file the mayor’s office says contains roughly 13,000 pieces of documentary evidence, four plea-agreement cooperators and imputation proceedings against 55 former officials, according to El Espectador. Quintero dismissed the trip on X, telling Gutiérrez to “stop being a clown” and adding that if he had “a single ill-gotten peso” in the US, “the United States wouldn’t need your theatrics to find it,” according to Infobae Colombia.

Gutiérrez said several other officials facing charges in the broader case have gone on to hold national-government posts under Petro, including Fabio Andrés García (Medellín’s former secretary general, now in a leadership role at the Superintendencia Nacional de Salud), Sergio Andrés López (Medellín’s former planning director, now an advisor at the Ministerio de Salud (Health Ministry)), Natalia Andrea Jiménez (a former subsecretary of contracting execution, now a contractor at the Cancillería (Foreign Ministry)), César Augusto Chavarría (Metroparques’ former logistics chief, now at the DIAN tax authority) and Rubén Darío López (the infrastructure secretariat’s former technical director, now a contractor at Aerocivil, Colombia’s civil aviation authority).

Where the cases stand

Two threads of the investigation are moving on parallel, and separately contested, tracks. In the Aguas Vivas case, Judge 22 of the Medellín Criminal Circuit Court nullified the formal charges against Quintero and 12 co-defendants on July 14, 2026, ruling that prosecutors had not specified clearly enough how each defendant participated in the alleged scheme. The Fiscalía and the Alcaldía de Medellín, recognized in the case as a victim, are asking that same judge to reverse herself before the matter can move to the Tribunal Superior de Medellín (Medellín Superior Court) for a final ruling. Hearings on August 6 and August 20 each ran long before prosecutors and the city’s legal representative — who cited more than 4,000 pieces of evidence and 50 witness statements — could finish arguing that the nullity was wrongly decided; the defense is now set to respond at a hearing scheduled for September 14, 2026, after which the judge will rule, according to El Colombiano and Telemedellín. The nullity is a procedural setback for prosecutors, not an acquittal or a dismissal, and the case remains open.

In the AMVA-Itagüí firefighters case, Gutiérrez said the repeated delays have gone beyond ordinary scheduling friction. After the August 25 postponement, he called it “indignante” (outrageous) and asked prosecutors to seek the defendants’ arrest rather than wait out further delays, according to Infobae Colombia. After the August 31 hearing was voided over the reassignment dispute, Gutiérrez wrote on X: “There have been three postponements. They have dragged this process out so much that we have gone to the courts to investigate what is happening — this is no longer normal.” He added that his administration, recognized as a victim in the case, would join prosecutors in asking the court to order pretrial detention for the defendants when the hearing resumes on September 10, according to Infobae Colombia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The decision that kept foreign rescue teams out of Colombia in the first days after the August 10 earthquake did not originate with the government that has spent the past week defending it. It originated with Javier Pava Sánchez, the acting director of the country’s disaster-risk agency, an appointee of former President Gustavo Petro who was still holding the post four days into Abelardo de la Espriella’s administration, and it is set out over two pages under his own digital signature.

The letter, reviewed by Finance Colombia and filed under radicado (case reference) UNGRD 2026EE14740, tells Foreign Minister Omar Bula Escobar that Colombia’s own accredited capacity is sufficient and that “at this stage of the emergency, it is not necessary to request or activate the deployment of specialized international search-and-rescue teams (USAR).” The document’s embedded digital signature records a signing time of 1:45:08 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11. Pava has since said publicly that it went out at 1:20 p.m.

What the Letter Says

The earthquake struck at 7:34 a.m. on Monday, August 10, with a magnitude of 7.4 and an epicenter in the municipality of San José del Palmar, in the department of Chocó, according to the Servicio Geológico Colombiano (Colombian Geological Survey, or SGC), as reported by Pulzo. De la Espriella had been sworn in the previous Friday and had named little more than his cabinet and a handful of front-line officials; the rest of the state was still staffed by Petro appointees or by lower-ranked officials serving on an interim basis, Madrid’s El País reported in the August 12 interview in which Pava gave his account.

Addressed to Bula at the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and signed by Pava as acting director general of the Unidad Nacional para la Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres (National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, or UNGRD), the letter states that the country has more than 25 groups with search-and-rescue capabilities and that Chocó, Valle del Cauca and Risaralda had been prioritized. The figure is broader than the 23 UNGRD-accredited USAR teams that Pava, El Tiempo and La Silla Vacía all cite; the letter counts groups with search-and-rescue capability rather than accredited USAR units. Its finding is conditional: should the emergency outgrow national capacity, Colombia would request support, though only from teams holding a valid classification from INSARAG, the United Nations’ International Search and Rescue Advisory Group. It thanks the international community for its offers. No country is named in it.

Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara, of the Ministerio del Interior (Interior Ministry), has described that document as the trigger under Colombian procedure. He set out the mechanism on Blu Radio on August 14. “Requesting international rescuers is not something the foreign minister does motu proprio; it is not the foreign minister’s initiative. The foreign minister is the vehicle for doing it,” he told Néstor Morales. The determination is made by the Puesto de Mando Unificado (Unified Command Post), the interagency body the UNGRD directs. “If the man at the UNGRD, who was Pava, tells the foreign minister no, then the foreign minister cannot go and request any international assistance on his own initiative. That is to say, the initiative belongs to the director of the UNGRD.” Madrid’s El País reported the same sequence from the other direction: once Pava had specified what was needed, the Foreign Ministry went to multilateral bodies and individual governments and asked for precisely that.

Four Offers, and How Pava Weighed Them

Pava told Madrid’s El País by telephone that Bula had informed him before he wrote the letter of four countries offering rescue personnel: El Salvador, Peru, Israel and the United States. His own accounts differ on when that conversation happened: he told Infobae that he met Bula at around 2 p.m. to review the offers, which would place the meeting after the letter was signed. “In Colombia we have an enormous capacity of rescue teams, we have 23 USAR groups, so I looked carefully at what they offered us,” he said. Two he rejected on certification grounds: “In the case of El Salvador, they were not certified teams, they did not have experience in these types of situations. I also told the foreign minister that Peru’s are not certified either.”

His reasoning on the other two was different. “I told him, ‘Ugh, it seems complicated to me,’ because those have a political strategy,” he said of the Israeli and US offers — the director, Madrid’s El País noted, comes from the left. He qualified it in the same breath: “Of course it is good to have help from whoever, no matter where it comes from, but you have to see what we need most and what we already have capacity covered in. Things may change in the coming days, but at that moment we had capacity covered in rescuers.” He then chose between them. “Between Israel and the United States, I prefer the United States. But not the rescuers, because we have a good team here. It seemed better to me that they send their disaster coordination experts, who have very good technology for organizing satellite information in real time.”

To Blu Radio on August 12 and to the news agency Colprensa three days later, he set out the same four decisions in technical terms, without repeating the political characterization. “There was the offer from El Salvador, from Peru, in which, let’s say, their capacity is, on the one hand, they are not certified under INSARAG rules, and on the other hand, they are medium USAR teams, an area in which we have capacity,” he told Blu Radio. On Israel: “Israel has the response team and I said: no, that is not the one that is needed at this moment, and we stayed with that first requirement.” On the United States: “It was said that we would indeed need something related to specialized groups for the technological handling of information, and that is what the United States offers.”

The Letters That Followed

Pava’s defense is that the letter was a snapshot and that he accepted foreign help the same afternoon. In a video posted to his social media accounts on August 14 and in the Colprensa interview, he said he sent two more letters that day: one at about 3 p.m. accepting the US offer of technological and coordination support, and one at 5:20 p.m. asking that offers of humanitarian aid be accepted. “That letter was issued that day at one twenty in the afternoon and corresponds to the requirement conditions at that moment,” he said in the video, according to Infobae. “It is so that toward three in the afternoon I send a new letter to the Foreign Ministry accepting the help of the United States for those activities.”

Neither of the two follow-up letters has been released, but their contents have been described consistently. Madrid’s El País reported that in a later document Pava made explicit that three field hospitals and several thousand kits of food, household goods and cookware were required, including pet food. Infobae and Colprensa describe the 5:20 p.m. letter in the same terms — hygiene and food kits, and field hospitals to reinforce care in Chocó and Pereira.

He also framed the first letter as a technical instrument rather than a refusal. “There has at no point been any intention to limit access for those groups that can help and contribute assertively,” he said in the video. “When one speaks of authorizing USAR groups or search-and-rescue groups, one is speaking of specialized groups that have been accredited by the country sending them and that are accepted in Colombia.” He said the “disinformation” around the letter carried a “perverse intention: to justify the arrival of the Israeli Army’s USAR teams in Cali,” according to La Silla Vacía.

The México Question

México’s absence from the rescue effort became a story of its own, and Pava has described it two ways four days apart. To Madrid’s El País, on the night he announced he would resign, he said Bula had not initially wanted to receive support from México, which has a left-leaning government. To Colprensa on August 15, he said he had raised México himself and been told there was nothing on the table. “What I knew on Tuesday was the offer from only those four countries,” he said. “I asked whether there were any from México or from Chile, which we have had good experiences with, and they told me there were no offers. By Wednesday I found out that there were indeed offers from other countries, but by then those were other decisions the foreign minister had made.” Asked whether political interests shaped which aid was received, he told Colprensa: “Indeed, they are political decisions taken by the Foreign Ministry. Conflict was generated because aid from some countries was prioritized over others because they are political allies. I was left with many doubts about the México matter, because the foreign minister did not speak of further offers… I was lost.”

México’s public position on August 11 was that it was waiting on Bogotá. President Claudia Sheinbaum said that day that a humanitarian package and a specialized Mexican earthquake-rescue team were ready to go but that Colombia had to approve the deployment. “We are awaiting the formal request from the Government of Colombia, but we are ready for the moment they tell us we can go and help,” she said, according to El País. Chile’s President José Antonio Kast made a similar offer. Bula has said Colombia works with countries “without any ideological or political consideration,” a remark he made at a news conference on August 12, according to Chile’s Emol, citing AFP.

Three separate Mexican groups have figured in the argument. Sheinbaum said on August 13 — by which point Pava had been out of the job for a day — that Colombia had not approved entry for the Mexican Army’s rescue brigade, and that the obstacle was documentary: “They asked for certification from Colombia. They are certified, but now they are asking for another certification,” she said, adding that the brigade “is ready to leave at any moment,” La Opinión reported. The civilian Brigada de Rescate Topos Tlatelolco separately announced it would not travel, citing Colombia’s protocols for coordinating incoming teams. A third group, the independent Topos Aztecas, was already working in Cali, La Silla Vacía reported, noting that neither Topos brigade is México’s official state rescue capability. Pava’s own comment to Madrid’s El País about the Mexican volunteers already on the ground: “The Mexican topos (moles) seem to have come without authorization, and now they have to formalize their entry in order to operate.” Sheinbaum said Colombia had requested food parcels, water and medicine. La Opinión reported that México began an operation on August 12 contemplating 58.5 tons of aid, carried by Mexican Air Force C-130 aircraft, through August 14.

The Transition That Was Called Off

Pava spent 48 hours running the earthquake response for an administration that regarded him as the previous president’s man, and he has described the relationship in those terms. “They distrusted me, and I distrusted them,” he told Madrid’s El País. “In the meetings I was a fly in the milk, because they understand that I am from Petro’s very close circle of friends, not a second-tier official.”

The institutional gap was real on both sides. De la Espriella had ordered the customary transition process with the outgoing Petro administration suspended on July 7, Infobae reported at the time, and the incoming UNGRD director had not been named when the earthquake hit. The agency had no permanent director general and none of the three subdirectors who run its core areas — risk knowledge, risk reduction and disaster management — according to El País of Cali. “The UNGRD has 130 employees on provisional appointments and more than 1,000 contractors; with that team there were only some, because others ended their contracts with the end of the government,” he said. “What I did not count on was that there was no official from the other government, that there was no replacement in the post, and that I would arrive on Monday and this earthquake would occur.” He said the agency had more than $35 billion COP available for the first hours of response. Pava had himself replaced members of the UNGRD’s management team during his two months in the post, and defended those changes when Blu Radio put the criticism to him: “At no point was any sub-directorate left abandoned; it was taken on by career staff with experience and capacity.”

What the New Director Did Next

geologist David Santiago Tamayo Roldán, De la Espriella’s own pick, was sworn in as UNGRD director on the morning of Wednesday, August 12, and the government’s position changed the same day, on Lara’s account: “As soon as the new UNGRD director, Doctor Tamayo, arrived, the first thing he did in the morning with the foreign minister was to certify that international aid would be received, and international rescuers arrived.”

That Wednesday morning the Foreign Ministry welcomed a team of 22 US experts specialized not in carrying out rescue work but in coordinating those who do — the support Pava had recommended requesting from Washington. Hours later Tamayo announced Colombia would accept international rescue teams to relieve Colombian crews as needed. More than 54 hours had passed since the earthquake, Madrid’s El País reported.

The published country lists have not matched. Emol, citing AFP, reported on August 12 that Tamayo named four countries: the United States, Israel, El Salvador and Ecuador. México’s La Jornada carried the same four. La Silla Vacía reported three — Israel, the United States and El Salvador — and Lara also said three: “Rescuers were requested from three countries because no more are needed.” He went on: “Because we also cannot receive 4,000 rescuers, because receiving them, the 4,000 rescuers, becomes an additional problem for us.”

Tamayo’s own list changed again four days later. Presenting the national balance on the evening of August 15, he said the emergency had not exceeded the country’s response capacity, while noting that Colombia had accepted specialized international support to reinforce operations. He said three UN-accredited groups were in the country — from the United States, Ecuador and Israel, a trio that drops El Salvador from the list La Silla Vacía and Lara had given; warned local officials not to authorize groups not properly certified for search and rescue; and questioned that many such groups arrive requesting large quantities of resources without the capacity to operate autonomously, El País of Cali reported. Four days after Pava’s letter, the certification threshold and the capacity finding were the new government’s position as well.

What the Capacity Numbers Show

Colombia has 23 UNGRD-accredited USAR teams and roughly 1,000 trained rescuers drawn from the Colombian Red Cross, the Defensa Civil Colombiana (Colombian Civil Defense), fire departments, the armed forces and the national police‘s specialized Ponalsar search-and-rescue unit, according to El Tiempo, which interviewed Silvia Ballén, head of the UNGRD’s national search-and-rescue program. Colombia’s USAR COL-1 team obtained its international INSARAG classification in 2018, making the country one of four in the hemisphere with a UN-certified search-and-rescue team, El Tiempo reported; a team at the heavy classification averages 64 personnel and can sustain field work for seven to 10 days.

Lara said the constraint in some regions was demand, not supply. “In Quibdó 160 rescuers were left idle, with their arms crossed, because there was nothing left to search for or rescue,” he said, adding that they could be moved to Pereira, Dosquebradas or Cali but that local officials were reporting sufficient coverage: “Both the governor and the mayor, the mayors of these cities, tell us that there are enough rescuers.” La Silla Vacía reported that from Wednesday night several regions began closing the rescue phase, with Quibdó moving to reconstruction, Buenaventura expected to follow, and towns such as Quimbaya, in Quindío, requiring no rescue operations because there were no missing persons.

The View From Outside

Foreign governments spent August 11 asking whom to talk to. China’s ambassador to Colombia, Zhu Jingyang, asked the government to name an official and an official liaison for coordinating international assistance. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed publicly that Colombia had declined rescue personnel: “The Government of Colombia has requested humanitarian aid only in the form of supplies to assist the families affected by the earthquake,” he wrote on his social media accounts. “We have been informed that its rescue teams, medical teams and other emergency bodies are deployed and attending to the situation, so that at this moment they do not require personnel support.” El Salvador said it would send two cargo planes with 100 tons of supplies instead; Emol reported the shipment arrived. Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, made a similar request for a clear and organized response to the offers on the table, Madrid’s El País reported. Laerke also confirmed that the United Nations had received no formal request for assistance from Colombia, while saying the UN system stood ready to provide all the support within its reach, according to Infobae.

The United States was the exception. Washington announced $15.5 million USD in aid for emergency shelter, food, protection and damage assessment, and the State Department said it had activated a Disaster Assistance Response Team on Monday that would arrive in Colombia on Tuesday. Colombia issued a diplomatic note on Tuesday requesting specific support from the international community, short of a formal international appeal. UN Secretary-General António Guterres wrote that day that “the United Nations remains in close contact with the Colombian authorities and supports the government-led response, as requested.” Infobae reported that Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) politicians including former Senator María José Pizarro and Representative Mafe Carrascal were pressing De la Espriella to request UN help. On August 12, Israel’s government said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered an aid delegation dispatched “following a request from Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella,” according to Semana.

Where It Stands

Lara has been summoned to Congress to account for the government’s handling of the emergency. “On Tuesday we were summoned to Congress, we have been summoned, I was summoned to Congress so that we explain this situation,” he said, adding: “Watching how they make politics out of this tragedy — that is scavenger politics, frankly. Let’s drop it now.”

The UNGRD’s latest national balance, with a cutoff of 6:30 p.m. on August 15, records 289 people dead, 3,937 injured, 143 missing and 353 rescued across 15 departments and 448 municipalities, with 117,222 people affected. The death toll was revised down from 294 reported that morning and the missing figure from 320, after the agency cross-checked municipal reports against records held by the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office), the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Legal y Ciencias Forenses (National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences) and relief agencies to remove duplicates. Pava has pointed to that volatility in his own defense, telling Colprensa that on the Monday “I had an assessment far below what exists today,” and that at the time of his meeting with Bula the assessment showed the main sites requiring rescue were covered and that what was missing was coordination support and some technological capability.ungrd-carta-a-minexterior.

Full Translation: The UNGRD Letter to Colombia’s Foreign Ministry

The following is Finance Colombia’s translation of the original Spanish-language letter (radicado UNGRD 2026EE14740, dated August 11, 2026, digitally signed at 1:45 p.m.), sent by the UNGRD to Colombia’s Foreign Ministry:

Bogotá D.C.,
Doctor
Omar Bula Escobar
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Calle 10 No. 5 – 51. Palacio de San Carlos

Subject: Update on national search-and-response capacity in light of the earthquake that occurred in Colombia on August 10, 2026.

Dear Minister:

As part of the response to the emergency caused by the 7.4 Mw-magnitude earthquake recorded on August 10, 2026, with its epicenter in the municipality of San José del Palmar, department of Chocó, the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD) wishes to report on the current status of the response and the capabilities available within national territory.

According to information consolidated by the UNGRD’s National Crisis Room, the coordinating entity for risk management in Colombia, and taking into account that the assessment of damages and needs continues to be updated, different territories have been prioritized, particularly the departments of Chocó, Valle del Cauca and Risaralda, according to the needs identified in each of them.

With regard to search and rescue in collapsed structures, Colombia is carrying out response actions through its specialized national capabilities, with search-and-rescue groups accredited by the Government of Colombia, deployed and coordinated through the National Disaster Risk Management System.

At this hour, the country has more than 25 groups with search-and-rescue capabilities, which are sufficient to meet the operational needs identified in the affected areas. Based on the assessment carried out so far and on the national capabilities available, the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management, through its Search and Rescue Program, considers that, at this stage of the emergency, it is not necessary to request or activate the deployment of specialized international search-and-rescue teams (USAR).

This determination corresponds to the current state of the emergency and is subject to ongoing monitoring of conditions on the ground. Should the emergency evolve, or should the identification of new needs exceed available national capabilities, the Government of Colombia will promptly communicate, through established official channels, its specific requirements for international assistance and, if necessary, may request support solely from international search-and-rescue teams holding the corresponding INSARAG classification.

In this regard, the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management expresses its deep gratitude to the international community for its expressions of solidarity and for the offers of technical, operational and humanitarian support in search and rescue received through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UNGRD.

Colombia maintains active mechanisms of coordination and information exchange with the international community and, in particular, is reporting on the evolution of the response and available capabilities through the corresponding international coordination mechanisms, including the Virtual OSOCC (Virtual On-Site Operations Coordination Centre) platform, within the framework of United Nations mechanisms for coordinating search-and-rescue operations.

Sincerely,

Javier Pava Sánchez
Director General (Acting)

Prepared by: Laura Manuela Bermúdez Caro, contractor, International Cooperation Group – UNGRD
Reviewed by: Nicolás Fernández de Soto, International Cooperation Liaison to the Director General’s Office – UNGRD
Reviewed by: Antonio José López Reales, Coordinator, International Cooperation Group – UNGRD
Reviewed by: Silvia Carolina Ballén Sánchez, Specialized Professional, Management Sub-Directorate – UNGRD
Reviewed by: Johana Andrea Rangel Franco, Specialized Professional, Management Sub-Directorate – UNGRD

Who Is Javier Pava Sánchez?

Javier Pava Sánchez is a geological engineer, a specialist in risk evaluation and disaster prevention and a master’s graduate in territorial planning and population dynamics, according to El Tiempo. Petro appointed him to lead the UNGRD in 2022, and returned him to the agency as acting director through Decree 0611 of June 16, 2026, after the Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office) suspended director Carlos Carrillo over alleged improper political activity. Carrillo said the measure surprised him and rejected it, telling reporters, according to Infobae: “At no time did I campaign, I never promoted any candidate nor did I request electoral support for any campaign.”

Pava was still the UNGRD’s acting director when he signed the August 11 letter, announced that night that he would step down, and was replaced by Tamayo on the morning of August 12. He remains acting manager of the Fondo Adaptación (Adaptation Fund), another agency in the sector for which the new government has not named a replacement, Madrid’s El País reported. Two days after leaving the UNGRD, in the video responding to Lara, he said: “I want to state to Colombia that I have acted responsibly in the exercise of my functions and consistently with the government I represent, which is the government of President Petro.”

Above image: Javier Pava Sánchez speaks during a meeting at UNGRD headquarters in Bogotá. (Photo: UNGRD handout)

The ruling allows the case to move forward, enabling the court to begin examining the substance of the dispute.

The case stems from the controversy surrounding President Gustavo Petro‘s decision to replace Thomas Greg & Sons, which had produced Colombian passports for nearly two decades, with a cooperation agreement between Colombia’s National Printing Office (Imprenta Nacional de Colombia) and Portugal’s Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda.

Following that decision, Colombia’s Office of the Inspector General (Procuraduría General de la Nación, PGN), the country’s oversight agency, argued that the agreement violated public procurement laws and requested that it be declared null and void. The government, meanwhile, has defended both the legality of the contract and its objective of strengthening Colombia’s sovereignty over the production of its travel documents.

The court order, dated June 30 and made public on July 1, 2026, does not determine whether the agreement is legal. Instead, it addresses a procedural issue: the Portuguese company argued that it had never been properly notified of the lawsuit filed by the Inspector General’s Office and requested that all proceedings be declared null.

However, Judge José Élver Muñoz Barrera concluded that although international notification should have been carried out through letters rogatory because the company is domiciled in Lisbon, that procedural issue was cured when the company voluntarily appeared in court through legal counsel.

However, Judge José Élver Muñoz Barrera concluded that although international notification should have been carried out through letters rogatory because the company is domiciled in Lisbon, that procedural issue was cured when the company voluntarily appeared in court through legal counsel.

The ruling cites Article 301 of Colombia’s General Code of Procedure, which states that “any party that appoints legal counsel shall be deemed notified by conclusive conduct of all rulings issued in the respective proceeding,” a legal doctrine that has the same effect as personal service of process.

The judge also rejected claims that due process had been violated.

“At no point have the rights to due process, defense and adversarial proceedings of Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda S.A. been violated,” the ruling states.

The court further noted that it completed all the procedures required for international service of process, including issuing the letters rogatory, translating the documents and coordinating with Colombia’s Foreign Ministry and the Portuguese authorities.

With this decision, the legal proceedings will continue, and the court will now examine whether the passport agreement complies with Colombian law.

The Inspector General’s lawsuit and Portugal’s response

The case originated with a lawsuit filed by the Inspector General’s Office in October 2025 challenging the cooperation and participation agreement signed on July 28 of that year.

The agreement, valued at more than $1.3 trillion COP, was designed to implement a new model for producing, personalizing and issuing Colombian passports.

In its lawsuit, the Inspector General asked the court to declare the contract absolutely null and void and order the Portuguese entity to return all funds it received under the agreement.

According to the oversight agency, the agreement violated Law 1150 of 2007 governing public procurement involving international organizations because Casa da Moeda contributed only 21% of the project’s total value, while Colombian law requires a minimum contribution of 50% for such agreements to be awarded without a public bidding process.

Casa da Moeda, for its part, argued that the lawsuit had never been served in accordance with the applicable international procedures.

Felipe De Vivero Arciniegas, legal counsel for the Portuguese entity, argued that because the company is headquartered in Lisbon, it should have been notified exclusively through letters rogatory in accordance with Colombia’s General Code of Procedure and the Hague Convention. On that basis, he requested that the entire notification process be repeated.

In its latest ruling, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca rejected that request, concluding that the company’s voluntary appearance in the proceedings remedied any potential defect in service of process.

A dispute that began with Colombia’s passport reform

The legal dispute originated with President Gustavo Petro’s decision to replace the passport production model that had been managed for nearly two decades by the private company Thomas Greg & Sons.

Thomas Greg & Sons is also the company that operates the software used to tabulate votes in Colombian elections, a role that has sparked criticism and confrontation with Petro. The president previously wrote:

“This government is not beholden to Thomas and Greg, whose board includes former presidents and former presidential candidates. It is absolutely immoral that members of the oligarchy who has run for high office oversee the company that counts the votes. It is a tremendous mockery of democracy.”

Thomas Greg & Sons produced Colombian passports continuously from 2007 until its contract finally expired after being extended several times.

After Petro declined to continue with Thomas Greg & Sons, the governments of Colombia and Portugal signed a memorandum of understanding on October 2, 2024, to develop a joint system for producing and personalizing passports, travel documents and visa stickers.

At the time, Colombia’s Foreign Ministry said the agreement was based on “the proven capacity, knowledge and experience of Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, S.A. of Portugal,” as well as its international reputation and technical certifications.

The parties subsequently signed the cooperation and participation agreement that is now the subject of litigation on July 28, 2025.

One month later, the Foreign Ministry announced that the new passport model would begin implementation on April 1, 2026, with Colombia’s National Printing Office assuming responsibility for passport personalization through a technology transfer process carried out jointly with Casa da Moeda.

According to the Foreign Ministry, the new model was intended to strengthen “the protection of the sovereignty of Colombian citizens’ personal data.”

Timeline of the legal proceedings

The legal dispute advanced quickly after the agreement was signed.

In October 2025, the Inspector General’s Office filed a lawsuit seeking to have the contract declared absolutely null before Colombia’s administrative courts.

On November 4, 2025, Colombia’s National Printing Office filed a motion asking the court to reconsider and clarify the order admitting the lawsuit. Two days later, the Foreign Ministry’s Revolving Fund also requested clarification and supplementation of that judicial order.

Casa da Moeda later requested that all proceedings be declared null, alleging a violation of due process because it had not been properly notified.

Finally, on June 30, 2026, the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca rejected that request and confirmed that both the notification procedure and the guarantees of due process had been respected.

The litigation now moves into its substantive phase.

For now, the court has issued no ruling on the validity of the agreement or on the legality of the procurement model used to implement Colombia’s new passport system. Those issues will be addressed during the next stages of the proceedings.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese company, in partnership with Colombia’s National Printing Office, continues to produce Colombian passports without interruption, and passports issued under the new system remain legally valid until their expiration dates.

Above photo: Former Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo (left) and then-Portuguese Ambassador to Colombia Catarina de Mendoza during the signing of the memorandum of understanding between Colombia and Portugal, October 2, 2024. Photo courtesy of Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Colombia’s Procuraduría General de la Nación (Inspector General’s Office) has opened a formal preventive inquiry into a troubled government program to build four airports serving some of the country’s most isolated regions, after the Investigative Unit of Caracol Radio (Unidad Investigativa de Caracol Radio) documented that the projects had spent more than 60% of their budget while completing less than 20% of the physical work. The order, made public on June 17, 2026, directs the Aeronáutica Civil (Aerocivil) to account for the program’s schedules, spending and contracting.

The Procuraduría Delegada Segunda para la Vigilancia Preventiva de la Función Pública (Second Delegate Office for Preventive Oversight of Public Function) ordered monitoring of the airport projects prioritized by Aerocivil. In an official letter to the project’s general manager, delegate inspector Samuel Benjamín Arrieta Buelvas cited “possible delays in the execution of the works, differences between the financial execution and the physical progress of the projects, difficulties related to the supply of materials and inputs, observations on the contractual and logistical management of the project, as well as other risks that could affect the completion of the planned works.” The office gave the entity twelve points to answer, among them a detailed accounting of the funds received, committed, disbursed and executed for each airport; the contracts and supply, transport and oversight orders signed; and an explanation of the gap between the money spent and the physical progress recorded.

“It has happened before that I lay the first stone and they never lay another.” — President Gustavo Petro, at the August 2025 launch of the Bahía Solano airport works.

The inquiry follows the investigation by the Investigative Unit of Caracol Radio, also reported by El País and El Colombiano. The terminals were due to be finished in May 2025; none will be ready before President Gustavo Petro’s term ends on August 7, 2026.

The project is part of the program Aeropuertos para los Servicios Aéreos Esenciales (ASAES), created to keep air operations safe and efficient in hard-to-reach areas. The four terminals are in Bahía Solano, in Chocó; Magüí Payán, in Nariño; and Cumaribo and La Primavera, in Vichada — regions where roads are scarce or nonexistent and air travel is often the only permanent link to the rest of the country. Roughly 122,000 people depend on these airports for access to basic services, commerce and mobility.

The numbers at the center of the controversy come from the project’s own contract and oversight documents. The initiative carries an investment of $363.763 billion COP — more than $100 million USD — including a management fee of nearly $23.8 billion COP (about $6.5 million USD) for the state-owned Empresa Nacional Promotora del Desarrollo Territorial (Enterritorio). Aerocivil had disbursed around $214 billion COP, equal to 60% of the budget. Physical progress lagged far behind: Cumaribo was the most advanced at 18.4%, followed by La Primavera at 15.3% and Bahía Solano at just 5.5%, while in Magüí Payán work had not begun at all.

Three state entities share responsibility under an unusual arrangement. Aerocivil is the contracting party and supervisor; Enterritorio — successor to the controversial Fonade — handles overall management, including procurement, supply of materials and oversight; and the Ejército Nacional (National Army) executes the works through its engineering units, a use of the armed forces that Petro has defended since his 2022 campaign as a way to keep civilian contractors from abandoning the sites. Enterritorio, in turn, hired private operators to supply the soldiers with materials, food, spare parts and lodging.

Petro himself has voiced doubt about the works. At the August 2025 event launching the modernization of the José Celestino Mutis airport in Bahía Solano — more than 18 months after the agreement was signed — the president said, “It has happened before that I lay the first stone and they never lay another.” In the months since, the roughly 122,000 residents who stand to benefit have watched the projects stall amid a series of irregularities.

Minutes of the project’s technical-operating committee show problems from the earliest stages: repeated delays in hiring suppliers, late delivery of materials, difficulties getting equipment running and poor coordination among the participating entities. At a meeting on November 22, 2025, the secretary of airport services, Andrés Arboleda, recorded Aerocivil’s concern with Enterritorio’s management — 55% of the resources had been executed while physical progress stood at just 3%. The Army also objected, sending at least 15 letters since late 2023 warning of delays in hiring specialized personnel and shortfalls in the supply and quality certification of materials; in Bahía Solano, it reported, the works still lack all the required environmental permits.

The reporting also raises pointed questions about costs. Citing the contract documents obtained by the Investigative Unit of Caracol Radio, the project paid an intermediation fee of 4.9% plus VAT on billed goods and services — a charge that was neither written into the contract nor approved by the technical-operating committee, yet has already exceeded $4.2 billion COP (about $1.15 million USD) paid to private contractors. Internal documents flagged striking discrepancies between market prices and the amounts billed: wooden stakes billed at $38,000 COP against a real value of $1,000 COP, pavement baskets billed at $900,000 COP versus a calculated $107,000 COP, and a pavement cutter with a market price of $7 million COP that the project sought to bill at $26 million COP. In Bahía Solano alone, Aerocivil acknowledged total possible overruns of about $22 billion COP (around $6 million USD).

Aerocivil rejected budget-increase requests that would have raised the project’s value by roughly $57 billion COP — about 15% of the total. But it paid a price: the number of aerodromes to be upgraded was cut from six to four, dropping Bajo Baudó, in Chocó, and Barrancominas, in Guainía. El Colombiano named several of the private operators involved — DU Brands, Ferretería El Hidrante S.A., the consortia Aeropistas CPG and IRC, and Organización Tiempos de Paz, the last of which it reported is accused of subcontracting and failing to pay local suppliers.

Enterritorio denies any irregularity and attributes much of the delay to external factors. Its acting president, Esmeralda Molina, told the Investigative Unit of Caracol Radio that the complexity of the institutional structure, logistical difficulties, weather conditions and public-order problems had affected the schedule, and defended the experience of the private operators. The entity nonetheless declined to provide specific figures on the disbursements made and the level of compliance achieved by contractors, citing confidentiality and security.

State oversight bodies had already begun to circle before the latest order. The Procuraduría warned in May 2026 that Colombia’s air-transport system faces a “systemic risk” and asked that an investigation into Aerocivil be opened, as El País and Infobae reported. The Contraloría General de la República (Comptroller General’s Office) has separately flagged the ASAES program’s low execution — a weighted physical advance of just 2.31% as of December 2024 — and, in an unrelated audit of an Aerocivil water-treatment contract awarded without environmental permits, identified a presumed fiscal detriment of $5.67 billion COP, according to Portafolio and El Nuevo Siglo.

The episode has renewed scrutiny of convenios interadministrativos (inter-agency agreements) — widely used by public entities subject to state procurement rules to move resources to other state bodies that can then contract more freely, and more opaquely. The accumulated delays have produced four extensions of the agreement; the latest runs to August, though the entities involved already acknowledge that the new deadlines will be hard to meet. The works also drew earlier scrutiny: in November 2025, El País reported that Aerocivil had grounded most of Colombia’s passenger aircraft amid broader oversight failures.

For now, the next administration will inherit a project with the money largely spent but the infrastructure unbuilt — and the communities that were promised the terminals are still waiting. As El País put it, the promised terminals “remain more a project than a reality.”

This article is based on the original investigation by the Investigative Unit of Caracol Radio and the June 17, 2026 order of the Procuraduría General de la Nación, as reported by El País and El Colombiano.

Colombia’s Inspector General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Nación) has decided not to extend the three-month provisional suspension imposed on former Chief of the National Intelligence Agency (DNI), Wilmar Mejía, and Army General Juan Miguel Huertas, as part of a disciplinary investigation into alleged links with dissident factions of the former FARC guerrilla group.

Both officials had been temporarily removed from their positions after being mentioned in chats and documents found on devices belonging to alias “Calarcá,” one of the leaders of these illegal armed groups.

According to a document released by the Inspector General’s Office and published by the digital media La Silla Vacía, the “alleged conduct under investigation corresponds to events that occurred in 2024, when those involved were not yet public officials.” In that regard, the oversight body said it “will continue gathering evidence to determine whether such conduct extended into the period in which they held public office.”

“It is therefore necessary to continue the evidentiary process to establish whether the questioned conduct, in addition to being corroborated, extended into periods when those under investigation held public office,” the Inspector said in a statement.

Under Colombia’s legal framework, the Inspector General’s Office investigates public officials and individuals who manage public resources. If it is established that the alleged acts occurred prior to their appointment, the case would fall exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Attorney General’s Office (Fiscalía General de la Nación), which handles criminal investigations involving private citizens.

Ongoing investigation and background

The initial suspension was ordered on November 27, 2025, by the Inspector General’s Disciplinary Investigation Chamber and confirmed on December 23 of the same year, for a period of three months.

Later, at the end of March 2026, the National Intelligence Agency requested, by public communication, that the oversight body “clarify the scope of the measure,” which led to the recent decision not to extend the suspension, while the disciplinary investigation remains ongoing.

In parallel, the Attorney General’s Office continues investigations into the so-called “Calarcá case.” Attorney General Luz Adriana Camargo said there is “confirmed serious information from computers and cellphones about links between the group and a general and a DNI official,” according to statements reported by Caracol Noticias.

So far, no charges or convictions have been issued in connection with these cases.

Changes at the National Intelligence Agency

Amid the investigation, Wilmar Mejía confirmed his departure from the National Intelligence Agency on April 1, 2026, in an interview with Canal 1. “When the Inspector General’s Office lifted my suspension, I went to sign my reinstatement document and within 15 minutes I submitted my resignation. I am no longer the director of intelligence,” he said.

Following his resignation, President Gustavo Petro appointed him as director of the Financial Information and Analysis Unit (UIAF), the agency responsible for combating money laundering and terrorism financing in Colombia. The decision has drawn criticism, as Mejía remains linked to ongoing investigations by both the Inspector General’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office.

More information about the Colombia´s Intelligence Agency? Read “Colombia Intelligence Chief’s Resignation Exposes Instability and Possible Illegal Group Infiltration” by Finance Colombia.

The lawsuit, submitted to the Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca, demands the “absolute nullity” of the inter-administrative agreement signed on July 18. The contract partners include the Cancillería (Foreign Ministry), Colombia’s Imprenta Nacional (National Mint), and Portugal’s state-owned mint, the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda (INCM).

The Procuraduría, led by Gregorio Eljach Pacheco, argues that the agreement violates Colombian public contracting law. The primary objections cited are the failure to conduct a competitive public bidding process and the direct adjudication of the contract. The oversight body also alleges that the agreement does not meet the legal requirements for such a partnership, stating that the foreign entity, INCM, contributed only 21% of the project’s total value, significantly below the legally mandated 50% minimum financing. The lawsuit requests the court to compel the Portuguese mint to return all funds it has received under the challenged agreement.

In its public communiqué, the Foreign Ministry clarified that it had not, at the time of the release, been formally notified by the court of the lawsuit’s admission. The ministry stressed that the filing represents the beginning of a legal process and is not a verdict against the contract’s legitimacy.

“The existence of a control measure, in this case a lawsuit, in no way prevents the continued execution of the projects, plans, and programs related to the issuance of the new passport model,” the ministry’s statement reads. It further added, “To date, there is no ruling against the Colombian Foreign Ministry that would make it impossible to move forward with the production process of new passports for Colombia.”

The Cancillería has confirmed its intent to mount a full legal defense through its juridical division once formally served. The judicial process will unfold in two stages, beginning at the Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca and potentially advancing to the Council of State, Colombia’s highest court for administrative matters.

President Gustavo Petro has publicly distanced himself from the Procuraduría’s legal action. Commenting on the social media platform X, the president stated, “I completely disagree with the Procurador on this issue. The country has the right for its printing press to be able to make its citizens’ identification documents because intimate data should not be in private hands.”

This legal challenge is the latest chapter in a controversy that began in 2023 when then-Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva suspended a public tender for the passport contract. Leyva cited concerns over a lack of competition, which appeared to favor the long-standing provider, Thomas Greg & Sons, a company that had produced Colombia’s passports for the preceding 17 years. Following that suspension, the government pursued the current direct agreement with the Imprenta Nacional and INCM.

The Procuraduría had previously initiated disciplinary investigations into alleged irregularities surrounding the implementation of the new passport model. These investigations include former Foreign Minister Rosa Villavicencio and her predecessors, Laura Sarabia and Luis Gilberto Murillo, as well as the former chief of staff for the presidency, Alfredo Saade.

The Foreign Ministry has sought to quell public concern over passport availability, stating that contingency plans are in effect and that a pre-existing contract ensures the continuous supply of passport booklets. “We give a piece of tranquility to the public,” the ministry stated, assuring that there “is not, nor will there be, a shortage.”

Headline Photo: Imprenta Nacional de Colombia. Photo credit: Imprenta Nacional de Colombia/Facebook.

The probe stems from a complaint filed with the disciplinary entity, which alleges significant failures in the execution of the contract by the Imprenta Nacional. According to the Procuraduría, these alleged breaches were documented by contract supervisors and in communications between the two government bodies.

The core of the issue appears to be a failure by the contractor to meet production and delivery obligations for the identification documents. The complaint suggests this situation compelled the Imprenta Nacional to create a contingency plan to expedite the printing and delivery of a backlog of pending documents. This plan was reportedly unsuccessful, leading to a breach of contract that has negatively impacted foreign residents in Colombia who rely on the credentials for their legal status and daily activities.

The preliminary inquiry is an initial investigative phase. Its objective, as stated by the Procuraduría, is to identify the individuals potentially responsible for any disciplinary offense fully. During this stage, investigators will gather evidence to define the specific actions under scrutiny and to determine if those actions constitute disciplinary violations that warrant formal charges.

This investigation into the foreign residency cards is separate from, but adds to, the ongoing scrutiny of contracts held by the Imprenta Nacional, which has also been at the center of a national controversy regarding the production of Colombian passports. To date, neither Migración Colombia nor the Imprenta Nacional has issued a formal public statement responding to this specific preliminary inquiry.

Headline photo: Colombian cédula. (Credit: Migración Colombia)