The Colombia Briefing | 10th August

🗞️ Colombia has a new president: Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in on Friday afternoon in the city of Cali.

The ceremony was attended by ten heads of state, two vice-presidents, and 15 foreign ministers, many of whom are high-profile allies of the regional right wing, a movement to which the new president belongs. Argentina’s president Javier Milei flew in, as did Chile’s Antonio Kast and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa.

Twelve countries in the Americas are now run by right-wing governments, with several governed by ultra-right-wing political outsiders like Milei and De la Espriella himself.

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Peru’s Keiko Fujimori and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — on whom much of the new president’s political campaign was modelled — were notably absent. The United States also refused to send a high-level official, with neither President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio attending: instead the administration sent judicial, anti-narcotics, and security officials. No members of Colombia’s political opposition were present at the ceremony.

However, controversial FIFA chief Gianni Infantino did attend the ceremony. Infantino is close to several international figures on the political right, including US President Donald Trump, who last month recommended him for the job of UN secretary-general.

De la Espriella, Colombia’s 43rd president, was sworn in at an amphitheatre in Cali in front of Congress, then flew to the Pichincha military barracks in a helicopter, where he delivered his inauguration speech.

Repeating his campaign rhetoric of the ‘Miracle Homeland’ and the ‘Era of the Tiger’, the speech laid out priorities and set the tone for the next four years. He announced that ‘the time has come to restore order, freedom and authority,’ proposing moral, institutional, and economic ‘regeneration’ of Colombia.

De la Espriella repeated his promise of an ‘iron fist’ security approach, abandoning negotiations with armed groups and remilitarising strategy, as well as returning to aerial fumigation to eradicate coca crops and building mega-prisons. ‘The Tiger has arrived, and you will find out just how hard he bites when it comes to defending the Colombian people’, he said.

The new president paid tribute to Miguel Uribe Turbay, a presidential hopeful and senator assassinated last year, as well as former president Álvaro Uribe, particularly regarding his security achievements. He cited former US president Thomas Jefferson and former UK prime minister Winston Churchill, quoting the latter’s 1940 address to Parliament: ‘Victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.’

The struggle against corruption was another key theme of the speech, and De la Espriella declared an immediate freeze on public spending, along with plans to reform taxation systems and abolish the wealth tax. He also announced his plans to achieve food sovereignty and formalise employment for those in the informal sector.

The new president also made announcements on energy, pledging to revive Colombia’s oil and gas sectors, calling energy ‘a matter of national sovereignty’, though his proposal has, controversially, included fracking.

Though Colombia is, according to the 1991 Constitution, a secular state, religion played an unusually prominent role both in the inauguration ceremony and speech. Addresses were given by an evangelical and a Catholic priest, both of whom followed an address by a rabbi (representing the 0.01% of Colombia’s population who practice Judaism) who ended his blessing by saying, ‘Long live Colombia and long live Israel’.

Despite campaign pledges to ‘disembowel the left’ and refusals to give interviews to critical outlets, De la Espriella said in his speech that under his presidency, ‘no one will be persecuted for thinking differently’.

The new president closed his address with his trademark military salute, saying, ‘Standing firm for the homeland, long live Christ the King’.

🗞️ Also on Friday, Gustavo Petro gave his last speech as president, making only a short address in Bogotá in which he declared ‘freedom and life forever’ and ‘long live a free Colombia.’

On the same day, left-wing politician Iván Cepeda, who lost the second round of the presidential election by 1%, gave a speech in Barranquilla. Cepeda promised a responsible political opposition, defending democracy and sovereignty. He thanked Petro and the Colombian people for the historic changes the outgoing government made in Colombia, including the minimum wage increase and the agrarian, labour, and pension reforms.

Cepeda promised that transformation and progress would continue despite his political movement now being in opposition, saying ‘we will fight to the limits and beyond to preserve the gains we have achieved’. He vowed to use the full force of the party in Congress, where the Pacto Histórico holds 26 of the 103 seats in the Senate and 42 of 183 in the House of Representatives.

“We will not respond to hatred with hatred, nor to authoritarianism with violence, but with the organised strength of the people. We will mobilise, but, if the opportunity arises, we will be open to dialogue and national agreement,” he said to a crowd who chanted ‘Resistance’ in response.

Cepeda announced a plan to win local power, focussed on next year’s regional elections, calling the Pacto Histórico ‘a government in construction, which will return in a few years to continue the path of social transformation.’

He warned of the new president’s close ties to the United States, and of submission to US interests via policies like tariffs, the Shield of the Americas, and the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — the US’s hemispheric security policy. Cepeda also warned of De la Espriella’s ties to Colombia’s paramilitaries and drug traffickers, as well as local clans, including the Chars, a political dynasty on the Caribbean coast.

Both Petro and Cepeda will play leading roles in the political opposition of the next four years.

🗞️ In the hours after his inauguration, the new president immediately began to dismantle the outgoing government’s negotiation policies, transferring a group of leaders who had been involved in peace talks to maximum-security prisons, ending the benefits granted to them for participating in ‘Total Peace’ talks.

This move, Abelardo de la Espriella’s first act in government, signals a definitive end to the tactics and aims of the former administration’s ‘Total Peace’ approach. Among the one hundred transfers were various armed group commanders and criminal bosses who had been involved in negotiations with the government towards urban peace in Medellín, Antioquia. The mayor of Medellín, Federico Gutiérrez, commented ‘The party is over for the criminals’.

🗞️ During his political campaign, Abelardo de la Espriella promised to replace Gustavo Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ policy with one of ‘total war’: what followed the day of the inauguration was indeed an explosion of violence across the country. The Ombudsman warned of clashes, sieges, and explosive attacks over the weekend in Cauca and Nariño, as well as events in nine other departments.

On Sunday, via X, the president announced the killing of several members of armed groups in Meta and Antioquia as a result of military operations, with the deaths including leaders of the Estado Mayor Central FARC dissidence and the Clan del Golfo group. Weapons and explosives were also seized, according to the announcement. The President’s tweet said, ‘there will be no truce with those who attack Colombia’.

Meanwhile, there were also severe and ongoing clashes in the rural area of El Tambo, Cauca, between the national army and the Carlos Patiño Front — part of a FARC dissident group.

Civilians were trapped in their homes and forced to seek shelter amid hours of intense combat and detonation of explosives. Residents told local outlet El País that the arrival of the army triggered the clash with members of dissident groups that maintain a presence in El Tambo.

🗞️ Also within hours of his swearing-in, De la Espriella recognised Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara, reversing his predecessor’s policy on the dispute and withdrawing recognition of the independent state staking a claim to that land.

Since Spain’s withdrawal in 1975, Morocco has controlled most of the Western Sahara and in 2007 proposed to the UN that the territory become an autonomous region under Moroccan sovereignty. An indigenous movement called the Polisario Front rejects Morocco’s claim, calling for a referendum on self-determination and independence for the ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR)’.

With this new endorsement, Colombia joins a list of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. However, countries including Algeria, Mexico, Iran, and Nigeria recognise the SADR’s right to independence, and the African Union recognises the SADR as a member state.

The Foreign Ministry’s announcement said that the decision was taken in the hope of ‘revitalising Colombia’s relationship with Morocco’ and creating closer bilateral ties which will ‘fully serve the interests of the Colombian people.’

🗞️ On Friday, the day of the inauguration, US President Donald Trump announced a one-billion-dollar support package for Colombia, focussed on two areas: the dismantling of so-called ‘narco-terrorist’ organisations; and ‘unlocking economic opportunity’ by deepening economic ties.

According to a US State Department communiqué entitled ‘A New Era in U.S.-Colombia Relations ‘, ‘the Trump Administration looks forward to working closely with the new administration to ensure security and prosperity for the United States, Colombia, and our hemisphere’.

This level of funding from the US is the highest since ‘Plan Colombia’ in the early 2000s — a controversial security alliance between the US and Colombia during the civil conflict, which has been linked to serious war crimes, including the ‘false positives’ killings.

🗞️ At 7:30 this morning, a powerful earthquake — 7.4 on the Richter scale — has shaken Colombia: it is the largest earthquake in the country in the last decade, according to the country’s geological service.

Its epicentre was near the Pacific coast in the department of Chocó, but it was felt in cities as far as Medellín, Bogotá, and Manizales: reports continue to emerge, but (at time of publication) at least 130 people have been killed and around 600 injured, mainly in the departments of Risaralda and Valle del Cauca.

In other seismic news, the Puracé volcano has triggered an orange alert — signalling the possibility of eruption following intensified earthquake activity and expulsion of gas and ash in recent weeks. These are the highest levels of activity registered at this volcano since monitoring began in 1993.