What Colombia calls corruption is not a system anomaly. It is the system’s operating logic under conditions of low opacity. What gets named a scandal is, most of the time, the visibility accident of mechanisms that function normally when no one is watching. The Attorney General’s office describes criminal organisations; researchers call it state capture. The difference between the two diagnoses is not semantic but strategic. One assumes the problem can be arrested, the other recognises that the problem is the architecture. The same families who built the state are the ones who exploit it, and what they pass down is not merely wealth but structured access to public funds.
Patrimonialism as a System
Political scientist Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín describes a political order in which the formal separation between public and private was never completed. “Patrimonialism” is the regime in which state power is not exercised in the name of an abstract public interest but as a direct extension of the interests of those who control it. This is not about the wealthy corrupting officials; it is about the wealthy being, frequently, the officials themselves, their relatives, or their long-term financiers. The distinction between family patrimony and the public budget becomes, in that context, a matter of accounting convenience. Colombia’s elites did not capture the state at some precise historical moment. They never let go of it.
This model does not require permanent illegality to reproduce itself. It requires enabling norms, institutions that do not audit it, and media that do not name it. It functions through public contracts awarded to the right families’ companies, subsidies that reach those who already have, and tax frameworks that allow fortunes to be transferred abroad without visible consequences. What Garay Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarán document in the Colombian case is that the boundary between legal and illegal actors is a permanent transition zone where the same agent can operate in both registers depending on circumstance and opportunity.
The Public Treasury as a Source of Accumulation
State contracts are, systematically, instruments for transferring wealth towards families that already control political access, and this function has operated without interruption under governments of every ideological denomination. The most voluminous case, and the most suppressed, is Reficar, the Cartagena Refinery. Conceived under Uribe’s first government and executed under Santos, its expansion ended up costing 8.326 billion dollars against an initial budget of 3.777 billion. The Comptroller General translated that overrun into a fiscal damage of 17 trillion Colombian pesos, and investigated thirty-eight directors of the refinery and of Ecopetrol, the state oil company that controls it, among them ten current or former ministers.
In June 2018, the Comptroller exonerated all Santos government officials still under investigation. Two former managing directors received sentences of five years and four months. Of the framework that made the plunder possible, nothing. The same logic operated with Odebrecht. The consortium awarded Colombia’s Route of the Sun Section II contract included Corficolombiana, a subsidiary of Sarmiento Angulo’s Grupo Aval. Six and a half million dollars were paid to the former Deputy Minister of Transport and 4.6 million via Senator Bula. One Aval executive was convicted, José Elías Melo, to eleven years. Sarmiento Angulo father and son faced no local conviction. The US Securities and Exchange Commission obtained an 80-million-dollar settlement in 2023.
The UNGRD scandal deserves its place in this catalogue not for its scale but for what it reveals. That a government that came to power in 2022 with an explicit discourse of rupture should have operated, according to the Attorney General, under the same contracts-for-votes logic that defined previous administrations, is not an accidental irony. It is proof that the problem is not ideological but architectural. Colombian corruption has no political colour. It has structure.
The Comptroller General identified in the Reficar case a fiscal damage of 17 trillion Colombian pesos under the Uribe and Santos governments; no former minister or political leader was convicted. The Attorney General’s indictment of 7 April 2026 establishes that the UNGRD scheme committed an additional 612.237 billion pesos in public contracts to purchase votes in Congress, under the Petro government.
The Legal and the Illegal as Communicating Vessels
There is no “clean” elite separate from a “narco” elite in the Colombian model. There is a continuum of accumulation in which capital of illegal origin integrates into legitimate patrimony through mechanisms that, over time, cease to appear problematic because time itself operates as a launderer. The best-documented expression of this integration is the parapolítica, the phenomenon that led to the conviction of more than sixty Colombian parliamentarians for their alliances with the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, paramilitary groups that operated with private funding from the 1980s through to the mid-2000s. The judicial investigation never traced back to the actual beneficiaries of the territorial ordering that paramilitarism produced.
The landowners who consolidated holdings in regions emptied by forced displacement, the agro-industrialists who extended their crops over parcels that cost lives. Parliamentarians were convicted; their financiers remained beyond the reach of justice. The real estate and agribusiness sectors are the two historical channels of that subsequent integration. The former absorbs capital without complex invoicing; the latter enables the territorial control that replaces what paramilitarism previously exercised. What Garay Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarán call the “co-opted reconfiguration of the state” is the process by which criminal organisations do not replace the state but inhabit it, using its institutions as tools of the business.
The Pandora Papers and the Geography of Hidden Wealth
This structural porosity requires, in order to function at patrimonial scale, a storage system beyond the reach of national states. The Pandora Papers, published in October 2021 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), offer the most comprehensive cartography of that system. The leak, nearly 12 million documents from 14 firms specialising in the creation of companies in tax havens (jurisdictions with minimal taxation and banking secrecy that allow the true owner of assets to be concealed), was reviewed in Colombia by the El Espectador-CONNECTAS alliance, which identified 588 Colombian natural and legal persons as beneficial owners of offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, and Delaware.
The cartography of hidden wealth reproduced the map of visible power. The Gilinski family appears with more than 33 offshore companies, with Jaime as beneficial owner of at least 19 and Isaac of 14 others. Fuad Char, senator and patriarch of the Barranquilla clan, appears in 10 of his family’s 13 companies. Carlos Solarte, head of the family that owns CASS Constructores, a habitual state contractor, appears in four companies in tax havens. Former presidents Gaviria and Pastrana appear as directors or beneficiaries of Panamanian companies. Whether these movements are or are not illegal in strict law is the least interesting question. The one that matters is why the Colombian state has facilitated, for decades, the accumulation of fortunes by its elites beyond any scrutiny.
The Pandora Papers, published by the ICIJ in October 2021 and reviewed in Colombia by the El Espectador-CONNECTAS alliance, identified 588 Colombian natural and legal persons as beneficial owners of offshore companies, among them two former presidents, regional political clans, state contractors, and media owners, with structures registered principally in the British Virgin Islands and Panama.
Congress, the Media, and the Attorney General as an Infrastructure of Impunity
The question that closes any analysis of oligarchic enrichment is not how it is built but how it is sustained. The answer rests on three pillars that mutually reinforce each other in Colombia. The first is Congress, where capture is not an event but a permanent state. The Fundación Paz y Reconciliación (Pares) documented that of the 3,144 candidates registered for the 2026 legislative elections, at least 195 arrived at the ballot box with serious pending judicial, disciplinary, or fiscal proceedings. Several of the parliamentarians implicated in the UNGRD case won seats with precautionary measures already in force against them. Electoral impunity is not a side-effect of the system. It is its operating condition.
The second pillar is media concentration. Four groups, Ardila Lülle, Sarmiento Angulo, Santo Domingo, and Gilinski, control more than 60% of Colombia’s media across television, radio, print, and online. Sarmiento Angulo, whose Grupo Aval paid 80 million dollars to the SEC over Odebrecht, owns El Tiempo. Santo Domingo owns Canal Caracol, El Espectador, and Blu Radio. Gilinski, with more than 33 offshore companies in the Pandora Papers, owns Semana, El Heraldo, and El País de Cali. In April 2026, La Silla Vacía revealed that Gilinski and Publicaciones Semana funded Vicky Dávila’s presidential campaign, former editor of that same magazine, with 2.1 billion pesos; Dávila then drew a further 2 billion from Banco Sudameris, also Gilinski-owned. The circuit is visible because it no longer needs to hide.
The third pillar is the Attorney General’s office. The institution has demonstrated a consistent capacity to convict intermediate executors and an equally consistent incapacity to reach the economic architects of corruption. The most revealing case is that of Néstor Humberto Martínez, legal adviser to Corficolombiana before being appointed Attorney General by Santos in 2016. From that office he directed the Colombian Odebrecht investigation and, in March 2021, shelved the case against Luis Carlos Sarmiento Gutiérrez, president of Grupo Aval, concluding there were no grounds for investigation. Martínez also shelved the inquiry into the death of Jorge Enrique Pizano, an auditor who had named him before dying in unexplained circumstances.
The Attorney General’s office is not corrupt in the episodic sense of an institution that takes bribes case by case. It is structurally dependent on the very powers it is supposed to oversee, given that the Attorney General is elected by the Supreme Court from a shortlist submitted by the President of the Republic. The result is not episodic corruption but something more efficient, systemic selectivity. The president of Corficolombiana is convicted; Sarmiento Angulo goes untouched. Two former Reficar managing directors are prosecuted; the ministers are exonerated. The pattern is so consistent that it no longer resembles a failure. It resembles a design.
What makes the 2026 electoral cycle singular is not that the oligarchy finances candidates or that the Attorney General never reaches the architects of the plunder. That is the norm. What is singular is the transparency with which the whole operates. Transparencia por Colombia warned on 29 April 2026 that nine of fourteen presidential campaigns had not reported income to the National Electoral Council less than a month before the first round, and that 66% of congressional candidates had also failed that obligation throughout the campaign. The law requires it. The consequence is none. The resources have no known origin, the media charged with investigating them belong to those who supply them, and the justice apparatus was built never to reach the top floor…
G.S.
Sources
- Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and Luis Jorge Garay Salamanca. El gran libro de la corrupción en Colombia. Debate, 2018
- Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín. El orangután con sacoleva. Cien años de democracia y represión en Colombia. Debate/IEPRI, 2014
- Pandora Papers Colombia. CONNECTAS/El Espectador, 2021
- Colombians named in the Pandora Papers. El Espectador, October 2021
- Semana and Gilinski funded Vicky Dávila’s campaign. La Silla Vacía, April 2026
- Grupo Aval pays for its corruption. La Silla Vacía, August 2023
- Odebrecht’s men in Colombia. Cuestión Pública
- Reficar: the embezzlement where impunity prevailed. Razón Pública
- Trial of ex-ministers Bonilla and Velasco in the UNGRD case. El País, April 2026
- Supreme Court recognises UNGRD and Invías as victims. Infobae Colombia, April 2026
- Congressional candidates 2026 with pending legal proceedings. Infobae Colombia, February 2026
- Alert over presidential campaign financing 2026. Transparencia por Colombia, April 2026
- Congressional financing report 2026. Transparencia por Colombia, March 2026
