On Sunday 31 May 2026, nearly 24 million Colombians voted in the presidential first round. Abelardo de la Espriella obtained 43.74% of votes cast; Iván Cepeda, of the Pacto Histórico, came second with 40.90%. That same evening, President Petro alleged the illicit addition of 885,400 voter IDs to the electoral register, modification of the electoral software on 26 May, and atypical behaviour at 5,300 polling stations. The mainstream press responded within 48 hours and archived the allegations.
The question nobody asked was the only one that mattered. Who has the institutional capacity to verify whether Petro is lying or telling the truth, and why does that capacity not exist?
The Architecture of the Unverifiable
The logistics of the 31 May presidential elections were awarded through a contract worth 2.1 trillion pesos (526 million dollars) to the joint venture led by Thomas Greg & Sons, the only firm to submit a bid. The company has won electoral contracts from the Registraduría in every cycle since 2010, several through expedited processes under limited oversight. The concentration of ballot printing, biometric authentication, data transmission and preliminary count publication in a single private provider, without real competition, in the process that determines who governs a country of 52 million people, is a structural vulnerability that no Colombian institution has seen fit to correct.
In 2026, the Registraduría awarded the entire electoral logistics contract to a joint venture led by Thomas Greg & Sons, the sole bidder, for 2.1 trillion pesos (526 million dollars). The company has held Registraduría contracts since 2010, several awarded through expedited processes under limited independent oversight. (Colombia Political Economy, Substack; Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil)
The company controlling this logistics operation is not an anonymous firm. Thomas Greg & Sons belongs to brothers Fernando, Camilo and Felipe Bautista, heirs of a business their father Gregorio founded in Bogotá in 1960. Fernando and Camilo are convicted criminals under United States law. In the late 1980s, they confessed and served prison sentences for defrauding 25 American banks through false Colombian coffee shipments. Camilo was also convicted for presenting fraudulent financial statements to obtain a 22-million-dollar credit from the Arab Banking Corporation, a financial institution then controlled by Gaddafi’s Libyan regime. He was sentenced to nine years in federal prison and served fewer than three. Investigative journalist Gonzalo Guillén put it plainly: fraud is their speciality, and they are the ones processing the electoral results. Article 8, Paragraph 3 of Law 80 of 1993, as amended by Law 2160 of 2021, prohibits members of joint ventures or consortiums with criminal sanctions from contracting with the Colombian state. Thomas Greg & Sons has been winning billion-peso state contracts in Colombia for over a decade. The company is registered in Guernsey, a tax haven in the English Channel. Its former board members include ex-presidents Andrés Pastrana and Juan Manuel Santos.
The system then rests on a chain of procedures that, in appearance, guarantee transparency but in practice produce exactly the opacity that benefits those who profit from it. The E-14 forms are produced in three copies with distinct purposes. One goes to telephone transmission; another is scanned and published on the Registraduría’s website; the third is sealed with the physical ballots until the official count. The preliminary tally broadcast on election night carries no legal weight. The definitive result is produced by counting commissions of judges and notaries whose independence from political power has never been seriously tested.
The Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica published a report in May 2026 identifying three axes of vulnerability in Colombia’s electoral system. The reliability of the counting software, the possible manipulation of polling station jurors, and the opacity of the results transmission process. The report does not conclude that fraud occurred.
It concludes that the system has structural flaws preventing the question from being answered with certainty. A system unable to demonstrate its own integrity is not a transparent system; it is a system that operates on faith.
The Electoral Observation Mission received 319 reports of alleged irregularities during the day. Behind that figure lies a concrete geography. In El Banco, Magdalena, a citizen was physically assaulted while documenting a suspected vote-buying scheme. In Popayán, four people were caught red-handed by security cameras handing out cash and collecting identity cards. In El Espinal, Tolima, Education Minister Daniel Rojas publicly denounced the distribution of meal vouchers in exchange for votes, allegedly orchestrated from a state technical training institution.
In Coyaima, also in Tolima, the Attorney General opened an investigation into alleged pressure by an ELN armed structure to vote for a specific candidate. By the close of day, authorities reported the seizure of nearly one billion pesos in cash across five operations; for the March legislative elections, that figure had exceeded 3.7 billion.
Vote-buying is not an anomaly of the Colombian electoral system. It is one of its regular operating mechanisms, documented in every electoral cycle, without any government having taken measures to dismantle it.
The Double Standard
For years, Colombia’s leading media organisations documented in detail the allegations of electoral fraud in Venezuela, the irregularities in Nicaragua, and the legitimacy crisis that followed Mexico’s 2006 elections, when López Obrador lost by 0.56% and alleged massive fraud. Coverage was extensive, sources were cited generously, and scepticism towards official results was presented as healthy democratic practice. Nobody considered it necessary to clarify that questioning tight electoral results was, in itself, an act of disinformation.
On 31 May 2026, faced with the Colombian president’s allegations, those same media organisations activated their fact-checking machinery within hours and concluded that the accusations were misleading. The shift was not editorial; it was mechanical. What changed was not the quality of the allegations but the political direction of the contested result. The standard of proof is not the same when the left wins as when the left loses, and this asymmetry requires no conspiracy; it merely requires that journalists work for companies whose owners have something concrete at stake.
Three families control 57% of television, radio and the internet in Colombia. The Sarmiento Angulo organisation owns El Tiempo and City TV, but also Grupo Aval, Porvenir and Corficolombiana. The Ardila Lülle organisation controls RCN Radio and Canal RCN, and also owns Postobón, several sugar mills and plastic and beer industries. Grupo Santo Domingo holds Caracol Televisión and has interests in beverages, hospitality and international media.
These are not communications companies with secondary business interests. They are industrial and financial conglomerates that happen to own, among their assets, media outlets. The distinction is not semantic.
A left-wing government that applies tax reforms on large fortunes or revises public infrastructure contracts is not an abstract threat to these groups; it is an accountable threat, measurable in percentage points of profitability. That their media should cover that same government’s electoral allegations with the most demanding verification standard is not editorial bias; it is a logical consequence of the ownership structure. Asking these outlets for objectivity on an electoral result that threatens their balance sheets is asking a judge to rule in their own case.
All indications suggest that Iván Cepeda calculated exactly that. He spent the night of 31 May contesting the preliminary count, and the following day declared that his team had found no evidence of irregularities sufficient to speak of fraud. That was not an act of honesty; it was the calculation of a candidate heading to a second round who cannot afford the label of sore loser that media outlets stand ready to attach within hours.
The most effective censorship is not the kind that forbids speaking. It is the kind that makes speaking too costly.
What an Election Cannot Change
Gustavo Petro came to the presidency in 2022 with a promise of structural change. Four years later, the concentration of media ownership is unchanged, the structure of land tenure is unchanged, and the financial groups dominating credit, pensions and infrastructure are unchanged. The government introduced reforms and stretched its relations with Congress and the Constitutional Court to their limits. But it did not transform the material conditions that allow an economic minority to control the opinion-forming instruments of a political majority.
This is not an anomaly of the Petro era; it is a twenty-year pattern. Two terms of Álvaro Uribe, two of Juan Manuel Santos, one of Iván Duque. None altered the structure of media ownership. None changed the concentration of credit in the same groups’ hands. None significantly redistributed land. Each change of government was presented as a fresh start; for those for whom it was essential that it not be one, none was.
Colombia’s electoral cycle is not a mechanism of change. It is a mechanism for periodically renewing the status quo’s legitimacy.
What the 2026 elections reveal is not whether fraud occurred at 5,300 polling stations; it is that the Colombian political system has a remarkable capacity to absorb change without transforming itself. The Petro experiment demonstrated the limits of what a presidency can modify when verification institutions, opinion-forming media and the economic groups that own them function as an integrated system of resistance.
There was no conspiracy; there was architecture.
The Vote as Consensual Fiction
The contemporary Colombian media system continues to be dominated by a handful of economic conglomerates, reproducing historical dynamics of ownership concentration and journalistic instrumentalisation that have defined the development of the country’s media. (García Ramírez and Zambrano Ayala, “The Colombian Media System in the 21st Century: new media, old problems”, Universidad del Rosario, 2025)
In Colombia, what elections produce is not a decision about power; it is a periodic legitimation of those already exercising it, or those prepared to exercise it within the margins power tolerates. The distinction matters. A democracy where voting decides implies that results can change the structure. A democracy where voting legitimises implies that the structure endures and results adjust to it. Colombia has practised the latter variant under the formal procedures of the former for decades.
What is at stake on 21 June 2026 is not whether Colombia will have a left-wing or right-wing government. It is whether the experiment of having a government that does not entirely comply with dominant economic conglomerates will be renewed or shelved. The answer the ballot boxes give will be presented as the popular will, whatever it may be. Media outlets will broadcast it in real time. International observers will sign their reports. And if the result favours the status quo, nobody will need to prove that fraud occurred for the fraud to have worked.
The device requires no mass falsification. It requires sufficient opacity for doubt to remain unresolvable, a press that frames that doubt as disinformation, verification institutions in no hurry to conclude, and an opposition that learns that questioning the system costs more than accepting its results. Colombia has been perfecting this mechanism for decades. 31 May 2026 was, in that sense, a demonstration of normal operation…
The speed of the institutional response is precisely the most suspicious element, not the most reassuring. Verifying 5,300 atypical polling stations, cross-referencing the electoral register with inscription records, auditing the software logs from 26 May takes weeks, not hours.
When the Registraduría and the Attorney General declare within 48 hours that everything is perfect, they are not describing the result of a verification. They are describing an institutional position.
The Registraduría has a direct structural interest in defending the integrity of the process it administers; any admission of failure is an admission of its own responsibility. And the Attorney General’s office is the same institution that attempted to remove Petro from the mayoralty of Bogotá in 2013 through a mechanism declared unconstitutional by the Inter-American Court.
It is not a neutral arbiter.
What the article argues is precisely that. The problem is not whether Petro is right or not. The problem is that the institutions called upon to verify are the same ones with an interest in not verifying. A system that cannot be independently audited cannot demonstrate its own integrity, even if all its officials swear it works perfectly.
Institutional unanimity is not proof of transparency. Sometimes it is exactly the opposite.
G.S.
Sources
- Así fue como Thomas Greg & Sons logró el contrato electoral para el 2026
- Los fraudes de Camilo Bautista
- Who are the Bautista brothers
- Colombian Electoral System. Fraud Allegations and Institutional Context
- Closing Report, Presidential Elections First Round 2026
- Five arrests for suspected vote-buying
- Arrests in Popayán for suspected vote-buying
- Citizen assaulted while reporting alleged vote-trafficking
- Colombia 2026 Presidential Elections LIVE
- The Colombian Media System in the 21st Century: new media, old problems
- The 410 owners of Colombia’s main media outlets
- Why Petro is casting doubts about the 2026 elections’ transparency
- Elections 2026: what to believe about electoral fraud
- García Ramírez, M. and Zambrano Ayala, W. *The Colombian Media System in the 21st Century: new media, old problems*. Universidad del Rosario, 2025.
