On 8 June 2026, thirteen days before the presidential runoff, the two candidates contesting the Casa de Nariño, seat of the Colombian presidency, accused each other, on the same social network and within a few hours of one another, of preparing an autoatentado, a staged attack against the candidate himself intended to influence the outcome of an election. Neither produced any public evidence. Both nonetheless announced they would refer the matter to the Fiscalía General de la Nación, Colombia’s attorney general’s office. The episode unfolded in the middle of the most violent presidential campaign in eight years, according to the Fundación Ideas para la Paz and the Misión de Observación Electoral, MOE, the independent body tasked with monitoring the integrity of Colombian elections. What follows reconstructs that exchange, the precedent that gives it its real weight, and the distance separating it from the territory where electoral threat needs no social media post to occur.
The communiqué of Monday 8 June
Early in the afternoon, Iván Cepeda, candidate of the Pacto Histórico, the left wing governing coalition in power since 2022, published a communiqué dated from Bogotá on his X account. In it he claimed to have received, through various channels, information indicating that the campaign of Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer from the ultraconservative movement Defensores de la Patria, was plotting a controlled autoatentado aimed at influencing the final result of the election. Cepeda announced he would bring the matter to the attention of the Fiscalía and would pass the same information to the Unidad Nacional de Protección, the state body that assigns security details to threatened public figures, so that it could reinforce, if necessary, the protection of De la Espriella and his running mate, José Manuel Restrepo. As far as the public record of this runoff shows, it is the first time a candidate has requested official protection against an act that, by his own account, had not yet occurred.
The reply came hours later, also on X. De la Espriella flatly denied the accusation and hit back in the same register. He asked Cepeda whether his desperation was showing, described him as anxious and out of control, and claimed his own campaign had received information about an equivalent plan, this time attributed to the senator. He closed the communiqué by suggesting Cepeda had switched strategy at the last minute, abandoning the idea of staging his own attack in order to blame him instead.
Between January 2025 and April 2026, the Misión de Observación Electoral recorded 565 acts of violence against political leaders in Colombia, with a 6.3% increase in cases directed specifically against political actors compared with the previous electoral cycle. (MOE, 2026 electoral calendar monitoring report)
The noise around the communiqué
The exchange of accusations did not happen in a vacuum. That same week, pollster Invamer had to publicly deny an image circulating on social media with fabricated poll results showing Cepeda as the winner. Days earlier, an artificial intelligence generated photograph had circulated showing Colombian national football team players making a gesture of support for De la Espriella, also debunked under the ElFiltro fact checking label. Cepeda, for his part, had to release a medical certificate to deny rumours about his health days before the campaign closed.
A report by the international organisation IDEA Internacional, published in May 2026, had anticipated this scenario, warning that the sophistication of Colombian electoral disinformation no longer depends solely on the adoption of artificial intelligence, but also on the participation of content creators, the spread of hate speech, and forms of digital political violence directed specifically at women. Attorney general Gregorio Eljach put it more bluntly during the eighth session of Plan Democracia, the interinstitutional electoral monitoring body, stating that disinformation had become the principal threat to the smooth running of the 21 June vote.
The precedent no communiqué names
On 7 June 2025, almost exactly one year before the exchange of communiqués between Cepeda and De la Espriella, senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a presidential pre-candidate for the right wing Centro Democrático party, was shot three times during a campaign event in El Golfito park, in the Modelia neighbourhood, west of Bogotá. The attacker, a fifteen year old boy captured minutes later, shot him in the back amid the crowd listening to him. Uribe Turbay spent more than two months in intensive care at the Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá and died on 11 August 2025, aged 39, after suffering a further brain haemorrhage.
The Fiscalía General de la Nación classified the act as a politically motivated attack, given the senator’s status as a sitting member of congress, opposition figure, and presidential pre-candidate. Authorities attributed the planning to a dissident faction of the former FARC, with no final conviction to date over who ordered the attack. President Gustavo Petro called the killing a defeat for democracy, and Bogotá’s city hall decreed three days of official mourning. Human Rights Watch recalled, in its subsequent statement, that the senator’s mother, journalist Diana Turbay, had been kidnapped in 1990 by drug trafficker Pablo Escobar and killed the following year during a failed rescue operation, two generations of the same family marked by the same form of political violence.
Human Rights Watch placed the attack within a wider historical pattern, recalling that between 1989 and 1990, in less than eight months, three Colombian presidential candidates, Luis Carlos Galán, Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, and Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, were assassinated by drug cartels and paramilitary groups. The killing of Uribe Turbay does not inaugurate a practice, it reactivates one.
That is the immediate precedent on which, a year later, the crossed accusations of autoatentado between Cepeda and De la Espriella are built. This is not an abstract rhetorical exercise about the dangers of campaign language. Colombia has already shown, within this same electoral race, that political violence needs no staging to produce a corpse.
The grammar of pre-emptive delegitimisation
Set against that precedent, pre-emptively planting the possibility of an attack within the register of calculated simulation serves a precise function that no communiqué states outright. Both candidates are preparing, without needing to coordinate with one another, a rhetorical exit for the day something actually happens to them. Should anything happen to either of them, the story already in place would allow it to be read as a self-inflicted calculation rather than an external threat, which is not a side effect of the cross accusations but their most effective function, dehumanising the opponent without need of a direct insult, it is enough to place him in advance on the terrain of premeditated lying.
The phenomenon is not exclusive to this campaign, but its simultaneous and reciprocal installation, on the same day, in the same format, is. Each side produced, within hours, an almost identical mirror of the other, suggesting less an original strategy than a reflexive response to the fear of being exposed alone to the accusation. The result is a discursive terrain in which the word attack loses its specific weight, devalued by repeated use for electoral calculation, in the very country that buried a presidential pre-candidate barely ten months ago.
Prediction markets did not wait for the Fiscalía’s communiqué to set their own verdict on the dispute. On Polymarket, the platform where users wager real money on the outcome of future events, De la Espriella reached an 84% probability of victory after the exchange of accusations, while Cepeda’s odds fell to 14%. That asymmetry makes it, in purely narrative terms, more profitable to plant the suspicion that any adverse outcome was fabricated in advance, especially for whoever starts with the lower probability of winning cleanly.
The territory where the threat needs no social media
While the two candidates traded communiqués from Bogotá, the investigative unit of El Tiempo was documenting, in the hamlet of Puerto Toledo, municipality of Puerto Rico, department of Meta, a far less discursive mechanism of control. Dissident factions of the former FARC, known by their commanders’ aliases, Calarcá and Mordisco, had imposed compulsory identity carding of the civilian population since January 2026, a registration and identification system these structures use to control who comes in, who goes out, and, when the moment arrives, who votes. The same procedure spread in subsequent weeks to other municipalities in Meta and to hamlets in Guaviare.
None of those facts went through an X account before they happened. They accumulated and were measured by a body that takes no part in the race. The MOE identified 386 municipalities at electoral risk due to violence, concentrated mainly in northern Cauca, Arauca, southern Bolívar, and the country’s south east, the same geography where the language of autoatentado, manufactured in the capital, has no practical equivalent.
The Ministry of Defence, through minister Pedro Sánchez, confirmed it had held a meeting with the Registraduría Nacional, the Procuraduría, the Ministry of the Interior, the Defensoría del Pueblo, and the MOE to assess the security situation ahead of the runoff. The same ministry announced rewards of up to 50 million pesos for information helping to clear up electoral crimes, up to 200 million to prevent terrorist attacks, and up to 1 billion pesos to protect presidential candidates, figures that say, better than any communiqué, what the security of whoever aspires to govern Colombia currently costs.
The Misión de Observación Electoral identified 386 municipalities at electoral risk due to violence ahead of the 21 June runoff, and maintains, as part of its general monitoring of the electoral cycle, a standing call for candidates to tone down campaign rhetoric. (MOE, electoral monitoring, June 2026)
What remains after 21 June
On 7 August, one of the two men who accused each other of plotting their own attack will take the country’s highest office. Along with the post, he will inherit a vocabulary that has already normalised the suspicion of staged violence as a legitimate campaign tool, one that coexists, without touching, with the real violence the MOE measures in figures, with the name of a senator who can no longer deny anything, and with the armed dissident groups exercising their control in specific hamlets through the registration of identities and movements.
No one in Bogotá needed to prove anything for the accusation to serve its purpose, dehumanising the opponent without raising one’s voice, while in Meta and Guaviare the question of who controls the territory kept being answered, as always, with no need for a communiqué…
G.S.
Sources
- Cepeda denuncia un supuesto plan de autoatentado de De la Espriella
- De la Espriella lanza dura respuesta a Cepeda por denuncia de supuesto autoatentado
- Las ‘fake news’ crecen como la principal amenaza en la antesala de la segunda vuelta
- Invamer desmintió imagen falsa que circula en redes sobre una encuesta de la segunda vuelta presidencial de 2026
- Segunda vuelta presidencial, Procuraduría advierte que la desinformación es el mayor riesgo electoral
- Mindefensa alerta sobre riesgo de estallidos violentos en elecciones
- Asesinato de Miguel Uribe Turbay
- Abelardo de la Espriella desmiente a Iván Cepeda de un supuesto autoatentado
- Colombia: Candidato presidencial gravemente herido en atentado
- Así fue el atentado contra Miguel Uribe Turbay
- Riesgo extremo electoral en 139 municipios, las alertas que rodean las presidenciales en Colombia
- Los planes criminales de Calarcá y Mordisco para la segunda vuelta presidencial
- 386 municipios en riesgo electoral por condiciones de violencia, MOE
