On 24 June 2026, Colombia’s National Electoral Council proclaimed Abelardo de la Espriella president for the 2026–2030 term, with an official margin over Iván Cepeda of 250,830 votes, less than one percentage point. That same afternoon, Gustavo Petro confirmed the start of the handover process with his successor, the formal transfer of government between outgoing and incoming presidents, which is the last institutional form of recognition available. What begins on 7 August is not a normal alternation between distinct governing programmes. It is the return to the order that Colombia had attempted, with partial and imperfect results, to interrupt since 2022. The man who will occupy the Casa de Nariño was born in Bogotá, grew up in Montería, holds triple Colombian, American and Italian nationality, runs a law firm headquartered in Miami, and will sign on 7 August ninety presidential decrees whose content he announced with precision before the election. The analysis of what comes next requires no speculation.
The Man Before the Office
Before becoming the outsider who had never held public office, Abelardo de la Espriella founded and led the Foundation for Peace Initiatives, FIPAZ, during the negotiations between the government of Álvaro Uribe and the paramilitaries at Santa Fe de Ralito, Córdoba. FIPAZ organised university forums with the active participation of Ernesto Báez, former commander of the Central Bolívar Bloc of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the AUC, a far-right paramilitary confederation responsible for massacres, forced displacement and killings across dozens of Colombian municipalities), inviting students to support a referendum that would allow demobilised fighters to be tried for sedition rather than criminal conspiracy, granting them lighter sentences and the right to stand for office. In 2011, the Supreme Court of Justice established that FIPAZ “did not promote peace when the self-defence groups were massacring, disappearing, killing and torturing, but when they were seeking to project themselves politically”, and ordered that De la Espriella be investigated. Two criminal proceedings were filed in his favour, the first in 2009 under Attorney General Mario Iguarán, a close friend of De la Espriella whose appointment, according to declarations by Salvatore Mancuso before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (the JEP, Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal) in 2024, reportedly had the backing of the AUC. The JEP, which De la Espriella has called a farce and pledged to eliminate, investigates the crimes of those same structures. The president who will come to dismantle that tribunal built his public career in the circle of those the tribunal is meant to judge. That no one frames this coincidence in these terms does not mean the information is unavailable. It means there are questions that Colombian journalism has decided not to ask.
De la Espriella was born in Bogotá on 31 July 1978 and grew up in Montería, where he knew Salvatore Mancuso from childhood, the former paramilitary commander who testified before the JEP in 2024 on the links between FIPAZ and the AUC. His law firm operates with offices in Bogotá, Barranquilla, Medellín and Miami. He holds triple Colombian, American and Italian nationality; he obtained United States citizenship in 2023, after more than a decade living in Florida. Donald Trump endorsed him publicly in the first half of 2026, when the candidate was not yet placing among the front-runners in the polls. Republican Senator Bernie Moreno acted as intermediary in the call between Trump and De la Espriella on the night of 21 June, before the official scrutiny had concluded. Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth congratulated him the following Monday. Marco Rubio had already done so on Sunday. The biography requires no additional interpretation. It is its own analysis.
The Ninety Decrees
On 7 August, at the moment of his inauguration, Abelardo de la Espriella will sign ninety decrees. This is not a campaign metaphor or a vague aspiration. It is a plan announced with that exact number.
“While we build the legislative agenda, we will sign on 7 August ninety decrees on security, economic, health and education matters.” (Abelardo de la Espriella, interview with El Tiempo, June 2026)
The content is documented. On security, the new government will intervene in 330,000 hectares of coca cultivation through aerial fumigation, drone deployment and manual eradication. It will launch construction of ten high-security mega-prisons in remote zones, modelled on Nayib Bukele’s template in El Salvador, administered by private operators under long-term concession contracts. It will liquidate INPEC, the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute, the state body managing the country’s prisons, and transfer that function to private operators. On economics, it will cut the state apparatus by forty per cent, equivalent by its own estimates to between 700,000 and 800,000 public-sector positions. It will declare an economic emergency to take rapid decisions. Such a declaration is a constitutional instrument permitted under specific conditions and subject to subsequent judicial review; that the president-elect anticipates it as an ordinary governing tool reveals a reading of institutions that is not neutral. The sequence is the same as that applied by Milei in Argentina and institutionalised by Bukele in El Salvador before dissolving the Legislative Assembly. Speed as a substitute for consensus; facts on the ground before the opposition has time to organise.
What Is Being Dismantled
The Special Jurisdiction for Peace was created by the 2016 Accord with the former FARC guerrillas. This year it marks its tenth anniversary. In that time it has prosecuted crimes against humanity, received confessions from former guerrilla commanders, and indicted military personnel for extrajudicial killings (the so-called false positives, in which soldiers presented murdered civilians as combat casualties to accumulate merits). It is imperfect, slow and politically costly for every sector whose appearance before it implies acknowledging something. It is also the only mechanism available in Colombia for victims to access any form of judicial truth about what happened to them. De la Espriella’s governing programme proposes cutting its budget by ninety per cent with the declared aim of closing it by 2030.
“The JEP is a tribunal to wash the blood-stained hands of FARC members and persecute the heroes of the homeland.” (Abelardo de la Espriella, public statements, 2026)
The JEP is not the only institution on the list. The new government has announced the elimination or absorption of the Agency for Reincorporation and Normalisation, which supports the reintegration of ex-guerrillas into civilian life; the Land Restitution Unit, which processes the return of properties to families displaced by the conflict; and the National Centre for Historical Memory, the institutional archive documenting what happened to victims across decades of war. These institutions carry constitutional protections derived from the Peace Accord. That the president announces them as targets of his administration says less about the legal viability of their elimination than about the signal his government intends to send from day one. This publication documented on 14 June 2026 that under Gustavo Petro’s government, monetary poverty in Colombia reached 28.0 per cent in 2025, the lowest figure in the country’s statistical history. The architecture that made that reduction possible, namely social transfers, targeted subsidies and assistance programmes dependent on the state apparatus, is precisely what a forty per cent contraction would, in practice, render unviable.
The International of Order
On 17 June 2026, seventeen Democratic members of the United States Congress sent a formal letter requesting that their government investigate De la Espriella’s ties to the AUC and to Alex Saab, designated as Nicolás Maduro’s front man and the lawyer’s client between 2013 and 2019, as well as the origin of his assets in Florida. In that letter, the legislators asked Trump to cease his interference in Colombia’s elections in favour of a candidate who, in their words, could represent a threat to United States interests. Trump ignored the letter. Milei posted that the tiger and the lion roar across Latin America. Kast congratulated from Chile. Noboa from Ecuador. Bolsonaro from Brazil. Machado from Venezuela. The continental bloc hailed the result as a shared victory. It is one; there exists a transnational political infrastructure, with shared funding, communication networks and advisers, that has produced results in Argentina, El Salvador, Chile and now Colombia, with a recognisable programme in every country it reaches. Always the same. Speed, emergency decrees, accelerated privatisation, suppression of dialogue with the actors of the conflict.
Colombia has fifty million inhabitants, is the world’s leading exporter of cut flowers, holds petroleum reserves whose exploitation the Petro government attempted to slow, and shares borders with Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Panama. What Washington has an interest in managing is not a small, peripheral state. De la Espriella takes office on 7 August with less than fifty per cent of the vote, without legislative majorities of his own, in a country Petro described on the night of 21 June as split in two. Colombia will have a new president with that profile, that backing and that programme. That all of this takes place within the constitutional framework, with international observers validating the process and the scrutiny showing a 99.997 per cent coincidence between the preliminary count and the official result, does not alter what the result installs. It only confirms that Colombia’s institutional order functions, as it is designed to, to produce exactly this kind of outcome…
G.S.
Sources
- Profile, FIPAZ and the AUC · La Silla Vacía
- Cepeda’s complaint, paramilitary ties · La Silla Vacía
- The 90 decrees · El Tiempo
- First 100 days · El Universal
- Key proposals · La Silla Vacía
- JEP and peace accords · El Espectador
- Rights rollbacks · Rolling Stone ES
- Democratic Congress letter · Chuy García / House.gov
- Fortune and trajectory · La Nación Argentina
- Trump, Bernie Moreno, Hegseth · El Tiempo
- Historic poverty reduction · AcidReport
