In Montería, capital of the department of Córdoba, a secondary school student named Abelardo de la Espriella moved in the same social circles as Salvatore Mancuso, ten years his senior, the future commander of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia. They belonged to the same class, the same milieu, the city where men of law and men of war have shared the same table for decades. De la Espriella built upon that environment a legal career that would make him a millionaire, then a presidential candidacy that would take him to the Palace. On 21 June 2026, Córdoba voted against him with 58% of the ballots cast. What elected him was not his homeland nor the victims of his most celebrated clients. What elected him was Antioquia, the Andean corridor of the interior, and the Miami diaspora. This article does not explain a fraud. It explains a class transaction that Colombia’s major media outlets chose to narrate as democratic drama.
The Tiger and His Land
De la Espriella was born in Bogotá in 1978, but Bogotá is merely a detail on his birth certificate. He grew up in Montería, in a family rooted in cattle ranching and local Córdoban politics. His father served as a magistrate at the Administrative Tribunal of Córdoba. His mother came from a family of rural landowners with ties to regional politics. In that environment, during secondary school, he encountered Salvatore Mancuso, who was then twenty years old and already moving through the social networks from which the coastal paramilitary project would emerge.
Mancuso would go on to command the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (the AUC were the far-right paramilitary confederation that between 1997 and 2006 carried out massacres, forced displacements and disappearances across fourteen departments of the country; they were designated a terrorist organisation by the United States and their leaders were convicted of crimes against humanity). De la Espriella would go on to become president. Their trajectories diverged in formal terms and converged in terms of mutual utility during the demobilisation process negotiated between the AUC and the government of Álvaro Uribe.
In 2005, De la Espriella founded the Foundation for Peace Initiatives, FIPAZ. The organisation staged university forums in which Iván Roberto Duque, alias Ernesto Báez, former commander of the AUC’s Central Bolívar Bloc, took part. In 2008, Báez declared that the AUC used De la Espriella as a channel for political projection towards university students. In 2009, former paramilitary chief Ever Veloza García, alias HH, testified before the Justice and Peace unit that De la Espriella worked with a paramilitary front, and that he himself had introduced him to Ernesto Báez. Mancuso himself confirmed that the lawyer had participated actively in the Ralito zone, the Córdoban estate where the AUC and the Colombian state negotiated the demobilisation. The De la Espriella firm, founded in 2003 with an initial capital of five hundred thousand pesos, was billing more than a billion pesos a year by 2006, at the height of paramilitarism’s consolidation as a state project.
Mario Iguarán, Attorney General between 2005 and 2009, identified by Mancuso as having reached his post with paramilitary backing and as maintaining a close relationship with De la Espriella, closed the investigation into the lawyer for alleged ties to the AUC just before leaving office. In 2014, his successor Viviane Morales archived the case again. In November 2025, Morales publicly endorsed De la Espriella’s presidential campaign.
Córdoba voted for Iván Cepeda with 58.28% of the ballots cast. The land where De la Espriella grew up, where his clients operated, where his childhood associates built their empires over mass graves, denied him the presidency by eleven points.
The Geography of Consent
Antioquia gave him 2,185,834 votes, 64.42% of the department, the largest regional margin in the entire election. Norte de Santander reached 76.56%. Meta 59.14%. Huila 61.12%. Arauca 56.60%. The Andean corridor of the Colombian interior, where paramilitarism operated for decades as an instrument of territorial control in the service of large landholdings and the extractive economy, voted massively for the lawyer who defended its legal operators.
These territories do not share with Córdoba the memory of the victims. They share with De la Espriella the logic of order, where order is the condition of accumulation, security the guarantee of business and impunity the reasonable price of growth. Antioquia has for decades produced the narrative of entrepreneurship as national identity. The paisa worker, the first-generation entrepreneur, the man who built everything from nothing, figures that render invisible the question of at what cost that wealth was built and with what instruments it was sustained during the years of conflict. Diego Fernando Murillo, alias Don Berna, head of the Envigado Office (the criminal organisation that administered urban paramilitarism in Medellín for two decades) and former AUC commander in Antioquia, was a client of the De la Espriella firm. Medellín voted 64.45% for the candidate.
This is not a coincidence. It is a continuity.
They did not vote for De la Espriella despite his having defended paramilitaries. They voted for him because he did. The defence of paramilitaries was not a youthful error nor a blemish on his record. It was the demonstration that this man knows on which side real power operates in Colombia, and that side is the one that interests those who see the state as an instrument for protecting what they already possess, not for examining how they came to possess it.
With 99.99% of polling stations counted, De la Espriella won in 758 municipalities against 431 for Cepeda, but Cepeda won in 19 departments against 13. The difference is not a statistical paradox: it is the radiograph of a country where the small municipalities of the interior concentrate rural landowners and the large departments of the coast concentrate organised memory. Source: Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil, bulletin 66, second round, 21 June 2026.
The mechanism is straightforward, as all well-designed loyalty mechanisms are. One does not vote for the candidate who represents one’s own values. One votes for the candidate who guarantees the continuity of one’s own material conditions. In Colombia, those conditions have been sustained for decades by an architecture of impunity that De la Espriella not only knows but helped to construct, case file by case file, closure by closure.
Miami Votes
The Colombian diaspora in the United States concentrates 454,262 registered voters, more than Spain and Venezuela combined. De la Espriella obtained 72% of those votes. Analysts attributed the difference to the affinity of expatriate Colombian entrepreneurs with his economic programme. The explanation is correct and sufficiently vague as to say nothing. De la Espriella is a donor to the Republican Party, has held United States citizenship since 2023, lived in Miami for over a decade, and received the public endorsement of Donald Trump before the second round. It is not that Colombian entrepreneurs in the United States see in him someone like themselves. It is that De la Espriella is literally one of them, a man who transformed Colombian criminal law into exportable capital, installed that capital in Miami in the form of a binational law firm, and returned to Colombia with a candidacy sustained by the same transnational network he had helped to build.
The diaspora has no dead to bury in Montería. It has no families in the forced displacement registers nor witnesses to recognise in Justice and Peace hearings. It votes by project, for tax reduction, the elimination of truth and reparation mechanisms, the end of peace agreements that threaten the title to lands whose origins no one wishes to see examined too closely. Trump wrote “he won, BIG”. Milei announced that “the tiger and the lion roar in Latin America”. These are not protocol congratulations. They are the recognition of a continental network of interests that identifies in De la Espriella’s victory its own advance across the region, and celebrates not the man but the mechanism he represents.
What the Caribbean Refused
Chocó voted Cepeda at 81.37%. Putumayo at 78.52%. Nariño at 76.73%. Bolívar, Atlántico, Magdalena, La Guajira, all for Cepeda. The Colombian coast, the Pacific, the territories where paramilitary operations left the most mass graves, the most communities without men of working age, the most names in Justice and Peace case files, voted against the candidate whose name appears repeatedly in those very files.
This is not a matter of ideology in the strict sense. The coastal departments have a tradition of clientelist voting that electoral analysts reduce to political machinery, as though that term were sufficient to explain everything and as though the machinery did not also respond to structures of power that someone built and someone maintains. But there is something that no machinery administers, and that relationship between the memory of bodies and the gesture of a hand in the ballot box exists regardless. That relationship does not appear in electoral regression models because it has no control variable.
The Caribbean refused the tiger because the Caribbean knows what tigers smell like. Not through Truth Commission reports or press articles. It knows it through the rivers where bodies surfaced for twenty years, through the municipalities where witnesses described meetings on the Castaño estates, through the surnames that circulate in the testimonies of former paramilitary chiefs and that people recognise without needing to read them in any newspaper. That memory is not built in television debates. It is transmitted by other means, through channels that campaign strategists can neither map nor purchase.
That memory was not enough to win the presidency. Memory never wins alone when it competes against organised capital, the interior’s electoral machinery and a diaspora that votes from the comfortable distance of economic exile. But it was enough to trace on the electoral map a boundary that Colombia’s major media described as “a country divided in two” without ever explaining along which precise line that division runs, nor what lies on each side of it, nor why that line coincides with such precision with the operational maps of the paramilitary blocs that the new president defended during the best years of his career.
The tiger of nobody is the tiger of somebody. He is the tiger of Antioquia and Miami, of the Andean corridor and the Envigado Office, of the rural landowners of Norte de Santander and the entrepreneurs who vote in Florida on Colombian cards. What Córdoba refused, Antioquia elected. What the coast remembers, the interior preferred to forget. And that forgetting, in Colombia, is never without cost…
G.S.
Sources
- Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil, second-round presidential results 2026, bulletin 66, 21 June 2026
- El Tiempo, municipality-by-municipality territorial analysis, second round 2026, 22 June 2026
- Wikipedia ES, 2026 Colombian presidential election
- Wikipedia EN, Abelardo de la Espriella biographical entry
- La Silla Rota, “Defending paramilitaries: the suspicious business dealings of Abelardo de la Espriella”, June 2026
- Diario Red, “Abelardo de la Espriella: from AUC paramilitarism to presidential fraud”, December 2025
- RT Actualidad, “Law firm, narcos and paramilitaries: what lies behind Abelardo de la Espriella’s fortune”, June 2026
- Ever Veloza García alias HH, testimony before Justice and Peace, February 2009
- Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia, ruling against Juan Pablo Sánchez, 2011, FIPAZ reference
- Yahoo Noticias, second-round results and overseas vote analysis, June 2026
