Abelardo de la Espriella wanted to be sworn in before a battalion, before a full square and before the most powerful man in Washington sitting in the front row. On Friday 7 August he will get an inauguration without a military garrison authorised for the oath, without an open public square and without the United States secretary of state, the figure his own team was counting on just weeks earlier. Three retreats have piled up in under a month on the ceremony that was meant to launch, in his own words, a government of firm hand and close alliance with Washington. The result is an inauguration reduced to a university arena holding two thousand five hundred people, guarded by eleven thousand uniformed personnel and received, on the American side, by an acting prosecutor rather than by a chief of diplomacy.
The garrison Petro refused him
De la Espriella had announced, weeks earlier, his intention to be sworn in as president inside a military garrison in Popayán, capital of Cauca, a department in southwestern Colombia where the dissident faction of the former FARC commanded by the alias Iván Mordisco operates with strength. The gesture aimed at an explicit tribute to the security forces, a central pillar of his campaign rhetoric against illegal armed groups.
On 24 July, at a solemn ceremony held at the Quinta de Bolívar, the Bogotá house museum where Simón Bolívar’s sword rests, Gustavo Petro shut that door. He spoke as commander in chief of the Military Forces, a role he would hold until the last second of his term, and ordered that no military installation be placed at the disposal of the event.
“I am not giving permission to any garrison or military establishment to get ready.” (Gustavo Petro, 24 July 2026, ceremony returning Bolívar’s sword)
The sentence was not merely an administrative formality. Petro never publicly acknowledged the defeat of his candidate, Iván Cepeda, against De la Espriella in the June runoff, and filed a formal fraud complaint, taken to the Council of State, in the days before leaving office, an accusation the national registrar publicly rejected that same 5 August. The block on the Popayán garrison was, in that sense, less an institutional measure than the last visible exercise of a power that had no other way left to act against the successor it rejected.
An outgoing commander who no longer controls anything except, still, the keys to the barracks. And he used them.
Congress ended up authorising the move. The Senate backed it fifty-five votes to thirty-two, the House of Representatives one hundred and seventeen to seven, never specifying a military venue. Days later, the Council of State rejected a legal challenge seeking to suspend the event entirely, on grounds that the change of city could affect administrative morality and public spending. De la Espriella had to give up the battalion. He got the city instead, but not the setting he had imagined.
The organisation of the event also dragged a problem rarely mentioned alongside the political dispute. The Foreign Ministry, still under the outgoing administration at that point, had to award the logistics and the invitation of international figures through a public tender, a mechanism chosen in the name of transparency but considerably slower than a direct award, and the process was only settled weeks before the event. The most celebrated handover of power this year was assembled, on the logistics side, against the clock and under a government that was already on its way out.
A square that is no longer a square
Colombian presidential inaugurations are traditionally held at Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, an open space that fits whoever shows up. Friday’s will take place at the Arena USC, the arena of the Universidad Santiago de Cali, holding two thousand five hundred people with access strictly by invitation.
It will also be the first presidential handover of power held outside Bogotá in the country’s recent history. Cali’s mayor, Alejandro Eder, presented the fact as an institutional showcase for the city before the world. Nothing in that account explains why the showcase chosen excludes, by design, the vast majority of those who did not receive an invitation.
Local authorities justify the change with a security argument that is hard to dismiss outright. Cali deployed a unified command post covering Palmira, Candelaria, Jamundí, Yumbo and Pradera as well, restricted drone use, imposed a dry law from the eve of the event and mobilised eleven thousand uniformed personnel across the Army, Navy and Police. De la Espriella himself had ruled out being sworn in at Popayán weeks earlier, citing, besides Petro’s veto, the volcanic ash affecting that region.
But the security argument coexists, without resolving it, with a second reality. An event De la Espriella described as the first proof that decentralisation was ceasing to be a slogan and becoming a reality ended up, in practice, less accessible than any Bogotá inauguration of the last several decades. No one disputes the risk of the deployment. What is in question is that the answer to that risk was to shut the door rather than open it with tighter control, replacing the public square with a university arena that only those invited, and no one else, can enter.
The Pacto Histórico, the left-wing coalition defeated in June, announced it would not attend, since it does not recognise De la Espriella as head of state, and called for parallel demonstrations on the same date. The opposition will not be inside the arena. It will be, like the rest of the country, watching from outside.
The list of national guests confirms that selection. Among the living former presidents, Iván Duque, Álvaro Uribe and Andrés Pastrana were invited and will attend. Juan Manuel Santos and Ernesto Samper, so far, do not appear among the confirmed attendees. De la Espriella defended the new format by estimating an economic impact of close to ten billion pesos for Cali, thanks to hotel, dining and logistics spending from about six thousand visitors, and claimed the total cost of the ceremony would be less than half that of the inauguration four years ago. The exact figure remains disputed, a court ordered the release of comparative budget studies between Bogotá, Cauca and Cali, and at least three different figures are circulating about the same event so far.
Washington downgrades its delegation
For weeks the possibility circulated that Marco Rubio, the United States secretary of state, would lead the American delegation in Cali. De la Espriella’s own team treated it as likely, in keeping with the narrative of a close alliance with Washington that the president-elect repeated throughout the campaign.
The White House confirmed the opposite on 5 August. Rubio is not travelling. Neither is Donald Trump, nor the under secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, Christopher Landau.
The American delegation in Cali will be led by Todd Blanche, acting attorney general, and Terry Cole, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, with no official of the diplomatic rank a presidential inauguration usually calls for.
The reading should not be forced. Rubio has not represented the United States at any presidential inauguration abroad since becoming secretary of state, in any country, so his absence from Cali does not by itself amount to a snub aimed at De la Espriella. What the final composition of the delegation does document is something else, more precise and more uncomfortable for the official narrative. Washington chose to represent itself at its new Colombian partner’s inauguration through a prosecutor and a counter-narcotics chief, not through a diplomat. The relationship the new government celebrates as a strategic alliance arrives, on the American side, with the vocabulary of a police operation.
Rounding out the delegation are Hugo Guevara, chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Bogotá, and Mario Diaz-Balart, chairman of the House subcommittee on national security. Neither holds the rank of foreign minister or full head of mission. In parallel, the United States Senate is advancing the confirmation of Nate Morris as new ambassador to Bogotá, who at his confirmation hearing centred his diplomatic priorities on containing Chinese influence in the region rather than on celebrating the arrival of an ideological ally at the Casa de Nariño. The underlying message matches that of the delegation itself, Washington views Colombia as a terrain of geopolitical dispute and counter-narcotics cooperation, not as a partner deserving a state-to-state photograph.
That second-tier diplomatic showing contrasts, word for word, with the campaign promise. De la Espriella built much of his political capital on the idea of a direct, personal relationship with Washington, superior to that of his predecessor. The delegation that finally lands in Cali disproves that promise before the new government has completed its first day.
What remains of the spectacle
On Friday there will be photographs with King Felipe VI, with Javier Milei, with José Antonio Kast, with most of the continent’s right-wing presidents gathered in Cali for the occasion, among them Daniel Noboa, Santiago Peña and Rodrigo Paz. Those images will circulate as proof of broad international backing, and in a literal sense they will be, a continental ideological alignment De la Espriella will display for months. But none of those photographs can replace what he explicitly asked for and did not get, the army denied him, the open square that never existed, the American diplomatic rank Washington chose not to send him.
The timing is not coincidental either. While the arena fills with flags and formal wear, the Pacto Histórico formally launches its role as opposition with demonstrations in the streets of several cities, a contrast the organisers of the event did not choose but did nothing to avoid either. Two parallel events, one inside with restricted access, the other outside with no cap on numbers, sum up better than any speech the real state of the national cohesion the new government claims to represent.
A man who presented himself as the candidate of the firm hand and the privileged relationship with the United States begins his term with the outgoing commander shutting him out of the barracks, with a university arena instead of a public square, and with an acting prosecutor as the highest face Washington chose to show him. That the army does pay him tribute a few hours later, once Petro has nothing left to deny him, does not correct the initial message. It confirms it. The tribute De la Espriella wanted as the opening of his term reaches him instead as a last-minute concession, granted the moment the chair from which it was withheld stood empty.
Three weeks were enough for the most-cited ally of the campaign to send him, instead of its top diplomat, a prosecutor.
A president who needs this display of foreign flags to disguise what he failed to secure on that very day reveals, better than any speech of his own, the real size of the power he inherits. The new government’s first security council is set for the following Saturday, at eight in the morning, at the Tercera Brigada in Cali. There, with no kings or foreign presidents or ceremonial cameras, De la Espriella will have his first real contact with the apparatus he says he wants to strengthen, the very one his predecessor withheld from him for a few more hours and that Washington, through a prosecutor and a counter-narcotics chief, reminds him it cares about only as an instrument of containment. The inauguration will have lasted a day. The institutional orphanhood surrounding it may last considerably longer…
G.S.
Sources
- Petro ordenó a las Fuerzas Militares no preparar instalaciones para la posesión de De la Espriella
- Petro niega permiso para usar una guarnición militar de Colombia en posesión de De la Espriella
- No pudieron impedir posesión de Abelardo De La Espriella el 7 de agosto
- Marco Rubio no viene a posesión presidencial, pero envía a director de la DEA y fiscal general
- Lo que se sabe de la eventual presencia de Marco Rubio en la posesión presidencial de Abelardo De La Espriella
- EE. UU. confirma quién encabezará su delegación en la posesión de Abelardo de la Espriella
- Delegación de EE.UU. acompañará la investidura de Abelardo de la Espriella en Cali
