Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in on August 7, 2026, at the Arena of the Universidad Santiago de Cali, the first presidential inauguration ever held outside Bogotá. In his government plan, proposal number ten states that “a homeland that leaves women alone cannot call itself just.” He promises faster judicial channels, support for victims of gender violence, targets for reducing femicide. Twelve days later, the new director of the Colombian Family Welfare Institute, María Carolina Restrepo Cañavera, ordered the removal of a mural painted by girls at the Bogotá headquarters. And issued a directive to stop naming them. The Defensoría del Pueblo demanded an explanation. The Constitutional Court has spent eighteen years saying, in Auto 092 of 2008, that naming women differently is not a stylistic gesture. It is an obligation. Between the promise and the first decision lies a distance measured in acts, not intentions.
The promise behind the tenth pillar
The change of venue was no mere protocol detail. The Chamber of Representatives approved moving the ceremony from Bogotá to Cali on July 28, by 117 votes to 7, in the middle of a transition marked by polarization. While De la Espriella took his oath in Cali that same August 7, senator Iván Cepeda led a rally in Barranquilla that he called “civil disobedience, resistance, and popular sovereignty.” The country arrived at the inauguration divided.
The inauguration speech lasted more than an hour. De la Espriella entered the USC auditorium at 4:13 p.m., alongside first lady Ana Lucía Pineda and their four children. Before the oath, the president of Congress, Honorio Miguel Henríquez Pinedo, listed the new government’s challenges, public order, insecurity, the fiscal situation, drug trafficking, illegal mining. As president, facing the military and the security forces, he announced his government would pursue the restoration of order.
He promised a list of narcoterrorist groups. He promised megaprisons.
Months earlier, on the campaign trail, he had been blunter with Reuters. “There will be no peace processes in my government,” he said. He blamed the outgoing government’s peace policy for strengthening armed groups and illegal economies.
Colombia has lived through more than sixty years of internal armed conflict. Women and girls are among the direct victims of its consequences, not as an abstract category but in the terms the Constitutional Court has documented since 2008. Promising more war without mentioning these victims leaves out half the equation.
That is where proposal number ten appears, the only one in the plan devoted to women. Three pillars, security and justice, the care economy, economic autonomy. In the first, it promises faster judicial channels, victim support, targets for reducing gender violence. It says nothing about how, with what budget, or by when. The other two pillars, the care economy and economic autonomy, are simply named in the document, with no targets or figures attached. It is a promise pitched in the same register as the rest of the plan, security as the answer to everything, with nothing to set it apart from the security policies the country already has.
That promise coexists with a campaign record that has cast doubt on the very protection it offers. In March 2026, after sexual harassment allegations surfaced against two Noticias Caracol presenters, De la Espriella offered his law firm’s services to the victims and said “don’t stay silent.” Two months later, on the show Piso 8, he attributed his support among female voters to the size of his genitals and asked a journalist to zoom in on a photo of himself. Then-candidate Paloma Valencia responded that journalists “shouldn’t have to put up with sexual jokes.” Vice-presidential candidate Juan Daniel Oviedo called the remark a display of “pettiness.” Days later, in another interview, he addressed a woman as “sweetheart,” a tone that drew fresh criticism for condescension.
He also claimed credit for the Rosa Elvira Cely Law, which criminalizes femicide in the country. Adriana Cely, sister of the woman whose 2012 murder gave rise to the law, publicly denied this. “He’s lying when he says the femicide law happened thanks to him,” she told a Spanish outlet. She acknowledged the lawyer had accompanied the criminal case against the killer pro bono, but maintained that gathering the evidence had been the family’s work, not his.
What is being erased at the ICBF
The government designated María Carolina Restrepo Cañavera to head the ICBF in late July 2026, a nomination it formalized through Decree 1182, signed on August 11, four days after the presidential inauguration. A lawyer specializing in tax law, she is part of the bloc of appointments carrying the Centro Democrático’s stamp. Less than a month into the job, during a visit to the Bogotá headquarters, she ordered a mural near her office removed.
On the wall were hearts, a hammer and sickle, and a phrase written in chalk, “the little resistance was here.” “This is absolutely abusive,” Restrepo told cameras. “What does a child know about that. All a child needs to do is play.” Resistencia Chiquita is not a slogan. It is a collective of girls from Bogotá born after the femicide of Yuliana Samboní, the seven-year-old murdered in the city on December 4, 2016. Astrid Cáceres, who directed the ICBF under the previous government, responded on social media, the mural was a free space, girls visiting the agency left their mark there. They were the ones who wrote that phrase.
On August 19, the ICBF published new institutional language guidelines. From that date on, the agency prioritizes “childhood, adolescence, and Colombian families” over the word “girl.” Representative Lourdes Mateus denounced the directive. Congresswoman Jennifer Pedraza did the math, seven million girls left unnamed. On August 26, the Defensora del Pueblo, Iris Marín, asked the ICBF to explain who gave the order and why.
Restrepo Cañavera spoke out again days later. “I’m surprised by so much concern,” she said. She argued that neither the Constitution, nor the Childhood and Adolescence Code, nor Law 1146 of 2007, nor the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires always using the full formula “children, girls, and adolescents,” and that none of them ban the word “childhood” either. She maintained that talking about childhood “does not erase girls” and dismissed that reading as a conclusion drawn by her critics, not a normative fact.
Why naming is not a detail
Article 2 of Law 1098 of 2006 obliges the state to protect “children, girls, and adolescents.” In those terms, no others. The ICBF protects children in peacetime and in wartime alike, and it is on that second ground, the armed conflict De la Espriella promised to intensify on the campaign trail, that the Constitutional Court already documented why naming by gender is not a stylistic gesture. In Auto 092 of 2008, it identified ten gender-specific risks facing women in Colombia’s armed conflict. Risks men do not share. Sexual violence, domestic exploitation, forced recruitment of their sons and daughters, persecution for social leadership, dispossession of land.
Auto 092 of 2008 identified ten gender-specific risks facing women in Colombia’s armed conflict, among them sexual violence, the forced recruitment of their children, and the dispossession of their land. Nearly eighteen years later, the Constitutional Court is still checking whether the state has addressed them.
The Court did not arrive at that list by generalizing. Each risk has its own case file, its own history. A government that decides, within one of its own agencies, to stop naming girls, does so in a country where the highest court has already established that gender produces risks that don’t fit a general category. This is not administrative style. It is about knowing who can be identified when something happens to them. What isn’t named is harder to trace.
Auto 092 was not born in a vacuum. It answered Ruling T-025 of 2004, which declared an unconstitutional state of affairs in the care of the displaced population, and a 2007 public hearing where displaced women from across the country documented how the conflict affected them differently than men. The Court issued it in the middle of President Álvaro Uribe’s Democratic Security Policy, the same hard-line, military-offensive formula De la Espriella promises to revive. The diagnosis back then was that a military response without an explicit gender lens left women’s specific risks invisible.
That diagnosis did not stop in 2008. According to figures from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, more than 35,000 victims of sexual, reproductive, and gender-based violence tied to the armed conflict were identified between 1957 and 2016, 92% of them women and girls, a figure the JEP itself acknowledges as an undercount of documented cases. Organizations such as Corporación Humanas and Sisma Mujer, drawing on broader prevalence surveys, estimate the real figure tops five million women sexually assaulted in that context. An April 2024 report from the Mesa de Seguimiento tracking Autos 092, 009, and 515 found that only 2% of these cases end in a conviction. In the first three months of 2026 alone, the Defensoría del Pueblo logged 3,664 new cases of sexual violence, with girls and adolescents making up most of them. That is the ground on which more war is being promised.
The family model as policy
The tenth proposal’s third pillar, economic autonomy, was left named in the plan with no targets or figures. The plan is specific on another point, though, it places the family at the core of society. That sounds fine. It isn’t, quite. The document leaves no room for different kinds of families, it speaks of only one, the traditional one, with fixed roles behind closed doors. In a country where much of the unpaid domestic work falls on women with no income of their own and no real control over their time, promoting that model as an ideal is not neutral. It is deciding how much autonomy they get to have.
According to DANE’s Satellite Account of the Care Economy, using 2024 data, Colombian women contributed 75.9% of the 44,326 million hours spent on unpaid domestic and care work in the country. That labor, with no wage or contract, was worth 340.5 trillion pesos, close to 20% of GDP, more than that year’s output from either commerce or manufacturing. Economist Cecilia López, who championed the law behind that measurement, noted the share has stayed almost unchanged since 2014. Ten years without that weight of hours changing hands is the fact behind the word autonomy.
That tension is not new. Nor is it ancient. The right to vote was approved in 1954, Legislative Act 03, after a debate in which Josefina Valencia and Esmeralda Arboleda spoke. Women could not vote right away, the country was under a military dictatorship with no elections. They voted for the first time on December 1, 1957.
Colombian women’s right to vote was approved in 1954 and exercised for the first time on December 1, 1957, when 1,835,255 women voted for the first time in the country’s history, in a general election.
Sixty-nine years after that first vote, women’s political citizenship remains young. A government that promises to protect them and that, before completing a single month in office, decides which word to use for girls and which family model to impose, is not making minor decisions. It is taking a stance. And that stance can already be read…
A.B.
Sources
- Resumen de la investidura presidencial de Abelardo de la Espriella, 7 de agosto
- Investidura presidencial de Abelardo de la Espriella – Wikipedia
- Así fue el minuto a minuto de la posesión presidencial de Abelardo De La Espriella en Cali – El Tiempo
- Colombia’s ‘outsider’ candidate De La Espriella vows military crackdown to boost economy – Reuters/Yahoo
- Análisis de las propuestas programáticas de Abelardo de la Espriella (2026-2030)
- Restrepo, directora del Icbf, ordenó retirar mural por mensajes políticos – La Silla Vacía
- Del mural “Resistencia Chiquita” en el ICBF y el debate por el activismo infantil – El Espectador
- Polémica por mural que ordenó retirar directora del ICBF – El Colombiano
- ¿Por qué el ICBF pide usar “niñez” en lugar de “niñas”? – Semana
- Directora del Icbf responde a las críticas y defiende hablar de ‘niñez’ – El Tiempo
- Icbf, críticas a directora por excluir “niña” del lenguaje institucional – La Silla Vacía
- Defensora del Pueblo se mete en polémica por uso de la palabra “niñez” en el ICBF – Semana
- Auto nº 092/08 de Corte Constitucional
- Conmemoración 60 años del voto de las mujeres en Colombia – UN Women Colombia
- La conquista del voto femenino, un camino que empezó antes de 1954 – Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica
- Controversia por comentarios de Abelardo de la Espriella hacia dos periodistas – El Tiempo
- Familia de Rosa Elvira Cely contradice a Abelardo de la Espriella por atribuirse ley de feminicidio – El Colombiano
- María Carolina Restrepo Cañavera llega a la dirección del ICBF – El Espectador
- Quedó en firme el nombramiento de María Carolina Restrepo como directora del ICBF
- La impunidad domina los casos de violencia sexual en el conflicto armado colombiano – Infobae
- Las mujeres realizan 75% del trabajo doméstico y de cuidado no remunerado – La República
- Investidura presidencial de Abelardo de la Espriella, traslado a Cali y protestas – Wikipedia
