On 10 August, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake shook western Colombia. The successive tallies from the National Disaster Risk Management Unit, which climbed day by day as the search under the rubble advanced, eventually fixed the toll at 288 dead, 202 missing and 185,016 people left without a roof. Jaime Andrés Beltrán, appointed Housing Minister barely three days earlier by President Abelardo de la Espriella, toured the affected areas during the first days of the emergency, moving from one flattened neighbourhood to the next as the death toll kept being revised upward. The following weekend, while relief brigades kept clearing rubble in Chocó and Valle del Cauca, a digital outlet photographed him at a beach hotel in Santa Marta, alongside his wife. Ten days into the job, with an opposition bloc that had already filed a censure motion against him, Beltrán arrives in Congress dragging something considerably older than this week’s scandal, a removal from office over dual party membership and a file still open at the Contraloría over the disappearance of more than twenty billion pesos in municipal scrap metal. The full name of the portfolio he runs, the Ministry of Housing, City and Territory, is no minor detail, the decisions of that very ministry will, in the coming months, shape the lives of the 185,016 people left homeless by the earthquake, which turns his two-day absence into rather more than a communications problem, in the literal sense, the one official least entitled to disappear from view.
Ten days a minister, one weekend at the beach
On the Saturday, Beltrán attended a wedding in Santa Marta. He did not return the next day. Photographs published by the outlet Desigual show him on the Sunday on the sand, beside his wife, while in Buenaventura the survivors were still sleeping under tarpaulins and waiting, as Congressman Alejandro Toro later complained, for the deputy minister for Water to come and sort out the drinking-water supply.
Senator Jennifer Pedraza was the first to demand his removal in writing. Representative Caty Juvinao, of the Alianza Verde, called the gesture a total failure. Senator Rafael Nieto, of the Centro Democrático, did not demand his resignation but asked who, within government, was actually leading the housing response to the emergency. Three weeks earlier, Beltrán’s very appointment had already caused a stir, outlets such as RTVC had reported in advance that De la Espriella would name a former mayor under investigation for corruption.
The minister’s public schedule, however, was not empty. On 15 August, two days before the beach photographs surfaced, Beltrán had toured the town of San Pacho alongside the governor of Valle del Cauca, Dilia Francisca Toro, posting images of that visit on his own social media. The contrast between that documented weekday schedule and the information vacuum over the following weekend is, in large part, what fed the suspicion that the Santa Marta wedding ran on longer than declared.
Beltrán responded on 17 August with a video posted to his accounts. He denied having abandoned his duties. He explained that he lives in Bogotá, that his wife and daughters live in Bucaramanga, and that he had taken advantage of a family holiday to see them. He closed with a line his critics later cited as proof of the very disconnection they were denouncing, I will keep being minister, but I will keep being a father and a husband, and that is what makes Colombia great, families. The line did not calm his critics, and it did the opposite of what he presumably intended, invoking family as justification for a two-day absence in the middle of a national crisis reinforced, rather than dissolved, the sense of disconnection the photographs had already established.
According to the official UNGRD tally, the 10 August earthquake damaged 127,557 buildings across Colombia and destroyed 26,945 of them outright, concentrated mostly in Chocó, Valle del Cauca, Risaralda and Caldas.
A mayor who should not have been where he was
Beltrán is forty-four. He is a social communicator, a pastor at a Christian church, and served two terms as a Bucaramanga city councillor before winning the mayoralty in 2023 on a hard-line anti-crime platform that earned him, in the local press, the nickname of the Colombian Bukele.
The comparison with the Salvadoran president was not merely stylistic. Beltrán built his municipal career on the promise of an authority that does not negotiate with illegality, a line the available press coverage rarely linked, at the time, to the management of the city’s own warehouses under his mayoralty. It is a reading the data now available allows one to sustain, even though no court has yet framed it in those terms, the contrast between the declared firmness towards ordinary crime and the documented opacity surrounding his own inventories.
He did not finish his term. On 21 August 2025, after an eight-month process and a first annulment decreed in December 2024, the Council of State handed down the ruling that removed him from the mayoralty over dual party membership. The concrete grounds, as reconstructed by El Tiempo, were not some generic alliance between arbitrary parties. Beltrán had been elected as the candidate of Colombia Justa Libres, but during the 2023 campaign he publicly backed council candidates from three other parties, Centro Democrático, Partido Conservador and La U, instead of backing only his own party’s list. On leaving office, Beltrán acknowledged no irregularity in his campaign conduct, he instead asked the authorities to rethink the very notion of dual party membership, as El Tiempo reported at the time.
Resigning a mayoralty over an annulment ruling does not necessarily close a political career in Colombia. In Beltrán’s case, it reopened one. He had been national regional manager during De la Espriella’s presidential campaign, and the new president brought him in August 2026 into a cabinet the Casa de Nariño itself presented as unusual for its gender parity, nine male ministers and nine female ministers.
The scrap metal that was never declared lost
The other file is older and darker. Between January and May 2024, according to the magazine Vorágine’s reporting, materials left a municipal warehouse at the Colegio San Ignacio that Bucaramanga city hall never wrote off nor officially declared as scrap. Satellite images show the depot full in February that year and empty by October. Bucaramanga’s Contraloría put the loss at 21.7 billion pesos, counting the material as though it were still in service, and in its November 2024 report named as presumed responsible Beltrán himself, his predecessor Juan Carlos Cárdenas and two infrastructure secretaries.
The name that has circulated most in the journalistic investigation, however, is not that of an official but of a relative. Óscar Ramírez, Beltrán’s brother-in-law, is named in the testimony of a municipal employee, Edgardo Rodríguez, who claimed to have received from him the details of the authorised carrier for removing the material, the plate number, the identity card, the driver. The Fiscalía opened an investigation and, as of this piece, was still verifying the authenticity of the voices in the audio recordings supplied by Rodríguez. As of this piece, no formal charge exists against either Beltrán or Ramírez.
The timeline reconstructed by Vorágine is precise. Between January and March 2024, the Colegio San Ignacio warehouse went unmonitored, with no security log kept. In April and May, the security logs record fifty removals of material. On 31 July 2025, with Beltrán already out of the mayoralty over the electoral annulment, opposition councillor Carlos Parra presented further evidence on the case before the city council itself, keeping open a file that, to date, no court has yet closed. It is that file, without conviction or charge but not shelved either, that Beltrán carried with him into the Housing Ministry.
Bucaramanga’s Contraloría set the value of the materials removed from municipal warehouses between January and May 2024 at 21.7 billion pesos, according to its report from November of that year.
A censure with no date
This 18 August, two separate procedures converged. Beltrán had already been summoned to a political oversight debate before the plenary of the House of Representatives, called weeks earlier to assess the De la Espriella government’s overall response to the earthquake emergency. That debate can end in recommendations with no direct bearing on the post. The censure motion follows a different logic, it is the only constitutional route capable of forcing a minister’s immediate removal, and it is the one the Pacto Histórico bloc formally filed that same day.
Congresswoman María Fernanda Carrascal summed up the argument without mincing words, a minister has public responsibilities that do not get suspended, she said, while there are families who don’t know where they are going to sleep. Article 135 of the Constitution requires the motion to be put forward by at least a tenth of the members of the chamber where it is raised, then approved by an absolute majority for the official’s immediate removal to take effect. No concrete voting date had yet been set as this piece went to press.
Recent history does not favour those pushing it. In thirty-five years under the 1991 Constitution, no censure motion has ever managed to remove a minister in Colombia, a mechanism Congress itself has used more to open oversight debates than to actually remove officials from office. The motion against Beltrán joins that list of attempts, with nothing in the recent record suggesting an exception is coming.
Beltrán could remain minister for months, carrying two unresolved files, a mayoralty lost to nullity and a scrap-metal case still under investigation, alongside a beach photograph as the episode that, paradoxically, travelled fastest of all. Nothing in his political record suggests that public exposure is new to him, nor that it will shift his calculations much from here.
What this episode exposes, beyond the isolated clumsiness of an official on holiday, is a mechanism of advancement that the earthquake’s circumstances simply made visible ahead of schedule. A mayor removed for electoral irregularities, with an unresolved fiscal file still open, reaches a ministry not despite that record but, to a large extent, thanks to services rendered during the campaign that carried his political patron to the presidency. The gender parity the Casa de Nariño displayed as a gesture of renewal coexists, within the very same cabinet, with this kind of political debt, nine women and nine men sharing a table where at least one seat was filled as a campaign settlement rather than a fresh start. Neither of these two things is new in Colombia, the recycling of political figures with open files and the assigning of campaign quotas to sensitive portfolios reflect decades of practice documented by the Colombian press. The only new thing, this time, was the beach, and the fact that someone photographed it just when the entire country had its eyes turned elsewhere.
Bogotá will go on arguing over quorums and hearing dates while Chocó goes on counting its dead beneath the rubble, while Buenaventura goes on waiting for the drinking water Toro demanded in the plenary, and while Santa Marta keeps, in the memory of someone else’s phone, the photograph of a minister on the sand…
G.S.
Sources
- Terremoto en Colombia, por qué está en riesgo la continuidad en el cargo del recién nombrado ministro de Vivienda
- Pacto Histórico radica moción de censura contra ministro de Vivienda
- Balance oficial de la UNGRD tras terremoto de magnitud 7,4 en Colombia
- Jaime Beltrán ya no va más como alcalde de Bucaramanga, Consejo de Estado confirma la nulidad de su elección por doble militancia
- La chatarra que se esfumó, un escándalo que salpica a la familia del alcalde de Bucaramanga
- Abelardo de la Espriella nombraría como ministro de Vivienda a exalcalde investigado por corrupción
