On the seventh of July two thousand and twenty-six, Colombia’s Ministry of Defence had everything ready for the empalme, the orderly handover of information between the outgoing and incoming governments, a mechanism the law requires after every change of president. Printed documents, technical teams convened, a table arranged with two symmetrical sides. On the outgoing side sat minister Pedro Sánchez with his staff. On the other side, the chairs reserved for the delegates of president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella remained empty throughout the session, while cameras recorded the scene. Hours earlier, De la Espriella had ordered, from his X account, the immediate suspension of the entire process, after outgoing president Gustavo Petro declared that he did not recognise the legitimacy of the incoming government.
The meeting that had everything ready, except the guests
The ministry did what institutions do when they are left on their own, it followed protocol. Sánchez presented his management report to his own officials, with the other end of the table left unoccupied. The ministry later issued a statement saying, in substance, that the empty chairs did not represent only a single absence, but a lost opportunity to strengthen institutional continuity in a sector where every decision can affect the security of millions of people. The phrase is not overstated if one considers what was actually being handed over that morning, the real state of the country’s military capabilities, pending alerts, open files.
What stands out is that, of all the empalme sectors, this is the one De la Espriella had loaded with the most personal symbolism. He appointed a retired general, Jorge Eduardo Mora, as his Defence minister, and placed other retired generals, former Senate candidates for his movement, on the empalme team for that sector. He promised a revival of the armed forces’ fighting spirit. He announced that he wants to be sworn in not before Congress, as tradition dictates, but at a military garrison in Popayán, to honour, he said, the true heroes of the homeland. The outgoing presidency replied to him in writing that this was not legally possible, that the seat of Congress is fixed by Law 5 of 1992 and that any change of venue depends on the chambers, not on the president-elect. The man who wants to take his oath surrounded by uniforms could not get a single member of his own team to sit down facing the uniforms that were meant to hand him the country.
A scene that was also stagecraft
The episode should not be simplified in a single direction. The suspension was not entirely unilateral, even though it began that way, outgoing finance minister Germán Ávila himself announced hours later that his own team was also freezing the joint tables, alleging that De la Espriella’s delegates had called officials of the current government former convicts and relatives of convicts, and that he would not tolerate, in his words, a single further attack. And Petro, far from limiting himself to lamenting the suspension, turned it into an explicit communications device, announcing on his X account that empty chairs would be set out, waiting for those who stole the election to understand what governing meant. The image that circulated that week in the Colombian press was not an accidental discovery by photographers, it was, at least in part, an editorial decision by the outgoing government.
That does not erase the central fact, no incoming delegate showed up to the appointment at Defence, cameras or no cameras. Vice-president-elect José Manuel Restrepo replied that the suspension did not stop his team’s work, that nearly thirteen million Colombians had chosen a new direction and that no one had the right to question that legitimacy. It may well be true that the team kept working behind closed doors. What it failed to do was be present at the one piece of stagecraft that actually mattered, the one that showed live whether the new government knows how to distinguish between defending its political legitimacy and fulfilling a legal obligation that does not depend on the other side behaving well.
The Ministry of Defence stated that the empty chairs represented a lost opportunity to strengthen institutional continuity in a sector where every decision can affect the security of millions of Colombians.
Thirteen hundred people, twenty-two tables, six months of prior work
The numerical contrast is where the episode stops being an anecdote and becomes a data point. On the thirtieth of June, De la Espriella’s empalme team was formally installed, thirteen hundred experts and facilitators spread across twenty-two technical tables, coordinated by Restrepo. This was not an apparatus improvised overnight, before the public launch a data-gathering project called Noah’s Ark had already been running for months, with around six hundred people using artificial intelligence and data mining to build what the team itself called a baseline covering seventy-five per cent of each sector. The apparatus existed, had a history, had a budget, and days later it added sixty million dollars in non-reimbursable financing from the Inter-American Development Bank, something unprecedented in the history of Colombian transitions, which until now had been settled internally and at no external cost.
Those sixty million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank did not turn out to be as simple a fact as announced either. A lawyer filed a formal petition demanding that the new government disclose the official documentation behind the operation, after a jurist consulted by the press pointed out that the bank’s own internal rules limit to three million dollars the commitments its presidency can approve directly, with any larger amount requiring approval from the Board of Executive Directors, as well as a formal request from a sitting head of state, not a president-elect. De la Espriella’s team responded on social media that the money was a donation, not a debt, and asked why anyone should fear transparency. The question remained unanswered, as did the underlying doubt, sixty million dollars for an internal administrative mechanism, financed from abroad, is in itself an unprecedented fact that deserved more scrutiny than it received amid the noise of the fight with Petro.
All of that accumulation of names, tables, months of work and now also externally financed money under review did not stop the chair from staying empty at the one moment when that work was supposed to become visible in front of the cameras. This was not a problem of installed capacity. It was a problem of deciding, in the heat of the moment, on the very morning of the appointment, that the political fight with Petro mattered more than the staging of its own technical rigour.
Abelardo de la Espriella’s empalme team was formally installed on the thirtieth of June with thirteen hundred experts and facilitators spread across twenty-two technical tables, under the coordination of vice-president-elect José Manuel Restrepo.
The starting flag, and then no one else
De la Espriella showed up in person for the team’s launch on the thirtieth of June, gave a speech about truth, transparency and technical rigour, and has barely appeared in the process since, which has been left entirely in Restrepo’s hands. His own team called that launch a banderazo de salida, the expression used to wave the flag that starts a motor race, a vocabulary of spectacle applied to the handover of the machinery of the state. The same man who built his fortune defending media-friendly clients, who launched a clothing brand, an award-winning rum and a wine, who published five books and two albums, seems to treat the presidency with the same reflex, the flashy launch first, sustained presence later, whenever it arrives.
The composition of the team itself also contradicts the image of a total break with the traditional political class that De la Espriella sold during the campaign as his main asset. At the presidential administrative department, the man in charge is Andrés Barreto, who was general manager of the De la Espriella Lawyers firm before becoming a superintendent under Iván Duque’s government, an appointment the Council of State eventually annulled for failing to meet the requirements of the post. At Education sits former prosecutor Viviane Morales, wife of Carlos Alonso Lucio, one of the ideologues behind the whole campaign and a former member of the M-19 guerrilla. The outsider rhetoric coexists, without apparent contradiction, with a network of appointments that reproduces long-standing personal and professional ties within the same old circle.
In parallel, the territorial empalme with governors and mayors is proceeding without major setbacks, according to regional press reports, which rules out talk of a general collapse of the transition. The problem does not appear to be a shortage of people or money. It is more specific, and therefore more uncomfortable, the willingness to abandon precisely the table where the new government had to demonstrate, live, that its anti-corruption drive and its technical rigour were not merely a launch speech.
Legitimacy as calculation, not as principle
It is worth looking at the other side of the board too, because this selective relationship with the rules is not exclusive to De la Espriella. Iván Cepeda, the defeated Pacto Histórico candidate, recognised his rival’s victory on the very day the vote count closed, with figures certified by the Registraduría, endorsed by the European Union’s observation mission and by the Carter Center. That same day, however, he began speaking of an alleged mass vote-buying operation and manipulation through artificial intelligence, making his full recognition of the new government conditional on legality rules he set himself. Days later, when the incoming government announced the creation of urban search units staffed by military reservists, Cepeda invoked Article 22A of the Constitution, which bans civilian armed groups, and turned that specific measure into the formal trigger for his call to civil disobedience. It is possible to recognise an election result and, at the same time, make that acceptance conditional on terms one reserves the right to declare unmet oneself. Colombia currently has two politicians who manage their relationship with the rules this way, each in his own way, one abandoning the table the law obliged him to occupy, the other accepting the scoreboard under a conditionality he controls himself. Neither of them needed to break a written rule to manage it, it was enough for each to decide, according to the convenience of the moment, how much of the institutional order he was willing to inhabit and how much he preferred to leave empty, like that chair no one occupied at Defence.
The empalme process itself has precedents of tension, the Colombian press has recalled that the last time a transition felt this loaded with mutual suspicion was almost three decades ago, with the departure of Ernesto Samper’s government amid accusations of financing with drug-trafficking money. The difference is that, back then, the conflict revolved around a specific judicial investigation. Here, it revolves around whether two men are willing to sit at the same table long enough to complete a formality the law does not allow them to skip. It remains to be seen, once the current fight between them eventually passes, whether that same chair goes empty again the next time something uncomfortable needs to be said in public…
G.S.
Sources
- Fuerte reclamo del Ministerio de Defensa al nuevo ministro tras ausentarse de la sesión de empalme
- Gustavo Petro empalme Abelardo De la Espriella sillas vacías
- Presidente electo Abelardo De La Espriella ordenó a su equipo suspender el proceso de empalme con el gobierno Petro
- Así quedó el equipo de De la Espriella para el empalme, 22 grupos revisarán cada cartera con análisis forenses
- Más de 600 expertos conforman el equipo de Empalme de De La Espriella
- Los USD 60 millones para el empalme ya desataron crisis para De la Espriella
- Método, militancia y anticorrupción, señales del empalme de De La Espriella
- Empalmes paralelos de De la Espriella y Petro marcan transición de gobierno atípica
- Gobierno informa a De la Espriella que no puede posesionarse en una guarnición militar
