With the broken ties between the outgoing and incoming government, and amid strong polarization, Colombia witnessed this Friday the inauguration of Abelardo de la Espriella as president for the 2026-2030 term. The ceremony where the president-elect received the presidential command marked an unprecedented event in the recent history of the country, because the main event did not take place in Bogotá, but in the USC arena in the city of Cali, for logistical and security reasons.
Hours before the swearing-in, the outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, gave a speech and stated that “the popular mandate is respected.”
Before taking office, De la Espriella met with the President of Chile, José Antonio Kast, and of Argentina, Javier Milei. Former presidents of Colombia César Gaviria, Andrés Pastrana, Álvaro Uribe, and Iván Duque attended the ceremony. Other figures were also present, such as FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
De la Espriella was born in Bogotá on July 31, 1978. From childhood, he was drawn to microphones and stages. He was a host of a program on the radio station La Voz de Montería. “For me, being in front of a camera or a microphone is like being in my backyard,” he said, according to El País.
Despite his ambition for journalism, his father urged him to study Law. He entered the Sergio Arboleda University of Bogotá, a cradle of right-wing leaders. There he traded whisky, perfumes, and emeralds in New York. “On each little trip, I was left with two or three thousand dollars, after paying expenses at the highest level,” he told his biographer, Ángel Becassino.
He attempted a political career in 1997, when he ran for mayor of Chapinera—a community near Bogotá—but lost.
He founded his law firm in 2002, and his first national exposure came with the paramilitary demobilization opened by the Uribe government, when he created the Fipaz foundation and defended that the leaders of the paramilitary organization Autodefensas Unidas (AUC) be tried for political crimes instead of ordinary crimes.
In this context, he represented politicians investigated for “parapolitics.” Thus, his law firm’s revenue rose from 11 million Colombian pesos to 2,000 million. “Parapolitics is an excellent niche of work,” he said then in an interview with the Colombian media Semana.
With this, besides millions, he gained the attention and criticism of the media. Between 2008 and 2019, he filed 109 lawsuits for slander and libel, and his firm filed 28 civil lawsuits against journalists. “I have realized that nothing hurts independent journalism more than the pocketbook,” he said in an interview with the television network RCN.
Today he declares control of dozens of companies in various sectors: real estate, livestock, gastronomy, and alcoholic beverages, in addition to his law firm. Although, according to investigations into his assets, the only one in the black would be his law firm, De la Espriella Lawyers.
He has Italian and American citizenship, and residences in both countries. He declared himself atheist but claims to have converted to Catholicism.
After 28 years without a formal approach to politics, in 2025 he created the political movement Defensores de la Patria, declared anti-establishment, with the promise of recovering economic growth and security in a country battered by 60 years of struggle against paramilitary organizations and drug traffickers.
Years ago, in his more liberal phase, he supported same-sex marriage and abortion. However, during his presidential campaign, he criticized his rivals, the Centro Democrático ticket composed of the former presidential candidate Paloma Valencia and the vice-presidential candidate Juan Daniel Oviedo—an openly homosexual economist—arguing the possibility that children might have their “gender changed” at school, according to La Silla.
Less than a year after starting his campaign to reach the Casa de Nariño, De la Espriella prevailed at the polls. According to the Colombian electoral body, the criminal lawyer and businessman obtained almost 13 million votes.
Asked by La Tercera, the director of La Silla Vacía, Juanita León, referred to his media character as the main factor. “Abelardo doesn’t have a turning point that one can say: ‘well, it was that particular event.’ I think he had a very media-driven career all his life,” she explained.
But his “firm” discourse on security could explain the rapid political rise of the president, according to León. De la Espriella created his political movement on August 5, 2025, less than two months after the senator and presidential pre-candidate for Centro Democrático, Miguel Uribe Turbay, was a victim of assassination.
After his victory, while shouting behind a security glass, De la Espriella said: “To the drug traffickers, terrorists, kidnappers, extortionists, and corrupt people who steal the people’s resources, I notify you tonight that Colombia has a government again.”
Between 2013 and 2019, De la Espriella represented the person identified as Nicolás Maduro’s frontman, Álex Saab, now prosecuted in the United States for money laundering and bribery. He provided commercial advice and later represented him in a criminal investigation. In an interview with El Espectador, Saab described him in 2021 as “a great lawyer and friend.”
The now president has declared that he advised his client to cooperate with U.S. agencies and that he was deceived about his ties to the Venezuelan regime.
In 2017, De la Espriella published a column in El Heraldo titled “Death to the tyrant,” referring to Maduro. At the same time, he represented Saab and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from front companies of the chavista frontman.
León pointed to that double personality as one of the characteristics of the newly sworn-in Colombian president.
Read more Morning-after pill in Chile: the fears that never came true
“He is a man full of contradictions. And one of the biggest, in my view, is that while he criticized Maduro’s regime, at the same time he was advising his main frontman,” she told La Tercera.
That same year, former Venezuelan prosecutor Luisa Ortega Díaz publicly accused Saab as Maduro’s frontman. “De la Espriella filed a slander lawsuit on behalf of Álex Saab. And at that time, he was already helping Saab negotiate a deal with the United States for that same matter,” León recalled.
An investigative file from the State of Florida, United States, in 2014 shows De la Espriella received more than $370,000 from two companies Saab used in Venezuela for the regime’s subsidized food program and for public housing that was never built. With part of those funds, De la Espriella financed an apartment in Miami.
“He began a campaign mainly on social media, with an ecosystem of influencers, where he started capturing the imagination of the right with the idea that he would be the new Bukele, that he would have a strong hand against crime, extortion, and the failure of Petro’s Total Peace,” León explained.
When Centro Democrático chose Paloma Valencia as its candidate in March, the right-wing electorate was already captured by “El Tigre.” “What people wanted was someone more like an avenger, someone who would bring order and security,” she added.
The most ambitious security promise of the now president includes three phases of thirty days each. A military and police offensive in the first ninety days of his term with the goal of recovering territorial control of Colombia from organized crime, according to his program “La Patria Milagro.”
Despite the promise, the researcher from the Ideas for Peace Foundation, Gerson Arias, explained to La Tercera that the main difficulty of De la Espriella’s term will be not only to recover territorial control but also to stop the expansion of illegal armed groups with reduced military capabilities.
“Today we are talking about approximately 29,000 members of armed groups. At the beginning of this government, we had 15,000,” he said.
Additionally, he explained, the zones of dispute between those structures increased from seven to fourteen, and confinement, threats, and child recruitment reactivated.
According to the researcher, the effective capacity of the Colombian public force is around 40% and he considered it unlikely that the goal will be met within the promised timeframe.
Furthermore, Arias explained, the zones where irregular military forces dispute among themselves would also have doubled. They went from seven to fourteen in recent years.
And the most urgent zones would be the borders. Nariño, on the border with Ecuador. Cauca, under control of FARC dissidents and the National Liberation Army. And Catatumbo, next to Venezuela. “The FARC dissidents are very strong and will give the president a very tough welcome,” Libreros warned.
Although he sees possible advances in the pursuit of leaders, Arias said that De la Espriella “will crash against the lack of capacities” of the State.
Without those capacities and without negotiation tables, experts anticipated that the president will resort to the executive route. Libreros anticipated that De la Espriella will decree constitutional states of exception to manage security without going through Congress, will close the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, and will end the rules that enable dialogues, leaving force as the only way.
“All this sounds nice in a campaign,” he said.
“Go ahead and execute it.” The result of this, he predicted, is that the new president would have accelerated political wear.
In this regard, consultant Mario Puerta pointed to political polarization as the main challenge for De la Espriella.
With a runoff that left 49.66% for De la Espriella and 48.70% for the official candidate, Iván Cepeda. “He arrives at the Presidency without a solid political coalition that guarantees governability,” Puerta told
La Tercera, and warned that Defensores de la Patria will suffer growing distances with the traditional Colombian right, mainly Centro Democrático.
Besides security and politics, Arias pointed to inherited debt that tightens fiscal capacity, stalled investment projects in the regions, and social mobilizations, with
Petro leading the opposition. “He will have to prioritize, and when you prioritize, you stop doing things,” said the researcher. With the Health Promoting Entities—the companies that manage and should guarantee access to medical services—on the verge of collapse and three years of shortages of essential medicines. “Simply to give you an acetaminophen, there is no way,” he illustrated.
Read more Book Review: From Los Prisioneros in Peru to Dorian Astor
