If Abelardo de la Espriella’s first four days are any indication of what his entire term will be like, we are in for some very dark comedy over the next four years. Here are eight highlights from his inauspicious beginning.
(1) On Inauguration Day a clip of him looking like a fool marching in place and saluting during military honors went viral after it was seen to have his own military officers looking at him with a look of bewilderment as to what on earth he thought he was doing. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department revealed that Colombia will receive a $1 billion support package for its participation in Trump’s Shield of the Americas project, which uses the drug war as a pretext to attack political enemies. A car bomb exploding the same day seemed to highlight the renewed chaos such policies are sinking the country into.
(2) President de la Espriella showed up hours late to announce Colombia’s 7.4 earthquake on August 10, smiling and blowing kisses to his supporters while offering them a “Look at me! Look at me! How ya doin?” greeting, apparently oblivious to the buckled roads, crashed vehicles, and collapsed buildings devastating half the country. A Latin American mini-Trump, he has captured the required spirit of buffoonery well.
(3) His first press conference was a video of himself talking about freedom of expression.
(4) With the country reeling from the earthquake, he took time to re-establish relations with Israel, broken off due to Tel Aviv’s mass extermination in Palestine, and recognize the Holy State’s sovereignty over Syria’s Golan Heights. Making Colombia great again.
(5) He also recognized Morocco’s colonial claim to the Western Sahara.
(6) He backed Colombia out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which the country had spent over a decade trying to get into. The U.S. ambassador-designate to Colombia made the announcement, not De la Espriella.
(7) He talked up Plan Patriot 2, which aims to re-start the country’s militarized coca eradication program, though it had devastating social and environmental consequences the first time around, and is opposed by anti-government parties and environmental, peasant, and indigenous organizations this time. A form of chemical and biological warfare, its goal is to clear undesired populations off rural lands desired by transnational corporations – de la Espriella’s constituency – in favor of cattle ranching, oil extraction, and vast plantations.
(8) With lives hanging in the balance in the early aftermath of the earthquake, he refused international earthquake aid. We don’t need no stinking welfare!
Even before being sworn in, De la Espriella met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, a higher priority than doing anything to help ordinary Colombians. He also met with Javier Milei, telling the Argentine president that the policies he is implementing served as inspiration for his own proposed economic policy, a strange confession given that Milei’s policies have plunged Argentina’s currency to its lowest value in history and provoked massive protest, occasioning frequent street brawls outside Congress, which are forcibly broken up with water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas.
Or perhaps it’s not so strange. After all, De la Espriella is only tangentially related to Colombia. A U.S. citizen who until recently lived in Italy, his constituents are the owners of massive private wealth, their professional servants, and Israel fanatics. Struggling Colombians are for him no more than a minor irritant to be quickly brushed aside, like ants at a picnic.
His career focus has been as a lawyer for the AUC, a paramilitary conglomerate that sowed terror and massacre in Colombia for decades, a war on the poor that painstakingly evolved into a peace and reconciliation process in 2016, which De la Espriella now eagerly seeks to unravel. The negotiations ended Colombia’s forty-year civil war, disarmed over 11,000 combatants, transformed the rebel group into the Comunes political party, and established the Special Jurisdiction for Peace to deliver transitional justice and landmark restorative sentences for victims while reintegrating thousands of ex-combatants into civilian life through community and cooperative projects. For many of those who laid down their arms, however, their reward has been getting assassinated or disappeared by death squads.
In the recent elections outgoing Gustavo Petro and his would-be successor Ivan Cepeda represented the path of continuing the peace process in order to complete a social transformation that would eliminate the mass poverty and injustice that are the driving force behind political violence, which the right seeks to repress, not resolve. In short, the choice Colombian voters faced at the ballot box was between striving for social peace nonviolently or taking a giant step towards unrestrained state warfare against the common people, a policy that cannot bring social peace short of complete extermination. The overwhelming majority of Colombians didn’t endorse De le Espriella’s iron fist agenda, either by staying home or voting for other candidates.
Unpopular though it may be, De la Espriella honed that agenda for years as a lawyer helping figures like Jorge Caballero, Rocio Arias, and Eleonora Pineda, spokespersons for the paramilitary AUC in Congress who were convicted of parapolitics, as well as Juan Carlos, “El Tuso Sierra,” a former drug-trafficker and also a member of the AUC. But his most prominent client was ex-president Alvaro Uribe, whom he has advised regarding the judicial process opened by former House representative for Bogota, Ivan Cepeda. Today Cepeda says, “Paramilitarism created an apparatus of death that erected an immense mountain of corpses upon which the pinnacle of power in Colombia was reached.” His recent presidential candidacy sought justice against the narco-paramilitary Uribe and his most ardent defender – De la Espriella – who as a U.S. citizen had to swear absolute loyalty to Washington, effectively an oath of patriotic loyalty to the empire that sponsors all the political violence.
Uribe’s election in 2002 inaugurated one of the bloodiest campaigns of state terror in Colombia’s history, with Colombian state and paramilitary forces committing about 80% of the country’s human rights crimes, compared to 16% by guerrillas. The death squads were not independent of the Colombian state, as was frequently declared by Washington, but an outgrowth of it: police even patrolled alongside the paramilitaries.
Not surprisingly, Uribe’s name turned up in the files of the U.S. DEA and the CIA as a narcotrafficker, one of the most wanted international drug traffickers, in fact. A declassified National Security Agency report dated September 23, 1991 described him as a collaborator of the Medellin cartel and a personal friend of the notorious Pablo Escobar, who former Colombian presidential candidate and one-time FARC hostage Ingrid Betancourt described as a “monster who had showed his fourteen year old son how to dig out a victim’s eyeball with a red-hot spoon.” Such are the realities of iron-fist politics in Colombia. The DEA report states that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the United States and Colombia. These individuals were also contracted as ‘hit men’ to assassinate individuals … and to perform terrorist attacks against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”
A key feature of the vicious class warfare of those years was the funding of a 31,000 member strong death squad that sowed terror throughout the country, killing thousands of peasants wherever the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas were influential. Hundreds of trade union activists were assassinated by hit men in broad daylight in towns and cities occupied by the army. Human rights workers, as well as journalists and professors who dared to report on military massacres, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed, some beheaded or disemboweled.
Millions of peasants were driven off their land and herded into wretched urban slums, the land taken over by prominent paramilitary chiefs or large landowners. This purging of political undesirables was strictly in accordance with Pentagon counter-insurgency training, which counseled the Colombian military to destroy the “social infrastructure” of the FARC, including its longstanding and extensive family, community, and social ties with the peasantry. The goal was to annihilate the social support the guerrillas depended on to survive, not negotiate a way for them to survive differently. Not without reason was Colombia called “the genocidal democracy.”1Geraldo Javier, S. J. Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy Common Courage Press, 1996 Virtually all of its human rights abuses went unpunished.
Instead of addressing the savage poverty that was the root of the war, Uribe perpetuated it while viciously attacking the inevitable guerrilla response. In a country of 45 million people, about 11 million could not afford even one nutritious meal a day and close to two-thirds of the population could not afford to meet its most basic subsistence needs. In rural areas there were virtually no decent roads, schools, or hospitals, and the poverty rate rose as high as 85%. Such a status quo could only be maintained by major applications of state violence, which is to say, death squads.
A complete bill of indictment against Uribe would take considerable time to draw up. He openly collaborated in the crimes of the death squads; caused massive forced displacement – over four million Colombians were uprooted from the land; ignored structural problems in the economy perpetuating massive unemployment and under-employment; allowed funds for the poor and social sectors to be systematically transferred to drug lords, paramilitaries, rich industrialists, and personal friends; denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors; closed down some of Colombia’s biggest hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs; systematically murdered union organizers, illegally invaded Ecuador; used the judicial system to attack civilians and political opponents; illegally assigned contracts to personal relatives; violated Colombian sovereignty by permitting seven U.S. military bases in Colombia (the Colombian Constitution does not allow the stationing of foreign troops on Colombian soil). In short, he worked long and diligently to convert the Colombian state into a major criminal enterprise.
De la Espriella differs from Uribe in depending more on personal charisma than traditional party structures, but he clearly builds on Uribe’s hardline security legacy while only superficially breaking with the Colombian establishment. According to Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre, De la Espriella, who ran for president as a political “outsider,” is possibly the most well-connected “outsider” that Colombia has ever had. He comes from a wealthy family close to Alvaro Uribe in the department of Cordoba. In his youth he founded a “peace foundation,” FIPAZ, which was actually funded by the paramilitaries themselves, specifically by Salvatore Mancuso, the historic and bloodthirsty commander of the paramilitary AUC, who promoted candidates close to the paramilitaries, including Uribe, and dedicated the organization to making public speeches on university campuses promoting the paramilitaries.
Espriella focuses on the “free market” and “merit,” and has promised to reduce the size of the Colombian state by up to 40% in order to provide what the late Edward Herman called a “favorable investment climate.” That’s a climate where taxes are low, profit repatriation allowances generous, poor people too terrified to lift their heads, independent journalists dead or in jail, and workplace and environmental regulations weak or non-existent. This is practically a description of utopia from De la Espriella’s point of view (right-wing libertarianism), and he’s eagerly pursuing the capitalist promised land. He favors “flexible” labor (subordinate to capital) and “productive” environmental regulation (pro-growth), and since taking office on August 7, has announced the repeal of the wealth tax, a levy applied only to those holding liquid assets in excess of 20 million pesos, a tiny minority of Colombians. Meanwhile, his Finance Minister Miguel Gomez Martinez plans a budget cut of at least 20 trillion Colombian pesos, approximately six billion U.S. dollars, which would require a halt to almost all government spending to implement.
In short, the DOGE plan. What could go wrong?
Sources:
Kurt Hackbarth, “Soberanía, The Mexican Politics Podcast,” You Tube, August 12, 2026. (Segment two of this episode deals with De la Espriella).
“Cuba: breaking with the island shows ‘clear subordination’ of Abelardo de la Espriella to the U.S.” La Jornada, (Spanish) July 28, 2026.
“De La Espriella: The Candidate of the Establishment,” Sasi Alejandre, La Otra Voz (The Other Voice), June 19, 2026.
“A Razor-Thin Victory for the Colombian Right,” Sandra Rátiva Gaona,” ZNet, June 27, 2026.
James Petras, “Colombia: State Terror in the Name of Peace,” May 4, 2010
Hans Bennett, “Neo-liberalism Needs Death Squads in Colombia,” Upside Down World, September 3, 2009.
Manuel Rozental, “The Circle Opens Out: New Evidence of Criminality in Colombian Regime,” Upside Down World, May 25, 2010.
Laura Violeta Davia Lopez, “A Government Opposed to Peace is a Government Opposed to Life,” ZNet, July 20, 2026.
Description of Pablo Escobar is from Ingrid Betancourt, Until Death Do Us Part – My Struggle To Reclaim Colombia, (Harper Collins, 2002).
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