Abelardo de la Espriella is sworn in today, August 7, as Colombia's president in a ceremony unfolding roughly 300 miles from the presidential palace he has already said he'll turn into a museum. Instead of Bogotá's Plaza de Bolívar, the 47-year-old former criminal defense lawyer takes his oath at a university arena in Cali, marking the first time in over a century that a Colombian presidential transfer of power has taken place outside the capital. Vice President-elect José Manuel Restrepo is sworn in immediately afterward, in the same session. It's a fitting opening scene for a president who spent his campaign promising to tear up the playbook of his predecessor, Gustavo Petro, from the moment he takes the sash.
A Ceremony Built on Compromise
De la Espriella originally wanted to be sworn in at a military garrison in Cauca, a region long marked by Colombia's armed conflict — a break with the custom of every elected Colombian president taking office in Bogotá. Petro, still commander-in-chief until the handover, declined to make any military installation available, and recurring eruptions from the Puracé volcano near Cauca's airport ultimately pushed organizers toward Cali, long a stronghold of Petro's political left. Congress relocated for the day to the Arena USC at Santiago de Cali University, a covered venue holding roughly 2,600 people, where senators and representatives will watch De la Espriella take the oath at 3 p.m. from Senate president Honorio Henríquez before he heads to an army garrison to address Colombia's military as his first act, rather than addressing Congress, as tradition calls for.
Days earlier, Colombia's Consejo de Estado turned back a last-minute legal bid to block the ceremony from happening in Cali at all, though a separate challenge remained alive in an administrative tribunal.
Petro will not attend. The opposition Historic Pact has organized protests in the city, and an Indigenous Minga delegation is also expected. Washington is sending Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to lead its delegation — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once rumored to attend, is absent from the official list, a decision U.S. officials attribute to scheduling conflicts in Washington.
Four Priorities for Day One — Not the Full Ninety Decrees
Months before the runoff, De la Espriella told El Tiempo he had 90 decrees ready to sign the moment he took office, touching security, the economy, health care and education, and declared he was "ready to govern from day one." That figure has followed him through the campaign. But reporting from the days immediately preceding today's ceremony describes something narrower for August 7 specifically: four priority measures that will be signed by decree today, with bills covering the rest of his program filed in Congress over the following weeks.
Those four measures are a "Defense Bloc" targeting extortion and homicide in Colombian cities; a formal deadline for illegal armed groups to disarm; the consolidation and closure of diplomatic posts abroad as part of a broader austerity push; and a restructuring of how security forces operate regionally, shifting some operational control away from Bogotá — alongside continued backing for infrastructure projects like the Antioquia railway.
Also expected in the wider decree package once it rolls out: a declaration of economic emergency, letting De la Espriella temporarily govern by decree and cut regulatory barriers in line with the free-market approach he's championed; a parallel "humanitarian crisis" declaration for the health system; and the start of a process to build ten so-called megaprisons meant to ease severe overcrowding. There's an irony baked into that economic emergency plan specifically: last December, De la Espriella and an ally sued Petro's own economic emergency declaration before the Constitutional Court, calling it unconstitutional and accusing the outgoing government of designing it to fund Iván Cepeda's presidential campaign — a decree the court ultimately struck down in April.
No Negotiations, No Glyphosate
Security policy is where De la Espriella's rhetoric has stayed most consistent — and most combative. On the campaign trail he vowed to fight "narco-terrorism" by striking illegal camps and fumigating what he's called 330,000 hectares of coca, using bioherbicides rather than glyphosate to comply with a Constitutional Court ruling. His 90-day security goals include taking down at least ten leaders of criminal organizations and standing up an anti-extortion task force built from police and military veterans.
The clearest marker of his break with Petro's approach came the day De la Espriella received his winner's credentials from electoral authorities, when he gave illegal armed groups a window to surrender or face what he called the full weight of the state. "You have a month to come to reason and arrange your surrender to the rule of law," he told the groups on June 25, adding that his government would offer no "generous deals" of the kind he says Petro extended. One U.S.-focused policy tracker has since described the same ultimatum as a 100-day window rather than 30 — but the one-month framing is what De la Espriella said on camera, and it's what Colombian outlets reported in real time, so that's the figure used here.
On the international front, he's said Colombia will join the Trump administration's regional security bloc, the Shield of the Americas, on day one, with operations run out of Medellín rather than Bogotá. Colombian and U.S. defense officials have also discussed a new joint security initiative modeled on the Álvaro Uribe-era strategy known as Plan Patriota.
Reversals, Rapprochements and Cutting Ties
De la Espriella's foreign policy amounts to a near-total reversal of Petro's positions. He intends to restore diplomatic and economic ties with Israel, which Petro severed in 2024 over the war in Gaza, move Colombia's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and withdraw Colombia's support for South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. He's also said he'll sever relations entirely with Cuba and Nicaragua and shutter 14 embassies and roughly 15 consulates as a cost-cutting move. "There will be no ties whatsoever with tyrannies in my government," he has said of the closures.
The Rhetoric That Got Him Here
De la Espriella's political identity was built almost entirely outside traditional politics — two decades as a criminal defense attorney representing, among others, figures tied to paramilitary and drug-trafficking cases, a background critics raised repeatedly on the trail. Supporters nicknamed him "El Tigre," a moniker Donald Trump embraced throughout the campaign in a pair of enthusiastic Truth Social endorsements describing him as a strong, tough leader. After the runoff, Trump told reporters at the White House that De la Espriella had called to thank him for the endorsement, adding simply: "He's going to be a great president." That backing wasn't uncontroversial: eleven U.S. congressional Democrats wrote to Secretary Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche questioning U.S. officials' involvement in Colombia's race and pointing to De la Espriella's legal history.
Colombian press-freedom groups have separately flagged that De la Espriella was the complainant in 109 defamation and slander cases against journalists between 2008 and 2019, most of them dismissed, which the Foundation for Press Freedom has characterized as a pattern of judicial harassment. He became a U.S. citizen in February 2023, in addition to holding Colombian citizenship by birth and Italian citizenship through family ancestry.
Perhaps the sharpest thread running through his rhetoric is an ideological about-face on peace talks themselves: two decades ago he took part in negotiations over the demobilization of a right-wing paramilitary group; on the trail this year he categorically rejected repeating that approach with Colombia's current armed groups. "There will be no peace processes in my government," he said during the campaign, treating every holdout as a target for prosecution rather than a negotiating partner.
A Fragmented Congress — and a Party of His Own, Finally
Governing may prove harder than decreeing. De la Espriella ran for president under the banner of Salvación Nacional, a small party that holds just one seat in the House and four in the Senate — not his own movement, Defenders of the Homeland, which had no ballot line of its own at the time. Colombia's National Electoral Council only granted Defenders of the Homeland legal recognition as a party on August 3, clearing the way for state funding and future ballot access — but for now, it holds no seats in Congress at all. He's built a governing coalition with Álvaro Uribe's Democratic Center, the Conservative Party, Radical Change and We Believe, but even combined it falls short of a working majority. His preferred candidate for Senate president, Alfredo Deluque, lost to a Democratic Center rival, Honorio Henríquez, by a 56-to-45 vote last month — a sign even his allies won't automatically follow his lead. He did notch one early win: Congress agreed to his request to move the inauguration itself to Cali.
Colombia's electoral authority certified De la Espriella's runoff win on June 25 with a final tally of 49.66% to Cepeda's 48.70% — a margin of well under a full percentage point.
