Colombia Inaugurates New President in Cali, Not Bogota

Colombia swore in a new president on Friday, August 7, in a city that is not the capital, and Belgrade has two reasons to take note. One is arithmetic: Latin America is rounding out a bloc of governments aligned with Washington, and that continent carries a block of votes in bodies where Serbian diplomacy counts every one of them, several of whose countries shifted their position on Kosovo’s independence over the past decade. The other is substantive: on the same day, in front of the military, Abelardo de la Espriela declared that negotiating with armed actors on Colombian soil is a closed chapter, a position rarely stated so bluntly in Europe.

He took the oath of office around 4:30 p.m. local time as the 36th president of Colombia, in a university auditorium in Cali, the country’s third largest city, in the southwest. The presidential sash was handed to him by Senate President Honorio Miguel Enriquez Pineda. Holding the ceremony outside Bogota broke a tradition more than a century old and required lawmakers to first approve moving the session of Congress, which the new president justified with a promise to return power to the regions.

Why wasn’t the ceremony held in Bogota?

Cali was not chosen for protocol reasons. The southwest of Colombia is territory where dissident factions of the demobilized FARC operate, groups that rejected the peace agreement signed a decade ago, along with the Clan del Golfo cartel and the National Liberation Army (ELN). For days before the ceremony the city was under heavy security, with armored vehicles lining the approach roads and police checkpoints searching vehicles for explosives.

The original plan was to hold the entire event at a military barracks, as a gesture to the armed forces. Outgoing president Gustavo Petro put a stop to that.

“The law specifies where the seat of Congress is, and the new president must take office at a session of Congress, just as I did and everyone before me did,” Petro wrote on X a few days before the ceremony.

The compromise split the day in two: the oath before lawmakers at the university, followed by a trip to a nearby military battalion, where the inaugural address was delivered in front of soldiers.

Message to the military: dialogue is exhausted

A 48 year old lawyer and businessman with no prior elected office, who largely self-financed his campaign and whom supporters call El Tigre, used that speech to reject his predecessor’s approach of negotiation.

“I am sending a firm message to the people: the time has come to restore order, authority and freedom,” De la Espriela said in his first address as president.

Alongside a promise to “ruthlessly defeat narco-terrorism,” he added that “there will be no room for maneuvers that undermine the nation’s stability” and that “the option of dialogue is completely exhausted.” The wording matters because it does not just describe a method, it defines the other side’s status: a group with which no one negotiates is no longer a political counterpart but a target.

A 40 percent cut and a return to oil

The economic part of his program was announced the same day, with the same sharpness. De la Espriela pledged:

• to cut government spending by up to 40 percent
• to expand oil and gas production, including what he called the “development of responsible and sustainable fracking”
• to strengthen the state oil company Ecopetrol
• to bring Colombia into a regional anti-drug-trafficking coalition called Shield of the Americas, formed at a summit hosted by Washington in March
• to restore diplomatic relations with Israel and cut ties with Cuba and Nicaragua, which he called tyrannies

He told business leaders his government would be a “partner in investing in Colombia,” arguing the country cannot afford to rely on proven oil reserves that will last only a few more years, or accept the decline in gas reserves.

Washington promises a billion dollars

The State Department announced the same Friday that the Trump administration intends, with Congress’s approval, to provide $1 billion in security assistance. The statement called the package “a cornerstone of a renewed partnership.” Trump personally backed De la Espriela’s campaign, and the American delegation at the ceremony was led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The guest list shows how much this was treated as a regional event rather than a domestic ceremony. Attendees included Spain’s King Felipe VI, Argentine president Javier Milei, Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa and Chilean politician Jose Antonio Kast, along with FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

No Santos, no left

What reports easily miss is who was not in the room. The new president barred former heads of state Juan Manuel Santos and Ernesto Samper from attending, citing coherence and distance from traditional politics. Santos is the man who signed a peace agreement with the FARC in 2016 and won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year for it. His absence from a ceremony that proclaimed the end of dialogue was not a protocol footnote but the shortest possible illustration of the change in course.

Lawmakers from the Historic Pact, the coalition with the most seats in Congress, boycotted the ceremony. Petro had initially disputed the result of the June 21 runoff, in which De la Espriela defeated Ivan Cepeda, claiming the count had been altered. The National Electoral Council confirmed the result on June 25, international observers dismissed the claim, and Petro ultimately said he would respect the outcome. On inauguration day, protests broke out in Cali, Bogota and Barranquilla.

Jorge Restrepo, an economics professor at Javeriana University in Bogota, said the narrow margin of victory signals a difficult term ahead.

“His discourse today, his speech, actually shows a lack of detail, a lot of intentions, a lot of political principles by which he is distancing himself from the previous left wing, progressive government of Gustavo Petro,” Restrepo said, adding that this same lack of detail would make it harder for De la Espriela to deliver the promised “nation of miracles.”

The term runs four years, and the first concrete deadline is already on the calendar: the new administration’s first diplomatic visit to Israel is set for October, and it will show how far the announced foreign policy shift goes beyond a speech at the barracks.