Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as Colombia’s president on Aug. 7, 2026, in Cali under heavy security, a ceremony moved out of the capital and into Colombia’s volatile southwest to signal a hard-line approach to illegal armed groups. The new president took office with the state already performing strength for the cameras, while Washington lined up $1 billion in security assistance to help bankroll the next phase.
Who Gets Backed
The United States plans to announce $1 billion in security assistance for de la Espriella’s administration, part of a package discussed with Congress. The U.S. State Department called the aid a cornerstone of a renewed partnership with the new government. That’s the language of empire dressed up as cooperation. The money is aimed at a presidency that arrived promising more force, more discipline and more control.
De la Espriella’s inauguration itself carried the message. He took the oath in Cali instead of the capital, breaking with tradition and turning the ceremony into a security spectacle. Francesca kissed her father, Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella, after he took the oath of office in Cali. The image sat beside the armed display: family, ceremony and state power all folded into one carefully managed scene.
Energy for the Powerful, Costs for Everyone Else
De la Espriella also announced a sharp shift in energy policy. He pledged to revive Colombia’s oil and gas sector, restore state-owned energy company Ecopetrol and strengthen the electricity system, saying energy security would be a cornerstone of his administration. He said Colombia would pursue an energy transition away from oil, gas and coal toward cleaner energy sources such as wind and solar power, but insisted it must not come at the expense of the country’s oil and gas industry.
“I believe in the energy transition,” he said. “But that transition must be built from strength, not from weakness, from self-sufficiency and not from dependence.”
He called energy security “a matter of national sovereignty” and said Colombia could not expect long-term prosperity by leaving its natural resources undeveloped. He said rebuilding Ecopetrol, Colombia’s majority state-owned oil company and one of the country’s largest sources of government revenue and export earnings, would be “a definitive and absolute priority” after accusing the previous administration of weakening the company.
He also confirmed his government would authorize fracking under what he described as “the strictest technical and environmental standards.” He said his administration would expand oil and gas exploration to rebuild Colombia’s declining reserves, guarantee the country’s energy security and attract investment back into the sector. He warned that Colombia’s energy system was in a “critical situation,” citing declining oil and gas reserves, delayed energy projects and rising electricity demand. He said the approaching El Nino weather phenomenon, which typically brings prolonged drought and can reduce hydroelectric power generation, meant there was little time to act. “The El Nino phenomenon won’t wait for us. To overcome it, it is imperative to implement urgent solutions,” he said.
The Right-Wing Turn
The new president’s rise fits into a broader regional shift. Conservative lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella joins Javier Milei, Chile’s José Antonio Kast and Peru’s Keiko Fujimori in a broad regional shift to the right. He prevailed by the slimmest of margins after campaigning on the fiscal austerity of Argentina’s Javier Milei, the hard-line security policies of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and a close alignment with Donald Trump.
He is inheriting one of the region’s toughest governing tasks, facing a widening budget deficit, accelerating inflation, high interest rates and a deteriorating security situation driven by record coca production that’s strengthening armed rebel groups. Ahead of his inauguration, half of Colombians said they viewed him negatively, while 45% held a positive view, according to LatAm Pulse. He scored a boost last month when Latin American development bank CAF offered US$9 billion in financing that will help ease fiscal pressure. But he also suffered a setback when his coalition lost a tussle for Senate leadership, demonstrating his lack of a majority that would help smooth the way for his legislative ambitions.
De la Espriella’s most pressing concern is likely to be security, an issue that even more than economics has helped propel conservative gains across Latin America. He’s promised to build mega-prisons as part of a tough-on-crime approach to violence and Colombia’s guerilla groups. For decades, dismantling the organised crime networks that operate throughout the Americas has proved far more difficult than campaign trail rhetoric suggests.
“These right-wing governments are stuck in a dilemma that isn’t easy to resolve,” said Sandra Borda, a professor at Bogota’s Universidad de los Andes. While they represent business interests that “demand strict discipline in public spending,” they also “fully understand that rolling back any of the subsidies or social programs created by left-wing governments would create very serious governability problems.”
Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, said of the region’s crop of conservative leaders: “They were quite effective at showing how left-of-centre governments had failed to address crime, or were ignoring crime. But now they actually have the responsibility of meaningfully reducing violence.”
Trump and the US have promised to help. But proximity to the US president may also pose risks. Washington gave Milei a $20 billion financial backstop ahead of a closely-fought midterm election last year, is offering technical support to De la Espriella on the fiscal front and has formed a new coalition regional partners to fight drug trafficking. Trump, however, remains broadly unpopular even in nations like Colombia, where he endorsed De la Espriella ahead of June’s runoff. More than half of Colombians, 54%, hold a negative view of the US leader, against 34% who see him positively, LatAm Pulse found. Majorities in Chile and Argentina also rate him poorly, according to the survey.
Sergio Guzmán, founder of Bogota-based consultancy Colombia Risk Analysis, said leaders like De la Espriella may not be able to count on Trump if they get in trouble. “The US previously treated the region with a greater degree of generosity, but it will be too preoccupied with its own domestic priorities to throw Latin America a lifeline,” Guzmán said. “What we saw with Milei was really the exception rather than the rule.”
AtlasIntel surveyed 2,191 people in Colombia, 982 people in Peru, 1,120 people in Argentina and 1,801 people in Chile between July 30 and August 3. The Colombia and Chile polls have a margin of error of 2 percentage points. The Peru and Argentina surveys have a margin of error of three percentage points.