Michael K. Smith
www.legalienate.blogspot.com
First published by Counterpunch on August 18, 2026
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 protests, 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 Álvaro Uribe, whom he has advised
regarding the judicial process opened by former House representative
for Bogotá, Iván 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 shown 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.”* 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 Álvaro 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?
Note.
*Geraldo Javier, S. J. “Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy” Common Courage Press, 1996
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,” www.petras.lahaine.org, May 4, 2010
Hans Bennett, “Neo-liberalism Needs Death Squads in Colombia,” http://upsidedownworld.org , September 3, 2009
Manuel Rozental, “The Circle Opens Out: New Evidence of Criminality in Colombian Regime,” http://upsidedownworld.org, 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)
