Wearing the yellow shirt of the Colombian national team and behind armored glass, the “Tigre” celebrated this Sunday having been the candidate with the most votes in the first round of the elections with a record of more than ten million votes.
The lawyer and businessman Abelardo de la Espriella shook the board of Colombian politics this Sunday.
De la Espriella (Bogotá, 1978) won with 43% of the votes and will compete for the presidency in the second round with the leftist leader Iván Cepeda, who wants to continue the policies of President Gustavo Petro.
De la Espriella will thus be the candidate of the right in the South American country. Many of his opponents classify him as far-right, but his team says he is “extremely coherent.”
He promises an “iron fist” against crime, illegality, drug trafficking and corruption, the main problems he identifies in Colombia.
As other candidates and politicians in the country have reported, De la Espriella’s campaign says that he frequently receives death threats; That is why at least 35 bodyguards accompany him at each event plus police deployments.
Without political experience, he presents himself as an “outsider”, a successful and independent businessman.
Admire the efforts of Presidents Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina and Donald Trump in the US.
He refuses to govern “with the usual ones”, a common phrase to refer to the elite that, until Gustavo Petro became president in 2022, had governed the country.
With his movement, Defenders of the Homeland, he aspires to channel the unrest of Colombians who see the political old guard as the origin of many challenges.
On June 21, it will be decided whether he reaches the presidency in a duel with Cepeda, located at his ideological antipodes.
The precocious entrepreneur
Senator Enrique Gómez Martínez is key in De la Espriella’s campaign. He belongs to the National Salvation Movement, a party that allied itself with the candidate and that won four seats in Congress in the legislative elections last March.
He realizes that behind the candidate’s image of a strong and transgressive man is someone “jovial, patient, punctual, energetic and who sleeps little.”
He already showed some of these characteristics when he emerged as a businessman at a very young age and before becoming a media lawyer with clients such as Álex Saab, the alleged figurehead of Nicolás Maduro who was extradited from Venezuela to the US to face criminal charges.
The Colombian journalist Gerardo Reyes investigated the candidate while writing a biography about Saab.
“De la Espriella’s biographer, journalist Ángel Becassino, tries to present him as a child prodigy. He learned by heart the speeches of Luis Carlos Galán, whom his father admired, and recited them perched on a stool,” says Reyes.
Galán was a presidential candidate assassinated in 1989 by drug trafficking hitmen in collusion with state agents.
De la Espriella ended up being a defense lawyer for Alberto Santofimio Botero, the former Minister of Justice who in 2007 was found guilty of instigating Galán’s murder.
Returning to his childhood, Reyes mentions that the candidate set up a business selling groceries in a neighborhood of Montería, the city where he grew up in northern Colombia.
He later graduated as a lawyer from the Sergio Arboleda University of Bogotá.
“He also did business there, selling clothes, whiskey and emeralds in the US,” adds the journalist.
Today the businessman claims to manage dozens of companies in diverse sectors: real estate, food, beverage and clothing trade, livestock farming and his law firm, De la Espriella Lawyers.
With the profits of these companies and personal loans he says he finances his campaign.
The media lawyer
In addition to Saab, from whom the lawyer says he separated in 2021, he has defended multiple cases including artists, victims of violence and environmental disasters, and individuals linked to paramilitarism.
The latter has sparked criticism in currents of opinion, although his team frames it within the routine exercise of a criminal defender and the right to legitimate defense.
“He came to the paramilitary world with the help of an anthropologist from Montería who taught geopolitics, good manners and history to Carlos Castaño, the paramilitary leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia,” says Reyes.
He also represented David Murcia Guzmán, founder of the DMG firm. This company was intervened by the State in a scandal of massive and illegal money raising.
In addition to these cases, the lawyer has defended communities affected by the environmental impacts of the Cerro Matoso nickel mine, victims of gender violence and the late left-wing congresswoman Piedad Córdoba, at the time accused of illicit enrichment.
The flag of security
De la Espriella announced his intentions to seek the presidency in July 2025, a month after candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot in public in Bogotá.
By then the businessman had created a prolific brand on networks.
“He understood the country’s digital moment long before the race. With many videos and different accounts, he generated conversation before launching the candidacy,” political strategist Catalina Suárez analyzes for BBC Mundo.
A central theme of that conversation was safety.
After four years of Petro’s government and his questioned policy of “total peace,” the country has experienced an expansion of armed groups in number and territory.
Along with the tragedy of Uribe Turbay, who died two months after the shooting, Colombia also suffers a security crisis linked to drug trafficking and other illicit income.
Although several analysts point out that the deterioration in security is not the sole consequence of “total peace,” the message that it largely is, defended by De la Espriella, resonates with certain voters.
“He is going to wipe out all crime. You can see that he is the one who will keep this country afloat,” a working-class supporter of his, who prefers not to give her name, tells me.
“No one has raised the flag of security like De la Espriella. His nickname of the Tiger became a symbol for the discontented. With the vest, the armored lectern and his security scheme, he shows that he is not intimidated. With this issue he has created a strong polarization,” says Suárez.
De la Espriella promises to dismantle Petro’s peace policy and is a firm critic of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a transitional and reparative justice body created within the framework of the peace agreement between the government and the FARC guerrilla in 2016.
He has called the left “enemies of the republic.”
Like Bukele in El Salvador, he says he intends to build megaprisons. He also plans to “eliminate” drug traffickers, guerrilla dissidents and other armed groups.
He has announced that he wants to fumigate hectares of coca, bomb “narcoterrorist” camps and cancel any plane or boat with drugs that leaves Colombia.
He says that to do this he will ask for help from the United States, Europe and Israel.
De la Espriella combines his strongman stance while highlighting the value of traditional family and Christianity, having converted to the faith after losing a loved one six years ago.
His wife, Ana Lucía Pineda, graduated as an administrator and business director, frequently accompanies him at his events. They have four children.
It also promises to improve the health system, be relentless against corruption and encourage the growth of the economy with the exploitation of hydrocarbons and mining, tax freedoms, fiscal adjustments and severe state cuts.
For the latter, he has said that he will use “the chainsaw” like Milei in Argentina.
Transgressive (and controversial) speech
De la Espriella says he rejects political correctness. It somehow fits into the transgressive discourse with which he presents himself to the electorate.
“With this photo I earned some very cool votes from the female electorate,” said De la Espriella in an interview on Piso8, a streaming channel, at the beginning of May.
He then asked the interviewers, among whom was a woman, to zoom in on the photo, after some comments that had occurred on the program about the candidate’s private parts and an alleged silicone implant.
His position was criticized as sexist among political opponents and other users on social networks.
“If a woman feels uncomfortable, a gentleman has a moral obligation to apologize (…) Everything happened in a humorous context,” the lawyer apologized.
In another interview, De la Espriella seemed to imitate the voice of the openly homosexual politician Juan Daniel Oviedo, adding that there were “things” about him “that he didn’t like” and that “had no fix.”
The comment was interpreted as homophobic by political voices. The lawyer said it was a joke taken out of context.
As an “outsider” and “successful businessman,” as clarified, De la Espriella claims to have the independence of “the same people as always” to take the measures that the country requires.
Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, politician and son of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, murdered during the reign of the Medellín cartel, made public his support for the lawyer for this reason.
“I am excited by its independence and freedom from traditional politics and the business elite. It is something unique in the history of Colombia,” he tells BBC Mundo.
Despite this, in recent weeks the candidate received support from former members of governments such as that of former presidents Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos.
His vice-presidential formula, José Manuel Restrepo, was Minister of Finance and Commerce under former president Iván Duque. He also comes from a political caste that includes Francisco de Paula Santander, hero of Colombian independence.
And the Char house, a powerful political and economic clan from Barranquilla, announced in early May its support for the candidate.
Five analysts from different universities and think tanks consulted by BBC Mundo consider that this support comes from the traditional political class that the candidate claims to reject.
In short, they agree, “it is difficult to govern Colombia without these endorsements and politicians who are experts in the functioning of the State.”
“Extreme consistency”
De la Espriella’s heavy-handed speech, together with his confrontational, anti-elite and conservative style, has led some media outlets, political opponents and analysts to brand him as “ultra-rightist and representative of the extreme right.”
It is a label that they ignore in their campaign.
“We circumvent the categorization of extreme by talking about extreme coherence,” explains Gómez Martínez, an ally of the candidate.
“We do not believe that this is an issue of ideologies, but rather of foundational principles and values.” ales. We believe that the Colombian people are not involved in the debate of ideologies. The elites do, because it allows them to generate labels,” adds the newly elected senator, grandson of former president Laureano Gómez and nephew of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, an influential politician murdered in 1995.
The founding principles and values to which Gómez Martínez refers revolve around the challenges of the Colombian State in security, productivity, justice, corruption, education and values.
Questioned about what values they propose, Gómez alluded to “Christian, Judeo-Christian morality, which is what builds this society.”
According to recent surveys by the National Administrative Department of Statistics, the population that identifies as Catholic is estimated at 80% of the total of 52 million Colombians. Other Christian groups are around 10%.
Patricia Muñoz Yi, a political scientist at the Universidad Pontificia Javeriana, says that she does not see De la Espriella as “so far-right,” but recognizes that “he has tried to be more radical than the right-wing reference of the Democratic Center.”
Centro Democrático is the party founded by former President Álvaro Uribe and which was represented in this first round by Senator Paloma Valencia, who came third without going to the ballot and below what the polls gave her.
Laura Bonilla, political analyst and deputy director of the Pares Foundation, considers that the lawyer movement is a “populist right.”
Beyond labels, the final fight for the next presidency is between the options seen as most extreme by many Colombians: De la Espriella vs. Cepeda.
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