Colombia inaugurates Abelardo de la Espriella, a hardline right-wing criminal defence lawyer nicknamed "the Tiger", on August 7, ending four years of leftist government and pulling Bogota back into Washington's orbit.

The ceremony moves from Bogota’s Congress to an arena at the Universidad Santiago de Cali – the city where De la Espriella registered his candidacy – a late change of plan from his original wish to be sworn in at a military garrison in Cauca, a proposal that drew criticism from jurists over militarising the transfer of power. Colombia’s Congress approved the Cali venue instead on July 30, breaking with the tradition of holding the ceremony at Congress in the capital.

De la Espriella, 48, won the June 21 runoff against leftist senator Iván Cepeda by less than one percentage point – 49.6% to 48.7%, a margin of roughly 251,000 votes – in the tightest presidential race in Colombia’s recent history. He succeeds outgoing President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist head of state, whose four years in office saw increasingly strained relations with Washington.

The result is part of a wider hemispheric swing: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on July 31 that roughly half of Latin America’s governments are now aligned with Washington, leaving only Mexico and Brazil among the region’s major economies under left-leaning leadership now that Colombia has changed hands. De la Espriella’s campaign became a proxy for that battle, with US President Donald Trump giving him a “complete and total endorsement” before the vote and branding Cepeda a “radical left Marxist”.

Trump greeted the win itself with a post on Truth Social, saying “He Won, BIG!”

The handover was not smooth. The transition process collapsed on July 7 after De la Espriella accused Petro of plotting a coup once Petro refused to recognise the runoff result and alleged fraud without providing evidence, prompting Petro to accuse his successor of the coup in return. Petro has separately said on X that he fears being “taken prisoner and brought to the US or assassinated,” though his own transition team downplayed the risk, ruling out imminent extradition given the outgoing president’s OFAC drug-trafficking sanctions designation earlier this year and the multiple legal steps extradition would require.

De la Espriella has never held elected office. Born in Bogota and raised in Monteria, he built his career as one of Colombia’s best-known criminal defence lawyers, representing notorious clients including Colombian-Venezuelan businessman Alex Saab, whom the US accuses of laundering money for the Maduro regime, and David Murcia Guzman, founder of the collapsed DMG Ponzi scheme. “You shouldn’t confuse a lawyer with his client,” he said on the campaign trail. He also represented the family of femicide victim Rosa Elvira Celi, whose 2012 murder led to Colombia’s femicide law.

A dual US and Colombian citizen who lived in Miami for about a decade and holds Italian citizenship too – a fact his opponents highlighted during the campaign – De la Espriella built commercial ventures in rum, wine and fashion before turning his television profile into a movement. He founded the populist right-wing Defenders of the Homeland (Defensores de la Patria) about a year ago as an alternative to Colombia’s traditional parties. Colombia’s electoral authority granted the movement formal party status only on August 3.

His platform is built on a “strong hand” against crime, rejecting Petro’s controversial “Total Peace” negotiated approach to FARC, ELN and criminal groups linked to narcotrafficking in favour of a harder line best exemplified by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Colombia ranks second-worst globally on the Global Organized Crime Index at 7.82 out of 10, while the UN Office on Drugs and Crime put the country’s 2023 intentional homicide rate at about 25 per 100,000 people, roughly five times the global average, and found Colombia produced 67% of the world’s coca crop that year, up 53% since 2001.

In office, De la Espriella plans to join Trump’s flagship regional security bloc, the Shield of the Americas, from his first day, restore diplomatic and economic ties with Israel that Petro severed in 2024 over the war in Gaza, sever relations with Cuba and Nicaragua and close 14 embassies, mainly in Europe and Africa, as part of a cost-cutting drive. He has also pledged to unwind Bogota’s rapprochement with Nicolas Maduro’s successors in Caracas until Venezuela holds democratic elections, a reversal of Petro’s more conciliatory stance with Caracas.

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche is leading the American delegation to the inauguration, which also includes counternarcotics officials and Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, part of what AS/COA described as one of the largest international turnouts ever seen at a Colombian inauguration – a marker of how central Washington has become to the country’s new administration from its very first day.

The king of Spain and fellow right-wing leaders of Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, among others, are expected to attend, Reuters reported.

While investors have responded positively to De La Espriella’s pro-business proposals, which crucially include reviving fracking to boost the country's oil output, optimism about swift reforms is checked by the heavy burden of public debt and limited fiscal room.