Colombian president-elect Abelardo De la Espriella announced on July 5 that he would abolish all mechanisms of outgoing president Gustavo Petro's "Total Peace" policy from the moment he takes office on August 7, reactivate every outstanding arrest warrant against illegal armed group members and establish a dedicated legal team to file criminal, fiscal and disciplinary complaints over what he described, without providing specific evidence, as "hundreds of irregularities" uncovered during the transition review, according to EFE and El País.

"The first task of that team will be to revoke, from August 7, all the concessions Petro handed to the narco-terrorists," De la Espriella told supporters in an address livestreamed from his Barranquilla office. He described Petro's government as "the most corrupt in all our history" — an unsubstantiated claim delivered in a speech framed around what he called a "sacred mission" for the transition committee — and pledged to ask attorney general Luz Adriana Camargo to reinstate all suspended capture orders, instructing the armed forces and police to execute them.

The rhetoric marks a sharp escalation in tone since De la Espriella's narrow runoff victory on June 21, when he beat leftist senator Iván Cepeda by fewer than 250,000 votes and struck a notably conciliatory note in his victory speech, pledging to govern for "all Colombians" and vowing to respect the 1991 constitution. The distance between that address and the latest broadside underlines the degree to which his transition has hardened into something closer to his fierce campaign register. That was, as analysts noted at the time, built on the language of existential threat and polarising rhetoric that cast the left as a danger to the nation.

The dismantling of "Total Peace" was central to De la Espriella's campaign from the outset. The policy, Petro's signature attempt to negotiate simultaneously with multiple armed groups including FARC dissident factions, drug trafficking networks and the ELN guerrilla, has been widely criticised for failing to curtail violence and was directly linked by critics to a rise in drone attacks, cocaine production and forced displacement. De la Espriella, a populist right-winger backed by US President Donald Trump, campaigned explicitly on replacing negotiation with a military crackdown: ending all talks with armed groups, launching air strikes against guerrilla camps and building ten "mega-prisons." His promise to reactivate arrest warrants suspended under "Total Peace" is the first concrete step in translating that platform into policy.

Transition under strain

A 24-day formal handover schedule, running from July 7 to July 31, was agreed between outgoing finance minister Germán Ávila and vice-president-elect José Manuel Restrepo, the former trade and finance minister widely expected to take de facto control of economic policy in the incoming administration. But De la Espriella has simultaneously ordered his team to publish detected irregularities daily on his Defensores de la Patria political movement's website, a move that has sharpened tensions and given the transition process an unusually public and combative character.

Among the substantive concerns raised was the state of the healthcare system, which De la Espriella said owes health providers COP26 trillion (approximately $7.8bn) in unpaid obligations — a situation he described as a "humanitarian emergency" that he promised to resolve within 90 days, with criminal charges filed against those responsible. He also flagged non-compliance with the fiscal rule and suggested that the true state of public finances may be worse than officially disclosed, a concern that will resonate in markets already alert to a budget deficit that exceeded 6% of GDP last year and a public debt load hovering near 63% of GDP.

Petro fights back

Petro responded by calling a national mobilisation for July 20, Colombia's Independence Day, to defend the social reforms achieved during his government, framing the occasion as his public farewell as head of state. De la Espriella in turn dismissed a call for civil disobedience from senator Cepeda, who came within a percentage point of defeating him in June's runoff, as "first lines, blockades and urban terrorism," adding: "I propose constitutional obedience."

The exchange captures a transition that has become as ideologically charged as the campaign that preceded it. De la Espriella arrives at the Casa de Nariño with a thin mandate, a Congress in which his movement holds only a handful of seats and an emboldened left-wing opposition that has shown little sign of accepting defeat quietly. How he navigates the gap between the combative rhetoric of his transition and the institutional constraints awaiting him in office is set to define his presidency from day one.