Abelardo de la Espriella, microphone in hand and bulletproof vest, chants patriotic slogans behind a bulletproof podium before dozens of supporters.
The scene has been repeated in recent months in various squares in Colombia, where voters give themselves over to the show of the “Tiger,” as this presidential candidate calls himself.
WATCH: Abelardo de la Espriella to Gustavo Petro and the left of Colombia: “Don’t even think about disregarding the popular will”
After a campaign surrounded by media noise, this lawyer and businessman has just shaken up the Colombian political board.
De la Espriella (Bogotá, 1978) won the first round of the elections this Sunday with 43% of the votes and will compete for the presidency in the second round against the leftist leader Iván Cepeda, who wants to continue the policies of President Gustavo Petro.
De la Espriella will thus be the right-wing candidate in the South American country. Many of his opponents label him as far-right, but his team says he is of “extreme coherence.”
He promises a “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 denounced, De la Espriella’s campaign says he frequently receives death threats; that is why he is accompanied by at least 35 bodyguards at each event plus police deployments.
With no political experience, he presents himself as an “outsider,” a successful and independent businessman.
He admires the administrations of Presidents Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Donald Trump in the U.S.
He rejects governing “with the usual ones,” a common phrase to refer to the elite that had governed the country until Gustavo Petro’s presidency began in 2022.
With his movement, Defenders of the Homeland, he aims to channel the discontent of Colombians who see the old political guard as the origin of many challenges.
On June 21, it will be decided if he reaches the presidency against Cepeda, who is ideologically his opposite.
The precocious businessman
Senator Enrique Gómez Martínez is key in De la Espriella’s campaign. He belongs to the National Salvation Movement, a party that allied with the candidate and won four seats in Congress in the legislative elections last March.
He says that behind the image of a strong and transgressive man of the aspirant is someone “youthful, patient, punctual, energetic, and who sleeps little.”
He already showed some of these characteristics when he emerged very young as a businessman and before becoming a media lawyer with clients like Álex Saab, the alleged frontman of Nicolás Maduro who was extradited from Venezuela to the U.S. to face criminal charges.
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 prodigy child. He memorized the speeches of Luis Carlos Galán, whom his father admired, and recited them standing on a stool,” Reyes recounts.
Galán was a presidential candidate assassinated in 1989 by drug cartel hitmen in collusion with state agents.
De la Espriella ended up being the defense lawyer of Alberto Santofimio Botero, the former Minister of Justice who in 2007 was found guilty as instigator of Galán’s assassination.
Returning to his childhood, Reyes mentions that the candidate set up a grocery business in a neighborhood of Montería, the city where he was raised in northern Colombia.
Later he graduated as a lawyer from Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá.
“There he also did business; selling clothes, whiskey, and emeralds in the U.S.,” adds the journalist.
Today the businessman claims to manage dozens of companies in diverse sectors: real estate, food, beverage and clothing trade, livestock, and his law firm, De la Espriella Lawyers.
With the profits from these companies and personal loans, he says he finances his campaign.
The media lawyer
Besides Saab, from whom the lawyer says he distanced himself 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 opinion circles, although his team frames it within the usual practice of a criminal lawyer and the right to a legitimate defense.
“He entered the paramilitary world hand in hand with 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,” Reyes relates.
He also represented David Murcia Guzmán, founder of the firm DMG. This company was intervened by the state in a scandal of massive and illegal money collection.
Besides 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 leftist congresswoman Piedad Córdoba, once accused of illicit enrichment.
The security banner
De la Espriella announced his intentions to seek the presidency in July 2025, a month after the pre-candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot publicly in Bogotá.
By then the businessman had created a prolific brand on social media.
“He understood the country’s digital moment long before the contest. 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 security.
After four years of Petro’s government and his questioned “total peace” policy, the country has experienced an expansion of armed groups in number and territory.
Alongside the tragedy of Uribe Turbay, who died two months after the shooting, Colombia also faces security crises linked to drug trafficking and other illicit incomes.
Although several analysts point out that the deterioration in security is not solely a consequence of “total peace,” the message that it largely is, defended by De la Espriella, resonates with certain voters.
“He’s going to wipe out all crime. It’s clear he’s the one who will bring this country afloat,” a working-class supporter tells me, preferring to remain anonymous.
“No one has raised the security banner like De la Espriella. His nickname, the Tiger, became a symbol for the discontented. With the vest, the bulletproof podium, and his security detail, he shows he is not intimidated. With this issue, he has created strong polarization,” Suárez comments.
Read more In which country would you like to live?
De la Espriella promises to dismantle Petro’s peace policy and is a firm critic of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a transitional and restorative 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 mega-prisons. He also plans to “eliminate” drug traffickers, guerrilla dissidents, and other armed groups.
He has announced that he wants to fumigate coca hectares, bomb “narco-terrorist” camps, and take down any plane or vessel carrying drugs leaving Colombia.
He says he will ask for help from the United States, Europe, and Israel for this.
De la Espriella combines his stance as a strongman while also emphasizing the value of the traditional family and Christianity, after converting to the faith following the loss of a loved one six years ago.
His wife, Ana Lucía Pineda, graduated in business administration and management, frequently accompanies him at his events. They have four children.
He also promises to improve the health system, be relentless against corruption, and encourage economic growth through hydrocarbon and mining exploitation, tax freedoms, fiscal adjustments, and severe state cuts.
For the latter, he has said he will use “the chainsaw” like Milei in Argentina.
Transgressive (and controversial) discourse
De la Espriella says he rejects political correctness. He somehow fits into the transgressive discourse with which he presents himself to the electorate.
“With this photo, I won some really cool votes from the female electorate,” De la Espriella said in an interview on Piso8, a streaming channel, in early May.
He then asked the interviewers, among whom was a woman, to zoom in on the photo, after some comments were made on the program about the candidate’s intimate parts and a supposed silicone implant.
His stance was criticized as sexist among political opponents and other users on social media.
“If a woman feels uncomfortable, a gentleman has the moral obligation to apologize (…) Everything happened in a humorous context,” the lawyer excused himself.
In another interview, De la Espriella seemed to imitate the voice of politician Juan Daniel Oviedo, openly homosexual, adding that there were “things” about him “that he didn’t like” and that “had no remedy.”
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 he defines himself, De la Espriella says he has the independence from “the usual ones” to take the measures the country requires.
Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, politician and son of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, assassinated during the reign of the Medellín cartel, publicly supported the lawyer for this reason.
“I am excited by his independence and freedom from traditional politics and the business elite. It is something unique in Colombia’s history,” he tells BBC Mundo.
Despite this, in recent weeks the candidate received support from former members of governments such as those of ex-presidents Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos.
His vice-presidential running mate, 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, a hero of Colombian independence.
And the Char family, a powerful political and economic clan from Barranquilla, announced its support for the candidate in early May.
Five analysts from different universities and think tanks consulted by BBC Mundo consider that these supports come from the traditional political class that the aspirant says he rejects.
In summary, they agree, “it is difficult to govern Colombia without these endorsements and politicians experienced in the functioning of the State.”
“Extreme coherence”
De la Espriella’s tough-on-crime discourse, combined with his confrontational, anti-elite, and conservative style, has led some media, political opponents, and analysts to label him as “far-right and representative of the extreme right.”
It is a label they ignore in his campaign.
“We mock the categorization of extreme by talking about extreme coherence,” explains Gómez Martínez, the candidate’s ally.
“We don’t believe this is a matter of ideologies, but of foundational principles and values. We believe the Colombian people are not in the debate of ideologies. The elites are, because it allows generating labels,” adds the newly elected senator, grandson of former president Laureano Gómez and nephew of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, an influential politician assassinated in 1995.
The foundational principles and values Gómez Martínez refers to revolve around the challenges of the Colombian state in security, productivity, justice, corruption, education, and values.
When asked 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 identifying as Catholic is estimated at 80% of the total 52 million Colombians. Other Christian groups account for around 10%.
Patricia Muñoz Yi, political scientist at the Pontifical Javeriana University, says she does not see De la Espriella as “so far-right,” but acknowledges that “he has tried to be more radical than the right-wing reference of the Democratic Center.”
Democratic Center is the party founded by former president Álvaro Uribe and was represented in this first round by Senator Paloma Valencia, who came third without advancing to the runoff and below what polls predicted.
Laura Bonilla, political analyst and deputy director of the Pares Foundation, considers the lawyer’s movement a “populist right.”
Beyond labels, the final battle for the next presidency is set between the options seen as more extreme by many Colombians: De la Espriella vs Cepeda.
Click here to read more stories from BBC News Mundo.
Subscribe here to our new newsletter to receive every Friday a selection of our best content of the week.
You can also follow us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook and on our new WhatsApp channel.
And remember you can receive notifications on our app. Download the latest version and activate them.
