Colombians will go to the polls this Sunday to elect Gustavo Petro’s successor for the next four years. Although transitional justice has not played a leading role in the campaign, the two candidates hold opposing views on the model the country devised to end its half-century-long armed conflict: the runoff will pit Iván Cepeda, a left-wing politician who took part in the negotiations between the government and the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that led to the 2016 peace agreement, against Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right outsider with no political experience who promises to abolish the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the judicial arm of the transitional justice system stemming from the peace deal.
At first glance, this appears to be a repeat of the last two presidential elections, whose run-offs pitted candidates who voted differently in the referendum on the peace agreement – which the ‘no’ vote won by 53,000 votes and which, although it allowed for the disarmament of more than 13,000 former rebels, foreshadowed many of the difficulties the agreement has faced in its implementation.
A closer look, however, reveals that both candidates face significant paradoxes in their approach to transitional justice. Cepeda, a victim of the armed conflict and a champion of the peace agreement who has promised to implement it fully, is haunted by having led the current government’s failed policy of negotiations with armed groups and organised crime. The negotiations were ambiguous on the criminal treatment offered to those who sought to lay down their arms, with no clarity on whether it would compete with, overload or duplicate the current transitional justice system. And De la Espriella, a criminal lawyer who has legally defended many of Colombia’s most unsavoury characters, promises to dismantle a transitional mechanism similar to one he defended and was actively involved in two decades ago with right-wing paramilitaries.
In practice, a drastic change to the JEP is unlikely: abolishing it would require a constitutional reform and a loss of political capital that already weighed heavily on Iván Duque’s government six years ago. Instead, regardless of which candidate wins, key questions will continue to hang over the special tribunal regarding how it will enforce its sanctions against former rebels and military officials convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A campaign without debates and with plenty of AI
It has been an atypical campaign in Colombia in which the frontrunners never faced off in debates, merely outlined their government programmes until the final week and agreed to few in-depth interviews, almost always with sympathetic media outlets or digital influencers reluctant to ask them tough questions. Mise-en-scenes proliferated, whether at rallies, on social media or in video fantasies created using artificial intelligence.
It was also the first election in two decades where there was no viable third option: De la Espriella and Cepeda secured over 40% of the first-round vote, relegating traditional right-wing candidate Paloma Valencia to 7% and the centrist Sergio Fajardo to 4%.
The three percentage points by which De la Espriella outperformed Cepeda suggest that, although everything points to a close result, he starts as the favourite. This would be a result that fits into a broader trend in Latin America, where not only has there been a shift to the right across almost the entire region – with the exception of Mexico, Uruguay and perhaps Brazil this October – but also because most elections over the last seven years have punished ruling parties, as shown by the research of Peruvian political scientist Alberto Vergara.
The criminal lawyer who wants to abolish the JEP…
Abelardo de la Espriella is a criminal lawyer who rose to fame through media appearances and turned his bespoke suits, Italian music albums and fine rum into a personal brand. He climbed the polls with a campaign centred on his new nickname, ‘The Tiger’ (an animal that doesn’t even exist in Colombia), a populist nationalist rhetoric and the promise to “eviscerate” the left.
His rise, however, can be explained by the fact that he was the one who best interpreted the fears – both founded and unfounded – of broad sectors of Colombian society, concerned by Petro’s erratic and quarrelsome behaviour, his questionable economic management and anti-business rhetoric, the tangible deterioration of security across much of the country, and the failure of this government’s ‘total peace’ policy.
In the final stretch, he has reinforced promises of punitive populism such as building mega-prisons following the model of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and critical stances towards the JEP, in a nod to the traditional right-wing sectors he defeated in the first round and which have now joined his ranks. “The JEP is not a judicial tribunal: it is a political body disguised as a court, established to allow the bloodstained hands of the FARC narco-terrorist leaders to be washed clean and to persecute the nation’s heroes in the most humiliating manner,” he said in an interview last week, omitting that both – former guerrillas and military officials accused of atrocious crimes – have the same opportunity to secure more lenient sentences if they acknowledge their responsibility, publicly apologise, provide truth and redress their victims. It is a criminal treatment that, as Justice Info has explained, more than 90% of indictees as those most responsible have accepted.
De la Espriella’s argument is twofold. On one hand, he claims that the JEP “is very costly” and that he will prevent “Colombians’ pockets from being drained” (omitting the difficulties the ordinary justice system has faced in prosecuting those very same crimes). He also promised to withdraw Colombia from the United Nations, the Inter-American Human Rights System and the Organisation of American States (OAS), echoing the attacks on multilateralism by Latin American and global populists on both sides of the ideological spectrum. On the other hand, he takes up a cause championed by former president Álvaro Uribe and Senator Paloma Valencia’s political party: that the military should not be equated with guerrillas – even if they committed heinous crimes – and that they should have their own justice mechanism. “Any bandit who doesn’t surrender must be killed,” is how he describes his defense policy.
… but who previously defended transitional justice
The criminal lawyer turned candidate’s view on transitional justice was starkly different a few years ago. When, two decades ago, Álvaro Uribe’s administration opened negotiations with paramilitary groups, a young De la Espriella threw himself wholeheartedly into supporting the efforts. He set up an NGO called Foundation for Peace Initiatives (Fipaz), through which he organised university forums attended by paramilitary leaders like ‘Ernesto Báez’, where they promoted more favourable criminal treatment and which, according to an in-depth profile of him written by La Silla Vacía, were funded by those very groups.
De la Espriella not only defended alternative sanctions such as those received by the paramilitaries under the Justice and Peace transitional mechanism, but also expressed support for extending them to the guerrillas. “I would be in favour of Mr Timochenko not serving a single day in prison if that is the price to be paid to bring peace to this country,” he said in a 2011 interview, referring to FARC’s last commander-in-chief. ‘Rodrigo Londoño’ was precisely one of the first to be sentenced by the JEP in 2025.
After the Justice and Peace process, De la Espriella built his career as a high-profile criminal lawyer. His client list included members of the Nule construction family, convicted of corruption; former paramilitary leader Juan Carlos “Tuso” Sierra; and David Murcia Guzmán, leader of a pyramid scheme that defrauded thousands of ordinary people and was convicted of money laundering. Perhaps the most controversial of all is Colombian businessman Álex Saab, alleged frontman for the former Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and currently in custody in the United States, a point that contradicts his narrative that he is necessary to prevent Colombia from becoming like its neighbour. In his business dealings outside his law firm, De la Espriella has had as partners a famous singer and an oil tycoon, but also relatives of a former paramilitary leader.
His stance may already be having an impact on transitional justice. Colonel José Pastor Ruiz, charged with extrajudicial killings and facing an adversarial trial after failing to acknowledge responsibility, was excluded from the JEP last week for failing to fulfil his commitment to provide the truth.
The peace negotiator who champions transitional justice…
Iván Cepeda, the congressman who seeks to continue the current government’s policies but has a less effervescent demeanour than Petro, is a politician and human rights defender whose career has been marked by the armed conflict.
He was 31 years old when his father, congressman Manuel Cepeda Vargas, was murdered on one of Bogotá’s main avenues in 1994. The incident involved “a joint operation by paramilitary groups and state agents”, according to a 2010 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling which found the Colombian state liable. His was not the only such case: at least 5,195 members of his party, the Patriotic Union, were murdered or disappeared in a political extermination campaign that decimated that left-wing party, according to one of the most recent indictments by the JEP, which charged two Army generals and three colonels as those ultimately responsible.
That persecution shaped the vocation of Cepeda, a philosopher who went into exile as a youngster and studied in Bulgaria: in 2004, at the height of the Uribe government’s negotiations with the paramilitaries, he led the creation of the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movice). From human rights activism, he made the leap to Congress, from where he closely accompanied the Juan Manuel Santos’s administration talks with FARC, acting as a sort of adviser to the guerrillas in their bid to seek a negotiated settlement and helping smooth the way whenever obstacles arose.
During Petro’s government, he was the architect of the ‘total peace’ policy, which opened simultaneous negotiations with a dozen illegal armed and organised crime groups. None came to fruition, partly due to flaws in the methodological design and the lack of willingness on the part of some of these groups, which ended up strengthening and expanding, according to a report by the Ideas for Peace Foundation.
As a presidential candidate, Cepeda advocates continuing a policy of negotiation – now called ‘comprehensive peace’ – and the work of the JEP, where his wife, anthropologist Pilar Rueda, worked for eight years as an advisor on gender issues. His running mate, Aída Quilcué, reinforces this narrative: as well as being an indigenous Nasa woman, she is also a victim of state violence, as her husband, Edwin Legarda, a leader of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC), was murdered by members of the army in 2008.
… but one that promotes negotiations with an unclear path to justice
Although Cepeda has been an advocate of a negotiated solution to the armed conflict, his strategy has been hampered by the legal ambiguity of the talks under Petro and the deterioration in security. One problem with ‘total peace’ is that, as Justice Info reported, there was never any clarity on what criminal treatment would apply to nudge thousands of combatants into demobilisation. This means there are many questions on how victims’ rights would be upheld, as well as whether these other rebels and criminals would be brought before the transitional justice system in place since 2016 or whether new mechanisms would be created for them. These questions are key for the JEP, which is three years away from reaching its deadline for bringing charges, having indicted 317 persons but managing to close only one of its 11 macro-cases.
Another factor working against Cepeda is the widespread perception of his alleged closeness to FARC. Setting aside unfounded accusations, the senator chose to defend ‘Jesús Santrich’, the former guerrilla leader arrested after the signing of the peace agreement whilst negotiating the shipment of a consignment of cocaine. Cepeda argued that the operation was a “judicial trap to torpedo the peace process” by Donald Trump’s administration, in which the then Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez allegedly participated. He attached less importance to the decision made by Santrich to break the terms of the peace deal to ship cocaine. Shortly afterwards, together with the former chief guerrilla negotiator ‘Iván Márquez’, Santrich abandoned the agreement and took up arms again.
Perhaps the episode that generates more uncertainty about Cepeda is his appearance on the computer of ‘Raúl Reyes’, the senior member of FARC’s top brass who died in a bombing raid carried out by the Colombian Army in Ecuador in 2008. A month earlier, after a march against the FARC had brought six million Colombians onto the streets, Cepeda called for a similar protest against the paramilitaries. In emails found on a computer belonging to Reyes that had been recovered by the military, an Argentine woman close to the guerrilla suggested she was coordinating with Cepeda, in messages showing that the FARC saw an opportunity in the march promoted by him. The current candidate has limited himself to saying that the files were tampered with by intelligence agency DAS and were deemed invalid and illegal by the Supreme Court. In reality, according to an investigation by La Silla Vacía, there was no evidence of tampering, and they were only ruled inadmissible as evidence in legal proceedings as they were obtained outside the country in breach of international protocols.
In the final week of the campaign, almost at the same time as he outlined a security policy for the first time, Cepeda called on the International Criminal Court to investigate his opponent over his alleged links to the paramilitaries. It was a strange strategy, which attributed three possible offences to his rival – criminal conspiracy, terrorist financing and illicit enrichment – that do not appear in the Rome Statute, and which omitted the fact that the ICC prosecutor’s investigation into Colombia was closed four years ago and that the Colombian justice system already investigated De la Espriella without finding anything. It incidentally highlighted that, just as in his long legal battle with Uribe, Cepeda is keen on the judicialisation of politics.
Neither speaks of how they will ensure compliance with the JEP’s sanctions
Regardless of whether they are for or against transitional justice, neither Cepeda nor De la Espriella has addressed the central issue that will define the relationship between the government they aspire to lead and the JEP: the legitimacy of the special tribunal’s decisions will depend largely on who ensures, and how, that those convicted do in fact comply with the two components of the sanction. This is an area where the national government is a key player, something never seen by the governments of Iván Duque and Gustavo Petro (or the JEP for that matter).
Five years after the JEP’s first indictments and almost a year before its first sentences, the retributive component of the sanctions – which the peace agreement termed ‘effective restriction of liberty’ – remains vague. As Justice Info reported, the first ruling against FARC over thousands of kidnappings refers to an “authorised perimeter” but does not specify what this entails; it is unclear as to how the surveillance mechanisms will operate and doesn’t address who will oversee monitoring after the special tribunal shutters in 2034. These are all issues the national government could prioritise.
Nor is it clear what will happen to the restorative projects, which aim to provide reparations to victims and which the JEP decided to create from scratch – despite its mandate limitations and the decline in cooperation funds – rather than relying on existing public policies under the national government’s purview, such as the collective victim reparation plans or the Territorially Focused Development Programmes (PDET), which were designed jointly with 300,000 inhabitants of the municipalities historically hardest hit by the war.
More broadly, neither of the two seems to have a proposal for how to prevent the armed conflict in Colombia from recurring: Cepeda offers to continue a model that has strengthened armed groups, whilst De la Espriella promotes a heavy-handed one that promises to intensify the armed confrontation.
