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Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as Colombia's president on Friday in Cali, the country's third-largest city, breaking with decades of tradition that reserved presidential inaugurations for the capital, Bogota, and doing so under extreme security precautions.
Senator Honorio Henriquez, president of Colombia's Congress and a member of the far-right Democratic Center party, administered the oath at the theater of the private Universidad Santiago de Cali. The first portion of the ceremony drew a substantial international audience, including Spain's King Felipe VI, multiple Latin American heads of state and more than 60 ambassadors.
Following the swearing-in, de la Espriella and his cabinet proceeded to Cali's Pichincha Battalion, a military installation, to formally assume the supreme command of the armed forces.
The dual ceremonies were boycotted by the leftist political movement of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, which instead organized rallies elsewhere in Cali as well as in Bogota and Barranquilla.
Speaking in Barranquilla, Pacto Historico Senator Ivan Cepeda said the left does not recognize the incoming government, citing de la Espriella's U.S. citizenship and what he described as the new president's alleged debts with the U.S. Department of Justice.
"De la Espriella, who once acted as an intermediary for drug traffickers and paramilitaries, from whose ill-gotten gains he has profited, has now become a figure who will be pressured by the United States, by his own government, and by its federal agencies to allow all kinds of foreign intervention in Colombia," Cepeda said.
Cepeda was de la Espriella's opponent in the presidential race, losing by a margin of less than one percentage point. His supporters are continuing to pursue a court order seeking to nullify the election result.
De la Espriella, a lawyer who built his political profile as a self-described outsider and close ally of former President Alvaro Uribe, campaigned on a hard-line approach to Colombia's armed groups and criticized Petro's peace-process strategy, arguing it allowed guerrilla factions and criminal organizations to expand their reach in the drug trade.
Petro, a former leftist guerrilla member who took office in 2022 as Colombia's first leftist president, has overseen a period of strained relations with Washington in recent years.
The decision to hold the inauguration in Cali, rather than Bogota's Plaza de Bolivar, marked a deliberate break from more than a century of Colombian precedent.
The southwestern city has been heavily affected by drug-related violence and armed group activity, and the choice of venue was widely read as a signal of the incoming administration's intended focus on security in regions hit hardest by conflict.
The transfer of military command at the Pichincha Battalion, rather than a traditional address to Congress, underscored that emphasis, placing armed forces and defense policy at the center of de la Espriella's first hours in office.
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