“Prison or death,” repeated over and over in his rallies Abelardo de la Espriella, a controversial 47-year-old lawyer, to refer to the fate awaiting criminals, drug traffickers, and guerrillas if he ends up being the next president of Colombia. It hardly matters that the far-right leader built a media career as a lawyer for celebrities, footballers, and paramilitaries before having an epiphany in Italy and deciding he should enter the electoral arena to save his country from the left, according to his words, in July 2025.
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De la Espriella, who defines himself as an outsider, and who has invented the nickname ‘The Tiger’, like the former footballer Radamel Falcao, an animal that is also the logo of the Defenders of the Homeland platform with which he has run in the elections, has just delivered an unexpected blow to the Colombian political scene. He has achieved this thanks to his sense of spectacle, a hard and direct rhetoric, and a message focused on security and, above all, anti-Petroism, the discontent that some sectors have felt due to the management of the current head of state, the former mayor of Bogotá who articulated the Historic Pact and brought a leftist agenda to the Casa de Nariño for the first time.
Abelardo de la Espriella has seized on the lack of concrete results of the total peace proposed by Gustavo Petro and the increase in guerrilla dissidents and crime throughout the country to advance from the right over the establishment represented by Senator Paloma Valencia and her mentor, former president Álvaro Uribe, promoter of the Democratic Center that until now had united traditional conservatism.
Precisely Uribe, whom he politically despises for being part of the ‘caste’, another of the messages that has managed to resonate among voters in the first round, was one of Abelardo de la Espriella’s clients as a lawyer, as were several involved in the parapolitics scandal during the Uribe era, such as Maloof, Jorge Caballero, Rocío Arias, or Eleonora Pineda.
Although De la Espriella boasts of being an ‘outsider’ and criticizes the political caste, he was a defender of former president Álvaro Uribe
He also defended Alex Saab, Nicolás Maduro’s frontman who has just been deported to the United States to be tried, and David Murcia Guzmán, convicted for the largest pyramid scheme Colombia has suffered, although the far-right candidate rejects any personal link with these clients. In any case, his law firm, De la Espriella Lawyers, has assets of more than 39 billion dollars, according to the independent Colombian newspaper El Espectador.
Born in Bogotá on July 31, 1978, Abelardo de la Espriella grew up in Montería, in the Colombian Caribbean, which is why he expected results in Barranquilla, and graduated in Law from Sergio Arboleda University. Eccentric and successful, he has always been a multifaceted entrepreneur, capable of recording two albums, publishing five books, and acting in several television series.
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They say his musical vocation is the result of his Italian soul. De la Espriella has triple nationality—Colombian, Italian, and American—and a taste for luxury and ostentation as demonstrated by his company De la Espriella Style, which has launched a brand of rum and high-end Italian wines and luxury clothing lines that he has helped design. Additionally, he owns a fine dining restaurant and enjoys being seen by voters in his Rolls Royce Phantom or on his private jet.
Married to businesswoman Ana Lucía Pineda and father of four children, De la Espriella always wears impeccable Italian-style suits, which he only changes during the campaign for the Colombian national football team jersey, whose all-time top scorer is ‘The Tiger’ Falcao, and sports a thin and perfectly trimmed beard, which accentuates his resemblance to Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, one of his role models from whom he wants to copy the high-security mega-prisons.
Besides being a lawyer, the far-right candidate has several luxury product brands, has been an actor and recorded albums, and enjoys ostentation
Other ideological beacons for Abelardo de la Espriella are the Argentine Javier Milei, from whom he has copied the word chainsaw to prune the state administration (by 40%), and Donald Trump, from whom he has learned to have a forceful and sharp discourse, including certain vulgarities that have earned him criticism for being homophobic and sexist (although it should be noted that as a lawyer he has defended victims of gender violence in cases that have created jurisprudence).
The big favorite to win the second round of elections on June 21—Paloma Valencia and Álvaro Uribe have already publicly expressed their support for him—boasts of being a self made politician and having paid for his campaign out of his own pocket and owing nothing to anyone. And that is why he feels free to apply unprecedented measures such as the proposal that administrative procedures be carried out with blockchain technology. De la Espriella wants to run Colombia as if it were a private company, with a firm hand, tax cuts, austerity, and stimulating national production.
Shielded in a glass cage and surrounded by more than thirty bodyguards at each public event, Abelardo de la Espriella has conveyed an image of insecurity among Colombians. His verbosity has also resorted to invocations to God and the homeland. He has promised bombings against boats and drug trafficker camps, with the help of the United States and Israel, another reference in his campaign, and the return to the policy of fumigating illicit crops such as coca leaves. In short, he has managed to polarize the presidential elections and turn June 21 into a choice of extremes, in his favor or in favor of the left that has governed for four years. That is his first success.
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