Abelardo de la Espriella aka ‘El Tigre’ Earned More Votes Than Any First Round Candidate in Colombian History and He Did It by Promising to Govern Like Bukele

Abelardo de la Espriella, the lawyer and businessman known as “El Tigre,” won the first round of Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday with a record ten million votes and 43 percent of the total. He will face left-wing senator Iván Cepeda in a second round on June 21st, setting up one of the most ideologically divided runoffs in the country’s recent political history.

De la Espriella has no prior political experience and has built his entire campaign around that absence, presenting himself as an independent outsider who owes nothing to the political class that has governed Colombia for generations. His critics have spent months labeling him as far right, a characterization his team rejects entirely, preferring instead to describe their candidate as extremely coherent in his convictions and unbothered by ideological categorization.

The Man aka ‘El Tigre’ Behind the Brand

De la Espriella grew up in Montería in northern Colombia, studied law in Bogotá and built what he describes as a portfolio of dozens of companies across real estate, food and beverage, clothing, cattle ranching and his own law firm before becoming one of the country’s most recognizable and controversial criminal defense attorneys.

His legal career brought him into contact with some of Colombia’s most consequential and disputed figures, including Álex Saab, the businessman accused of acting as a financial front for Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and Alberto Santofimio Botero, convicted in 2007 as an instigator in the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, a figure whose speeches De la Espriella reportedly memorized as a child. He also worked on behalf of communities affected by environmental damage, victims of gender violence and the late left-wing congresswoman Piedad Córdoba. His team frames his legal record as the standard work of a criminal defense attorney, while his critics read it as something considerably more revealing about the networks and interests he has moved through during his career.

The Security Candidate in a Country That Feels Unsafe

De la Espriella announced his candidacy in July 2025, one month after opposition precandidato Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot in public in Bogotá and died two months later. Security had already dominated Colombian public conversation for years, and he moved quickly to make it the defining issue of his campaign.

After four years of President Gustavo Petro’s total peace policy, which critics argue allowed armed groups to expand their reach across the country, De la Espriella’s promise of iron-fisted security resonated with voters who felt the country had grown more dangerous under the current administration. He has proposed dismantling Petro’s peace policy entirely, building mega-prisons along the lines of those constructed in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele, fumigating coca crops, bombing what he calls narco-terrorist camps and shooting down aircraft carrying drugs out of Colombia. He has said he will seek support from the United States, Europe and Israel to execute his security agenda, and has invoked the governing styles of Bukele and Argentine President Javier Milei as models for the kind of decisive institutional overhaul he intends to deliver.

His campaign travels with at least 35 bodyguards at every public event, and De la Espriella has used his bulletproof podium and visible security apparatus as a deliberate visual signal, presenting himself as a man who is threatened precisely because he represents a genuine threat to powerful criminal networks.

The Outsider With Establishment Support

De la Espriella has built his political identity around rejecting the entrenched Colombian political class, yet his campaign has recently collected endorsements from former ministers of both Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos, his vice-presidential pick served as minister under Iván Duque and the powerful Char political clan from Barranquilla announced its support in early May. Analysts across multiple universities and think tanks noted the contradiction, pointing out that governing Colombia without those networks is effectively impossible regardless of what a candidate promises during a campaign.

His campaign has also attracted criticism for comments widely interpreted as sexist and homophobic during media appearances, both of which he attributed to humor taken out of context, though the episodes added to a portrait of a candidate whose confrontational style is as central to his brand as his policy positions.

The June 21st runoff between De la Espriella and Cepeda presents Colombian voters with one of the sharpest ideological choices the country has faced in years, a contest between a candidate promising security through force and deep institutional change on one side and a candidate representing continuity with the Petro government’s left-wing program on the other, with the result set to define the direction of Colombia for the next four years.