Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, changes his plan, but not his mind. The future president asked the Senate and the House this Sunday to change the location of his presidential inauguration, next August 7, to Cali (Valle del Cauca). The request comes after weeks of noise, caused by De la Espriella’s insistence on assuming his new position in a military canton in Popayán (Cauca), in a gesture he hoped would honor the Military Forces, but which has sparked a debate about what it would symbolically mean to replace the civil authority represented by Congress at the time of the inauguration.
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To support his request, De la Espriella has cited alleged damages caused by the activity of the Puracé volcano in Cauca, which would hinder the transfer and logistics of the ceremony. In a statement issued this Sunday, the ultra’s office said: “The new government […] will ask Congress to hold the presidential inauguration in Cali due to the damages caused by volcanic activity and will hold its first Security Council there.” The president did not mention the belligerent political and social environment of the Cauca department, where indigenous groups opposing the incoming government have a strong presence. Nor did he mention possible security risks in an area hit in recent years by attacks and armed actions by illegal groups.
The choice of Cali, however, also carries symbolic weight. Although the capital of Valle del Cauca is a bastion of the left and ‘petrismo’ (which won overwhelmingly in last June’s presidential elections), it was there that De la Espriella registered his candidacy with the National Registry and led one of the first campaign events in the Cañaveralejo bullring. Cali was also the epicenter of the social unrest of 2021, whose memory is still present with the enormous monument to the popular movement of the fist raised to the sky in the sector known as Puerto Rellena, and since renamed Puerto Resistencia. The possible location of the first Security Council is also symbolic: it will be, if his wishes are fulfilled, at the Marco Fidel Suárez base, which last August was the target of an explosive attack that caused the death of six people.
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The ultrarightist president’s idea of honoring the Military Forces on the day of his inauguration has been rejected and criticized by several political leaders. Those on the left, of course, but also several Uribista congressmen, with whom, despite certain ideological affinities, they have been separated by political rifts. One of the main critics of the idea has been Uribista senator Rafael Nieto Loaiza, who has mentioned the symbolic problem of the head of state, at his inauguration, placing military authority above the civil authority embodied by the legislative branch.
From Nariño Palace to San Carlos Palace
In the message transmitted this Sunday on his social networks, De la Espriella has also announced that, while in Bogotá, he will dispatch from the San Carlos Palace, current headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and not from the Nariño Palace, where the president’s office is located and which will be converted into a museum open to the public during his Administration. The San Carlos Palace, in the center of Bogotá, was already a presidential headquarters in the past: the military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla moved it there in 1954 and it remained until 1979, when it was moved to the Nariño Palace.
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