Colombia's opposition coalition — trade unions, indigenous groups, left-wing parties, and social movements — launched a nationwide protest campaign on Wednesday against the austerity and foreign-policy pivot of President Abelardo de la Espriella, who took office in August after winning a narrow June runoff on a far-right platform. Former president Gustavo Petro, who was constitutionally barred from seeking re-election, joined thousands of marchers in Bogotá and called the mobilizations a warning against what he termed a "tyrannical and imposed government." The immediate trigger is next Tuesday's congressional deadline to approve the 2027 fiscal year budget. De la Espriella's legislative allies are advancing proposals to slash government spending, and protesters see this as the mechanism by which Petro-era reforms — expanded public university access, higher minimum wages, strengthened labour protections — will be dismantled. The budget vote is the choke point; everything else is atmospherics. De la Espriella's policy agenda is an unusually clean case of ideological reversal. A millionaire defence lawyer and political newcomer, he campaigned on shrinking the state, expelling millions of migrants, and aligning Colombia with the United States. He has delivered on the alignment piece: his government opened a Colombian embassy in Jerusalem on Wednesday and restored free trade with Israel, reversing Petro's severance of ties over the war in Gaza. Protesters carried Palestinian flags; several drew explicit parallels to Trump's 2018 embassy move. The government's posture toward the protests reveals the administration's instincts. A new decree expanded police powers to deal with protesters who vandalize property or disrupt essential services, and de la Espriella framed the issue in law-and-order terms: "Violence, vandalism and blockades that trample on the rights of millions of citizens will not be tolerated." Critics noted that the protests were largely peaceful. The expanded police authority is a pre-positioning move — creating legal architecture for future crackdowns before they're needed. The extraction dynamics are straightforward. De la Espriella's agenda concentrates benefits among Colombia's business class and international allies (Washington, Jerusalem) while shifting costs onto the constituencies that gained most under Petro: workers, students, indigenous communities, and the rural poor. Teacher Ester Guerra, 32, captured the ground-level anxiety: "I feel like we have no guarantees and that the little we did obtain … we're about to lose." The foreign-policy dimension is not incidental to the domestic story — it is part of the same transaction. Restoring ties with Israel, opening the Jerusalem embassy, and aligning with Trump are signals to Washington that Colombia is back in the fold. The implicit exchange is geopolitical cover and trade access in return for domestic austerity and ideological conformity. Student Jimena Rodriguez, 20, read the pattern plainly: de la Espriella "just wants to hand the country over to the United States, to Israel." Two months into de la Espriella's presidency, this is the opening skirmish, not the decisive battle. The budget vote on Tuesday is the first structural test. If the austerity proposals pass, the Petro-era social architecture begins to unravel. If the protests force concessions, the opposition establishes that street pressure still has legislative leverage. Colombia's single-term limit means de la Espriella cannot be removed by re-election; the only checks are congressional, judicial, and popular.
