On Wednesday Gustavo Petro, who was president of Colombia until August, went out into the streets of Bogota to protest against the president of Colombia. He had company. As Al Jazeera reported, drawing on AFP and AP, thousands of people marched in Bogota and other major cities on the first day of a nationwide campaign led by Petro, organised by a coalition of opposition parties, trade unions, Indigenous groups and social movements. Teachers’ organisations and student groups joined. So did Senator Iván Cepeda, a former presidential candidate. Marchers chanted “It will fall.” One sign read “First the rural class.” By most accounts the day was largely peaceful.
The target was President Abelardo de la Espriella, a former defence lawyer and millionaire businessman who had never held office before. He ran on a far-right ticket, narrowly won a runoff in June and took office in August. His platform was hardline on crime, immigration and the economy: expel millions of migrants, shrink the government, move Colombia toward free-market policies closer to those of US President Donald Trump, and undo the reforms of Petro, the country’s first left-wing president. Petro, a former left-wing fighter, couldn’t run again, because Colombian presidents get one term.
How narrow was the win? According to Colombia One, the opposition lost the presidency by less than 1% of the vote. I think that number explains most of what happened on Wednesday. If you lose an election by a point, you have roughly half the country behind you and none of the executive branch. You can’t sign decrees and you don’t write the budget. What you can do is show the government, and the legislators who have to vote on its plans, how many of your half will turn up on a weekday. A march, in that situation, is a lobbying tool with a very large mailing list.
And there is something to lobby about right now. Congress has until Tuesday to approve the 2027 budget, and de la Espriella’s allies are pushing proposals to cut spending. Under Petro, Colombia widened access to public universities, raised the minimum wage and strengthened labour protections. The opposition says all of that is now at risk, and protesters also pointed to cuts to labour protections and healthcare. Petro was specific about where he thinks the government is going: “we already know where they’re headed: against the living minimum wage.”
The march was mainly organised by the CUT, the Central Unitary Workers’ Union; Fecode, the teachers’ federation; and the Historic Pact, Petro’s coalition, according to Colombia One, which says the protests came out of meetings between unions and social groups in September. Everyone brought their own grievances. Teachers want better working conditions, healthcare for educators and the rebuilding of schools damaged in the August 10 earthquake. The outlet notes that the educators’ healthcare crisis began under Petro, so at least one of the problems the former president is marching about predates his successor. Indigenous groups want autonomy over their territories. A 32-year-old teacher, Ester Guerra, told AFP: “I feel like we have no guarantees and that the little we did obtain … we’re about to lose.”
The decree
The government did not just wait for the march. On October 13, the day before, de la Espriella signed Decree 1525 of 2026, which took effect on the morning the protests started. According to Colombia One’s account, it lets the authorities act against people committing violence without first finishing a dialogue with the wider crowd, sets mediation procedures and criteria for the use of force, creates humanitarian corridors so that ambulances, medical staff and essential supplies can get through, and puts a Unified Command Post under presidential supervision in charge of coordinating the response. Al Jazeera described it as an expansion of police powers so that officers can respond faster to vandalism or to disruption of essential services.
The president’s explanation went like this: “The right to protest is respected, but there is no right to destroy, attack the security forces, assault others or sow chaos.” He added that “violence, vandalism and blockades that trample on the rights of millions of citizens will not be tolerated.”
Nobody is in favour of assaulting other people, so the operative word there is “blockades.” Rural and Indigenous protesters in Colombia sometimes block roads for weeks, and for a movement without power a blockade is leverage: it costs the people you want to pressure something every day it goes on. A rule that lets police clear one faster, without first talking it out, lowers the price of ignoring the protesters. That is presumably the point of the decree, and it is also the point of the objection. Cepeda said the protocol was never discussed with the public or with social organisations, and that it “expands the use of force, restricts police dialogue” and opens the door to criminalising peaceful demonstrators. Common Dreams put that charge, “criminalizing protest,” in its headline. Colombia One also says the marchers object to counterterrorism legislation the government has announced.
Jerusalem
Then there was the foreign policy, which arrived on the same day. On Wednesday the government opened a Colombian embassy in Jerusalem, a contested move because Israelis and Palestinians both claim parts of the city. Petro had been a strong supporter of the Palestinians and broke off relations with Israel over its war in Gaza; de la Espriella has been putting those ties back together, free trade included. Some marchers carried Palestinian flags, and several compared the embassy to Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018. Jimena Rodriguez, a 20-year-old student, said the president “just wants to hand the country over to the United States, to Israel,” and added: “I feel dark times are coming.”
Petro called the protests a wake-up call “two months into the start of a tyrannical and imposed government.” He also said the government “is not a government for the people” but “a government for the big business interests of foreigners,” and urged Colombians to “take to the streets to defend life.”
Colombia’s one-term limit exists so that a president can’t stay in power indefinitely. It is silent on what an ex-president can do afterwards, and this one has decided that the job is roughly the same as before, only he no longer has an office to work from.