Taking stock of the Gustavo Petro government
We compared the campaign proposals and public commitments of the Gustavo Petro government with the results of his term. The assessment by experts and by the FEDe. Colombia team accounts for the legacy this government leaves in peace and security, corruption, health, management of public media, meritocracy and the promotion of excellence, fiscal policy, the rule of law, and territorial policy and management. Watch all the talks here (in Spanish).
total peace
In this video
Gerson Arias
Analyst – Fundación Acordemos
Daniel Mejía
Professor of Economics – Universidad de Los Andes
Isabel Aldana
Lawyer – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- The government subordinated security policy to its Total Peace policy. It granted political status to criminal groups and declared ceasefires with groups it negotiated with under no clear conditions, which allowed them to grow stronger.
- In municipalities with ceasefires, extortion rose by 337%, threats by 72%, recruitment of minors by 168% and criminal governance by 32%, while clashes between the Security Forces and armed groups fell by 73%.
- FEDe. Colombia filed 11 legal actions asking the State to guarantee the rights to peace and security.
CORRUPTION
In this video
Jineth Prieto
Research Coordinator – La Silla Vacía
Elisabeth Ungar
Former Director – Transparencia por Colombia
Andrea Sánchez
Lawyer – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- The promise of “zero tolerance” for corruption was one of the central banners of Petro’s campaign, but he failed to keep it. The government replicated corruption practices already familiar in the country, such as using inter-administrative contracts to avoid public tenders and benefit allies.
- Colombia fell for the second year in a row in the Corruption Perceptions Index, according to Transparencia por Colombia, dropping to 99th place out of 182 countries. Cases such as that of the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management showed that patronage (“mermelada”), steered contracts and benefits for people close to power persist.
- FEDe. Colombia exposed a systematic pattern of steered contracting that violates the principles of objective selection, free competition and the reservation of statute, embodied in directives and decrees that channeled contracts toward specific suppliers.
health
In this video
Andrés Vecino
Professor – Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
Sor María Inés Delgado
Director – Asociación Enfermos Hepáticos
Styven Boyacá
Lawyer – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- The government promised to guarantee health as a right while dismantling the health system, triggering a crisis in which patients ended up bearing the underfunding, the state interventions and the institutional uncertainty. Tutela actions over health rose from about 197,000 in 2023 to more than 312,000 in 2025. In addition, millions of lower-income Colombians doubled their out-of-pocket spending on medical appointments and medicines.
- The government also centralized decisions that should have responded to the needs of the territories and allocated about COP 4 trillion to basic health teams without public indicators on their results.
- FEDe. Colombia challenged several of the acts through which the government tried to implement its health reform administratively, bypassing Congress. It contested the resolutions setting the 2025 and 2026 Capitation Payment Unit (UPC) and, through a compliance action, secured the publication of the financial statements of Nueva EPS, which is under government intervention.
public media
In this video
Carlos Cortés
Lawyer and journalist, expert in digital policy
Soledad Gómez
Lawyer – Foundation for the Rule of Law
Luisa Molina
Communications Director – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- In his government program, Petro pledged to guarantee the democratic participation of State media and to reform RTVC to restore an “institutional, popular and independent” public media network. Instead, the public media system became a partisan tool serving the government’s political vision and excluding critical voices.
- News and opinion content went from 1 hour and 30 minutes a day under Iván Duque to 10 hours and 20 minutes under Gustavo Petro, according to an investigation by La Silla Vacía. Educational and cultural content was also reduced.
- FEDe. Colombia systematically documented the use of the public media system and brought a popular action over RTVC’s violation of pluralism, balance and impartiality in its news coverage.
meritocracy
In this video
Jennifer Pedraza
Senator – Dignidad y Compromiso
Laura Villa
Economist, expert in the civil service
Andrea Sánchez
Lawyer – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- The promises to eliminate parallel payrolls, reduce service contracts and prioritize merit faded away. The Résumé Bank received more than 20,000 applications, but about 2,000 people were selected on a first-come, first-served basis and without a committee to evaluate their profiles.
- Merit-based competitions at DIAN and Colpensiones never took effect, while high staff turnover was reportedly accompanied by the political distribution of positions.
- FEDe. Colombia brought actions against changes to job-function manuals that relaxed the requirements for public positions, such as the second-language requirement for ambassadors and the inclusion of philosophy and theology in profiles related to environmental licensing.
fiscal policy
In this video
Mauricio Cárdenas
Former Minister of Finance
Mauricio Reina
Associate Researcher – Fedesarrollo
- The government bet on borrowing more, and at a higher cost, to push its policies forward. It leaves the incoming government the highest debt in history, equivalent to 61% of GDP, according to the Autonomous Fiscal Rule Committee. It also went from receiving the nation’s net worth at COP 137 trillion to handing over a negative net worth of COP 273 trillion.
- The government changed the model for managing public finances by breaking the fiscal rule, and private actors stopped receiving public resources in sectors such as health, pensions and energy.
- There are warning signs about the state of public finances that could trigger a sudden fiscal crisis. To avoid it, the incoming government must make an adjustment to guarantee macroeconomic stability, ensure that the private sector increases investment and replaces the public sector as the engine of the economy, and promote effective redistributive policies to improve people’s living conditions, for example in education and productive potential.
rule of law
In this video
Mauricio Pava
Founding Lawyer – Protejamos la Constitución
Carlos Esguerra
Former Minister and member of the National Constituent Assembly
Andrés Caro
Director – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- The government program promised to “guarantee the balance of powers”, to respect the system of checks and balances and to “defeat the mafias that have captured public powers”; the President also pledged to respect the social rule of law. Yet the Executive repeatedly strained those limits, for example when it called a popular consultation by decree to pass the labor reform despite the Senate’s rejection.
- That tension was reflected in the push for a National Constituent Assembly as a response to Congress’s failure to approve its reforms.
- The President also spread a narrative of electoral fraud without evidence and attacked the National Civil Registry. The Administrative Tribunal of Cundinamarca ordered him to retract his accusations and refrain from repeating them, but the President ignored the precautionary measure and kept up the fraud narrative.
territorial policy
In this video
María Carolina Castillo
Executive President – ProBogotá Región
Lorena Garnica
Lawyer and professor, expert in agrarian law – Universidad Externado
María Paula Clavijo
Lawyer – Foundation for the Rule of Law
- The government promised an ambitious territorial transformation that included advancing rural reform, formalizing land tenure and protecting food production. It designed a regulatory apparatus that led to legal uncertainty and half-finished implementation. The figures the government presented as land titling mixed provisional handovers and land restitution, making them unreliable.
- The multipurpose cadastre, which was meant above all to regularize land tenure on a large scale, was reduced to its economic component: IGAC set massive increases in cadastral valuations in rural areas of 527 municipalities, driving up the property tax base for rural landowners. The Food Production Protection Areas (APPA) transferred the definition of land use — a competence of local authorities — to the national Government.
- FEDe. Colombia challenged before the Council of State the resolutions that created the APPA and ZPPA, and challenged IGAC’s resolution over its valuation methodology. It also intervened before the Constitutional Court in the review of the constitutionality of Article 32 of the National Development Plan, for violating territorial autonomy.