2023 Colombian Local Elections: Medellín
A thorough preview of the political context and 2023 mayoral election in Medellín
Medellín, with a population of 2.6 million people, is Colombia’s second-largest city and the capital of Antioquia. The local campaign in the capital of Antioquia has been polarized between former mayor (2016-2019) Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez, the favourite to reclaim his old job, and (now former) mayor Daniel Quintero. Quintero resigned from office on September 30 to openly campaign for his candidate, Juan Carlos Upegui, and is seeking to build a national base for a presidential candidacy in 2026. Quinterismo has become petrismo’s strongest ally in conservative Medellín and Antioquia.
Daniel Quintero: Fights, divisions and polarization
In 2019, Daniel Quintero won a surprise victory against the uribista favourite, Alfredo Ramos, winning by over 68,300 votes (over 8%). Quintero had been vice-minister for the digital economy in the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies from 2016 to 2017 in Juan Manuel Santos’ administration. Although Quintero had been in three parties (Conservative, Green and Liberal) by then, he ran as an independent, “without parties or political bosses” as per his slogan, capturing attention by denouncing corporate greed, mismanagement and corruption. With relatively progressive ideas (he voted for Petro in the 2018 runoff), he promised open, clean and transparent government and appeared to be a refreshing alternative to uribismo and their economic backers in a conservative city.
After his victory in 2019, there were high hopes and expectations in Quintero. Four years later, he’s disappointed a lot of his erstwhile supporters and leaves office with high disapprovals. He’s left the strong impression that he’s a duplicitous, self-serving politician—a cacique alternativo (‘alternative’ cacique) as some journalists have called him and others. Quintero has confronted what he calls Medellín’s traditional political-business elite, dividing and polarizing the city.
Daniel Quintero has broken the symbiotic alliance between the public and private sector (and academia) that had been the bedrock of the city’s governance model since the 1990s or early 2000s. This model had its dark sides and shortcomings, but it was credited for Medellín’s much-lauded transformation and rebirth after the dark years of Pablo Escobar.
Quintero, with rhetoric against corporate corruption and vowing to protect public resources, fought against Antioquia’s powerful business elite, the Grupo Empresarial Antioqueño (GEA), the large and influential antioqueño keiretsu. He has accused the GEA of being a cartel that’s robbed the city (pointing to the Hidroituango fiasco in 2018) and controlling local politics since 2003 over four successive administrations (Sergio Fajardo, Alonso Salazar, Aníbal Gaviria and Fico). Quintero was able to expose the unresolved and unspoken issues beneath Medellín’s ‘transformation’, like socioeconomic inequalities, exclusion and very real cases of corporate abuses and corruption (most notably Hidroituango), and used them to his political advantage.
One the battlegrounds has been Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), the publicly owned utilities company and large business group that’s the ‘crown jewel’ of Medellín and, over past decades, the symbol of the marriage between the public and private sectors. Quintero has been accused of politicizing EPM, undermining corporate governance and interfering in its decisions. Over his administration, EPM has had four general managers—the first was fired by Quintero in 2021 for not being aligned with the administration’s political interests; the second (caretaker) was later dismissed from EPM, allegedly for being too independent from Quintero; the third was forced to resign within days amidst controversy over his inexperience and close ties to Quintero.
In 2020, Quintero sued the Hidroituango consortium—in which the GEA had important stakes—for over $2.2 billion, holding them responsible for the 2018 crisis that delayed completion and caused huge cost overruns. This decision was the beginning of his confrontation with the GEA: EPM’s entire board of directors, which hadn’t been consulted, resigned in protest. The contractors along with several politicians were found financially responsible by the Comptroller General in a separate case in 2021 and ordered to pay a hefty fine. The first two turbines finally entered into operation in November 2022, and EPM awarded the contract to finish the project to a Chinese-Colombian consortium, following more controversies about the new contractors’ experience (or lack thereof). As a result of the Hidroituango crisis, EPM’s financial difficulties and its politicization by Quintero, EPM’s credit rating was downgraded in 2020 and 2021.
Critics argue that Quintero’s anti-elite discourse is a political tactic and smokescreen, and that he favours the interests of other political and economic groups. Quintero’s fight with the GEA came as the GEA’s companies (Nutresa, Sura, Argos) faced hostile takeover bids from the Gilinski group and their Emirati partners. Quintero has been seen as tacitly favouring the Gilinski family, and in exchange he’s received rather extensive and largely favourable coverage in Semana, the news magazine owned by the Gilinski group since 2019-2020 and known for its very right-wing, sensationalistic and anti-Petro editorial line. In 2022, Semana published an interview with Quintero in which he went after the GEA.
Quintero presented himself as an independent who’d govern “without bosses or political parties”. In power, he’s done the exact opposite. He allied with political groups in different parties (Liberal, Conservative, Greens etc.) and traditional politicians like Conservative senator Carlos Andrés Trujillo, former Liberal senator Julián Bedoya and controversial former governor Luis Pérez (who has also long been at odds with the GEA). Quintero ensured his governability with a clientelistic network of bureaucratic sinecures, giving ‘quotas’ to political allies in his administration and key public agencies. In addition to political allies, Quintero favoured a very tight-knit circle of loyalists, many of whom had family ties to one another.
Political favours paid out by Quintero to his allies have led to several scandals and alleged contract irregularities. The biggest one has come from Buen Comienzo, a childcare program administered by the education secretariat. The program awarded a large contract to Colombia Avanza, a company close to the parapolítico Suárez Mira clan from neighbouring Bello, despite lacking the experience and technical expertise for it. The education secretariat is suspected of having modified bid requirements to favour the company. In 2023, prosecutors announced charges against Quintero’s education secretary, Alexandra Agudelo, and several others. Agudelo is close to Albert Corredor, a renegade uribista councillor.
Quintero can point to some achievements during his administration. In contrast to his predecessor, Quintero’s record on security has been more positive. The homicide rate fell to 13.9 in 2022, an all-time low, with 358 homicides compared to 576 in 2019. The reduction in homicides could be due to a pax mafiosa between the organized crime groups that control much of criminality in Medellín. Nevertheless, as in other cities, there’s been an increase in thefts and robberies. Quintero secured financing from the national government for the ‘Metro de la 80’, an at-grade light rail line in the west of the city and signed the contract in late 2022. Fico had promised to start building it during his own administration but was unable to keep his promise.
The landmark project of Quintero’s tech-savvy administration was his ‘software valley’, an ambitious project to make Medellín and the Aburrá valley the heart of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and a South American Silicon Valley, attracting digital nomads and high-tech industries. His administration delivered over 65,000 laptops to high school students as part of its Computadores Futuro program, but this program has also faced controversies and criticisms. In October 2022, El Colombiano said that the ‘software valley’ was mostly hot air, finding that only seven ‘software valley centres’ out of 21 have been opened and none of them are new. In 2023, the Procuraduría opened a preliminary investigation into alleged irregularities in the ‘software valley’. Ruta N, a public joint venture between the city, EPM and Tigo-UNE to promote technology and innovation that had been another example of the public-private alliance in Medellín, also fell victim to the conflict between Quintero and the business elites and accusations of politicization. In August 2020, following the mass resignation of EPM’s board of directors, the board of directors of Ruta N also resigned in protest, decrying the new more political direction imposed by Quintero. In 2021, Iván Castaño, the brother of corrupt Liberal senator Mario Castaño (arrested in 2022 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for corruption and embezzlement in 2023) was appointed director of Ruta N. In 2023, prosecutors opened an investigation into allegations of corruption and bribes in Ruta N.
Throughout his career, Quintero’s political style has been confrontation and showmanship, generating conflict and headlines. His targets have been the GEA and the ‘political elite’ that controlled the city for years, uribismo and fajardismo. He has confronted El Colombiano, the city’s leading conservative-leaning newspaper that’s been extremely critical of Quintero (after having had good relations with previous mayors). Quintero said that’s because of their ties to the GEA and because he drastically cut official public advertising in the newspaper, instead favouring more ideological ‘alternative’ media and influencers that support him.
When criticized, Quintero’s response has invariably been to attack, insult and discredit. The press freedom foundation (FLIP) has repeatedly called on Quintero to respect press freedom and claimed that his constant attacks against El Colombiano undermine the newspaper’s credibility and stigmatizes journalists. Quintero has sought to discredit a citizen oversight group, Todos por Medellín, that’s recently denounced a possible corruption scandal, by saying that it’s financed by the business elites and economic lobbies.
Quintero’s attacks on uribismo and other political opponents have divided and polarized the city, in a way that hadn’t been seen in years. As a result of the polarization he sowed, Quintero faced difficulties in the city council against a strong uribista opposition. On five occasions, the council rejected the administration’s plan to sale EPM’s share in Tigo-UNE, a telecom company co-owned by EPM and Millicom. Quintero has been very critical of Millicom’s management of the debt-ridden company. Given the criticisms levelled at Quintero for his politicization of EPM and undermining corporate governance, the opposition didn’t trust how Quintero would use the money and wanted assurances that the proceeds from the sale of shares would belong exclusively to EPM rather than the municipal administration and would be used for EPM’s own investments. In September 2022, the council voted down the plan again after Quintero broke off a tentative deal with uribismo by announcing that the money could be used in municipal projects, a year away from the elections. Quintero has responded by accusing uribismo, allied with fajardismo, of ‘robbing’ 3 billion pesos away from the city. Most recently, in another example of Quintero generating headlines, he loudly denounced (without much evidence) a ‘cartel of the 20 trillion pesos’ which he claims wants to ‘rob’ Tigo-UNE after being behind Hidroituango and other corporate scandals. In October 2023, Millicom and EPM finally agreed on a joint $142 million capitalization plan.
Quintero’s conflict with uribismo, his own national ambitions for 2026 and Petro’s need to increase his support in very right-wing Antioquia have pushed quinterismo and petrismo into a marriage of convenience since 2021. Quintero had supported Petro in the 2018 runoff but distanced himself from him in 2019 to bolster his ‘independent’ credentials. In the 2022 congressional elections, quinterismo won two seats in Congress on the Pacto’s lists: former councillor Álex Flórez was eleventh on the Pacto’s list for Senate and Alejandro Toro was the top candidate of the Pacto’s closed list for the lower house in Antioquia. Flórez, no stranger to scandal, is currently suspended from Congress for eight months for an embarrassing drunken brawl with cops in Cartagena in September 2022 (which he blamed on an alcohol problem). In May 2022, Inspector General Margarita Cabello suspended Quintero from office for ‘political participation’ in favour of Petro’s presidential candidacy. Quintero and his supporters denounced Cabello’s decision as a dictatorial coup by a politically biased official (Cabello was Duque’s justice minister prior to her election as Inspector General), and he unsurprisingly seized on the crisis to rally his supporters in opposition to the decision, much like Petro had done in Bogotá in 2013.
In March 2023, on the basis of their participation in the Pacto coalition, the National Electoral Council (CNE) granted legal party recognition to Independientes, Quintero’s movement, just in time for the elections.
The alliance with quinterismo has been opposed by factions of the petrista coalition in Antioquia who dislike Quintero—namely the radical environmentalists, led by Pacto senator Isabel Zuleta, intransigent in their opposition to Hidroituango which they consider an environmental catastrophe (Petro is sympathetic to their views, given his opposition to hydroelectricity); and the ‘old left’, long limited to a weak testimonial presence in Medellín, which considers Quintero to be corrupt and deceitful.
As a result of the polarization around his figure and the powerful right-wing opposition to him (from uribismo, the media and the antioqueño business elites), Quintero has been the most unpopular mayor in decades. The last Invamer poll in October 2023 showed Quintero with a disapproval rating of 63% and an approval rating of 34%. In April 2020, shortly after taking office and during the first wave of the pandemic, Quintero enjoyed an approval rating of 84%. According to Invamer’s polls, which go back to 1994, Quintero is the first mayor of Medellín who has had approval ratings below 50%. His predecessor and arch-nemesis, Fico Gutiérrez, enjoyed approval ratings around 80% throughout his entire term. According to the 2022 citizen perception survey by Medellín Cómo Vamos, optimism in the city’s direction declined significantly under Quintero, to 45% in 2021 and 53% in 2022 compared to 67% in 2019. Trust in leading public institutions has also declined: favourable opinions of EPM fell from 90% to 72% since 2019.
Upegui, Quintero’s candidate
Daniel Quintero and Independientes have big ambitions in 2023, seeing the local elections as an opportunity to expand quinterismo nationally to ensure a national base ahead of a likely presidential candidacy in 2026. Independientes, now with the power to endorse candidates anywhere in Colombia, is running candidates in several major cities across the country, like in Cali and Cartagena. First, however, quinterismo needs to survive in Medellín, in the face of Quintero’s unpopularity and Fico’s comeback.
Daniel Quintero’s official candidate is Juan Carlos Upegui. Upegui, 33, looks like a clone of his mentor (young, similar looks) and has been a close ally of Quintero for a decade, ever since they co-founded the Partido del Tomate in 2013, a very theatrical stunt act that kickstarted Quintero’s national political career. Upegui is also the cousin of Quintero’s wife, Diana Osorio, who commanded significant power and influence over the administration’s decisions and bureaucracy behind the scenes. Upegui was appointed secretary of non-violence, a job created for him thanks to Osorio’s influence. In 2022, Upegui was among those cabinet secretaries who resigned in order to support Petro’s campaign, and later he led social media campaigns against uribismo and the right. Upegui’s popularity with petrista bases helped him win Independientes’ nomination in March.
Upegui’s campaign has been based on the continuity of quinterismo and opposition to Fico and the right, presenting himself as the progressive candidate. In a recent post on social media, Upegui said that they represent change against “reactionary sectors, nostalgic of a pre-modern, unequal Medellín hierarchized by great economic powers, complacent with mafias and attracted by war.” Upegui seeks to continue Quintero’s main initiatives (free post-secondary education, computers for students, coding classes, ‘Metro de la 80’ and the suburban ‘Tren del Río’ project, freezing utility rates) and has other big promises (new schools, 15,000 houses, 200,000 new jobs, basic income).
From the mayor’s office, Quintero had been itching for a fight against his political enemies, but the law forces officeholders to be politically neutral and prevents them from participating in electoral politics. Quintero implicitly campaigned for his candidate, against Fico, notably publishing the ‘petty cash fund’ records of previous administrations—to show that Fico had spent more than him and other mayors on personal minor expenses. On September 30, Quintero announced his resignation as mayor and, the very next day, headlined a campaign rally for Upegui. Quintero followed a strategy first used in 2019 by Rodolfo Hernández, who resigned as mayor of Bucaramanga (after being suspended from office for political participation) to openly campaign for his preferred candidate. Quintero justified his resignation by saying that he couldn’t stand idly by against Fico and uribismo, and that Upegui was the only alternative to ‘Fico-uribismo’.
In October, Upegui received the support of the bulk of the Pacto Histórico (all parties except the Polo Democrático), finally achieving the ‘progressive unity’ he had been calling for. The Pacto’s weakness in Medellín and Antioquia, as well as its internal divisions and shambolic endorsement process for these elections, forced it to ally with quinterismo in Antioquia to weigh something in a difficult electoral year.
Upegui appears a very distant second in polls, trailing Fico by as much as 40-50 points. Upegui and Quintero have desperately tried to create a narrative that Upegui is growing and has the momentum, but polling isn’t really consistently showing that at all. While quinterismo likes to recall that polls were off in 2019, that time Quintero was trailing by single digits in the final polls. Not by upwards of 40%!
Fico’s comeback
The prohibitive favourite is former mayor Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez, Quintero’s predecessor and arch-nemesis. In 2022, Fico Gutiérrez was the presidential candidate of the right-wing ‘establishment’ (including uribismo) and suffered a stunning defeat, finishing third in the first round and being eliminated from the runoff.
Fico has been in politics for over 20 years. He was first elected to Medellín’s city council in 2003, at the age of 28, and was re-elected with more votes than any other candidate in 2007. In 2011, Fico was the Partido de la U’s mayoral candidate, supported by Álvaro Uribe, but he finished third with 19%. He returned in 2015, this time with a new strategy, as the candidate of his own independent movement, Creemos, and leading a grassroots campaign which focused on meeting voters in the streets and a traffic stops rather than in the more typical mass meetings set up by political bosses, a similar strategy to that used by Sergio Fajardo’s mayoral campaign in 2003. Like Fajardo (and Quintero), Fico fits in the ‘mould’ of the 21st century Medellín politician—ostensibly ‘independent’, young-ish, messy hair, jeans and no tie. Fico portrayed himself as a young independent, but he had hefty financial backing from the antioqueño business elite, and appealed both to more centrist fajardismo and to the uribista right. Much like Quintero in 2019, Fico was not expected to win, but ended up defeating the uribista favourite, former senator Juan Carlos Vélez Uribe, by a narrow margin of just over 9,500 votes.
Fico was very popular throughout his four years as mayor, with approval ratings consistently around or above 80%. His popularity had a lot to do with his upfront style (critics would say showmanship), folksy populism (with strong local paisa accent) and omnipresence in public, in the media and online. A good retail politician, he demonstrated a real ability to connect with people, going to local neighbourhoods, and appear close to the common man. However, his administration also spent disproportionate amounts on publicity and vain self-promotion: he had a weekly hour-long television program on Telemedellín (the public TV channel) and his social media team created fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook to attack opponents and boost Fico’s image. El Colombiano was the biggest beneficiary of the Fico administration’s largesse.
His administration’s priority was security and fighting organized crime with a hardline strategy, focused on capturing over 100 top criminal leaders and investing in technology and infrastructure. His security strategy also counted a lot on bombastic rhetoric and theatrical actions of very limited effectiveness—in 2017, he personally took charge of a big police operation to arrest three petty thieves, transmitted on Facebook Live; his administration bought a new police helicopter and developed an app allowing people to record a crime and report it in real time but which proved quite ineffective (only 15 arrests from 30,000 videos). His actual record on security was bad. Key security indicators worsened, and his administration needed to resort to misleading data and unconvincing explanations to put a positive spin on it. The homicide rate increased from 20 in 2015 to 26 in 2018 before falling in 2019. Fico’s ‘kingpin’ strategy against top crime bosses destabilized the criminal world and led to the emergence of smaller violent groups.
In 2017, Fico’s security secretary, Gustavo Villegas, was arrested for his alleged links to the Oficina de Envigado, one of the dominant criminal groups in Medellín, accused at the time of leaking information about police operations to the group and coordinating arrests in exchange for receiving favours (like the ‘arrest’ of the three petty thieves from the livestreamed operation in 2017). However, Villegas negotiated a plea deal which reduced the charges against him to lesser crimes and sentenced to 33 months in prison for abuse of power and abuse of public office.
It was unclear what Fico’s vision for the city was, besides vague optimism, and he continued the public-private alliance model that Quintero would later attack. Fico also fell short on promises to build 19,000 new homes, revitalize and recover the downtown core and the ‘Metro de la 80’, but a new electric bus corridor and two new Metrocable lines were inaugurated. However, his administration had more positive results on business creation, increased private investment, culture, sports and child health.
Fico was unable to transfer his popularity to his right-hand man and anointed successor, Santiago Gómez, who finished third in 2019.
Fico left office with obvious presidential ambitions. Since 2018, he shifted more explicitly to the right, with a discourse focused on traditional conservative themes like family and security/law and order. His presidential candidacy in 2022 was all working out according to plan up until the spring: he convincingly won the right-wing primary in March 2022 with over 2.1 million votes (54%), triumphantly collected the endorsement of a dejected and weakened uribismo and enjoyed a big post-primary boost in the polls that positioned him as the anti-Petro candidate, as had been his plan all along. However, Fico’s campaign quickly stalled, and he fell victim to the anti-establishment mood and Iván Duque’s unpopularity. He didn’t see Rodolfo Hernández’s surge coming and finished third with 23.9%. Nevertheless, Fico won Antioquia with 48.8% and won 53.6% in Medellín against 24.5% for Petro.
Paradoxically, Fico came out of the presidential elections quite well in the end. With Rodolfo’s erratic behaviour and his disinterest in national politics, Fico established himself as one of the leading figures of the new opposition to Petro. In 2023, thanks to the proliferation of parties via the CNE, Fico’s party Creemos obtained legal recognition. After months of speculation, Fico finally announced his mayoral candidacy in July. He immediately became the prohibitive favourite and largely cleared out the field on the right: he received the support of the Cambio Radical (CR), the Partido de la U, the uribista CD, most Conservative factions and some Liberal factions. However, as in the past, the only logo he wants with his name is that of his own party.
Fico’s campaign is a fertile mix of anti-quinterismo and anti-petrismo, with vague promises to ‘reunite’ the city and restore trust in the city’s institutions. He denounces the corruption and divisiveness of the outgoing administration and criticizes Petro’s policies like total peace and the energy transition. Fico had previously called, from his column in Semana, for the 2023 elections to be a plebiscite against the national government. Anti-petrismo works well in a conservative city like Medellín that has proven to be one of the main strongholds of the opposition to the government, with massive turnout in the different anti-government protest marches organized since last fall. However, if elected, Fico will need to work with the national government on key projects like the future of Hidroituango and the Tren del Río commuter train.
Albert Corredor, the quinterista dissident
Behind Upegui, former city councillor Albert Corredor, a sort of dissident quinterista and candidate of the independent movement Medellín nos une, is third in most polls. Corredor’s family owns several educational institutions in Medellín and other cities (in 2018, he signed his own masters’ thesis obtained from his family’s college in Miami). Corredor was an advisor to Quintero when the future mayor was vice-minister in the ICT ministry in 2017, but in 2019 he was elected to the city council on the CD list thanks to his family’s ties to uribismo. However, Corredor was one of four CD councillors who rebelled and disobeyed the party’s decision to be in opposition to Quintero. Most famously, Corredor and the other three ‘betrayed’ the party and voted for a quinterista Conservative to be president of the council in November 2021 against their own party’s candidate. They had their voting rights suspended by the party, and Corredor resigned from the party (and his seat) last year.
In exchange, Corredor had ‘quotas’ in the secretariat of education. As noted above, Alexandra Agudelo, the former education secretary now facing criminal charges in the Buen Comienzo scandal, was close to Corredor and had previously worked for a vocational college owned by his family. Her replacement following her forced resignation earlier this year had also previously worked as vice-rector of a post-secondary institution owned by the family. Agudelo is actively working for his campaign.
Earlier this year, La Silla Vacía revealed how contract workers of the education secretariat were pressured to help Corredor’s campaign, told to collect signatures to register his candidacy and bring people to his events. More recently, El Colombiano denounced that employees felt ‘kidnapped’ by Corredor’s campaign, forced to be his ‘pawns’ and support the campaign under threat of being fired. In one case, one person was forced to lend his house to the candidate for breakfast and a shower.
Corredor had said that he’s Quintero’s friend but disagrees with him on certain things. In the final stretch of the campaign, Quintero called on Corredor to drop out in Upegui’s favour. Corredor has refused and his tone has shifted against Quintero. Talking about Upegui, he’s said that people won’t vote for a ‘fool’ and has said that 75% of Medellín rejects Quintero for dividing and abandoning the city. His new slogan is ‘ni Fico ni Quintero’.
The others
One of the other uribista rebels is also on the ballot: María Paulina Aguinaga. After an international humanitarian career, she was first elected to the council on the CD list in 2015, she was critical of Fico’s administration, and reelected in 2019. Like with Corredor, she was suspended from the CD in 2021 and later left the party in 2022. She is on the ballot with her own movement, Por Medellín. Aguinaga denies that she’s close to Quintero and has rejected Upegui’s invitation to support him. Her campaign decries polarization and pointless fights, with the slogan “neither going back to the past nor continuing with the present.”
In the Pacto, only a faction of the Polo Democrático is not with Upegui, supporting former city councillor Carlos Ballesteros. He is backed by former representative Luz María Múnera, a veteran leader of the ‘old left’ in Medellín and opponent of Quintero’s administration, currently vice-minister in the new Ministry of Equality.
On the left, quinterismo is challenged by Gilberto Tobón, a famous academic and political analyst. Tobón became popular and viral for his blunt, pessimistic and sarcastic commentary on politics, corruption, drug trafficking and politicians online and on popular TV programs. Last year, he ran for Senate with Fuerza Ciudadana, the party of Magdalena governor Carlos Caicedo, and while the list fell under the 3% threshold he won 170,000 preferential votes. Tobón supported Quintero in 2019 but quickly grew disenchanted. He’s said that Quintero’s administration has been a disaster, blaming his ‘hatred, rage and fanaticism’ for polarization. He sells himself as the most brutally honest, anti-corruption candidate.
One of the least well-known candidates is Deicy Bermúdez, an Afro-Colombian woman on the ballot for the new Partido Ecologista. She is supported by the feminist movement Electas, which is the successor of Estamos Listas, the feminist list which had been one of the surprises in Medellín in 2019 by winning one seat on the city council. Estamos Listas imploded after its failed attempt to go national by running a list for Senate in 2022. Bermúndez is supported by Estamos Listas’ former councillor Dora Saldarriaga, now candidate to the departmental assembly.
Like elsewhere in Colombia, the centre in Medellín is a hopeless mess. Attempts at a centrist alliance that could take on Fico and Quintero together largely failed, and the centrist candidates are barely registering in the polls. Juan David Valderrama, Sergio Fajardo’s cousin, worked in Alonso Salazar, Aníbal Gaviria and Fico’s administrations before running for mayor in 2019, finishing a very distant fourth with just 2.9%. Valderrama received the support of two former candidates, anti-quinterista Green councillor Daniel Duque and César Hernández. Luis Bernardo Vélez, a former fajardista, served four terms as a city councillor (2004-2015, 2020-2023). In both 2015 and 2019, he withdrew from the race to support the eventual winners—in 2015, he endorsed Fico and later served in his cabinet and in 2019, he endorsed Quintero and led the quinterista Independientes list for city council, which won two seats. Vélez was president of the city council for the first year of its term (2020-2021), but later broke with Quintero. He now says that Quintero betrayed the city with false promises. Vélez and Valderrama failed to agree on an alliance.
Sergio Fajardo, Medellín’s most famous centrist leader, is not supporting any mayoral candidate and is concentrated on supporting his party’s (Dignidad y Compromiso) candidates for council and departmental assembly as well as for governor. In a recent interview, he complained about the poor state of local politics, saying that politics in Medellín and Antioquia were in their worst moments.
With a similar centrist rhetoric is Rodolfo Correa, a politician who served in the gubernatorial administrations of both Luis Pérez (2016-2017) and Aníbal Gaviria (2020-2022). This is his third electoral candidacy—he unsuccessfully ran for city council in 2007 and for governor in 2019 (placing fifth with 3.2%). Correa is trying to sell himself as a ‘neither Fico nor Quintero’ third option, against quinterismo and the ‘far-right’ around Fico. However, because of his past ties to Quintero’s finance secretary Óscar Hurtado (now the caretaker mayor of Medellín following Quintero’s resignation), the right sees him as a crypto-quinterista. After his signatures to get ballot access were rejected, he obtained the endorsement of Colombia Renaciente, an ostensibly centrist party. Correa has received the support of a faction of the Greens.
On the right, a few no-hope candidates with overinflated ambitions didn’t withdraw:
Juan Camilo Restrepo (supported by the hard-right Salvación Nacional, MSN and the Christian right Colombia Justa Libres) is a career politician who was the Conservative gubernatorial candidate in Antioquia in 2019 (backed by parts of the GEA, he won less than 4%) and later became Duque’s high commissioner for peace (2021-2022) and senior national security advisor (2022). Duque appointed Restrepo as caretaker or ‘ad hoc’ mayor of Medellín in May 2022 following Quintero’s suspension, and later served a few days as caretaker mayor of Cúcuta. From his short stints as mayor, he largely became the subject of memes and jokes.
Liliana Rendón, a former representative (2006-2010) and senator (2010-2013) and one-time protégé of former governor Luis Alfredo Ramos (convicted for parapolítica in 2021), is attempting a political comeback (again). She was denied the uribista gubernatorial nomination in 2015 and unsuccessfully ran for Medellín city council in 2019 for CR, winning just 3,600 votes. She’s trying again, with her Movimiento de Frente Lilianista.
Felipe Vélez is a former Fico ally who worked on Fico’s two mayoral campaigns in 2011 and 2015 and served eight months as Fico’s planning director in 2016 and later managed the ‘Metro de la 80’ project. In 2019, he supported Valderrama. He has no prior electoral experience and is the owner of Gatepharma, an importer of pharmaceutical supplies. Vélez says the city needs new leadership and less polarization.
Jaime Mejía is a former CD councillor (2016-2019). After unsuccessfully seeking the CD’s mayoral nomination in 2019, he was appointed by Duque as counsellor at the Colombian embassy in the UK (2019-2022).
A nasty campaign
Although the result appears very predictable, the election has been dirty, violent and negative with a very degraded level of public debate.
Quinterismo has attacked its political opponents and critics incessantly. In his first campaign act as former mayor, Quintero threw pictures of his rivals into a trash can to his supporters’ delight. Online, quinterista or petrista left-wing influencers have spread misinformation about Fico—falsely accusing him of being responsible for the accidental death of a university professor in 2017, or sharing a manipulated video purported to be a ‘secretly recorded video’ from a webcammer (with sexual connotations) which was in reality a longer interview with an influencer.
Candidates have made dubious claims, contributing to disinformation. Fico has claimed that the Petro government wants to prevent his victory through the peace talks with the criminal groups in Medellín, part of the government’s total peace policy. Fico claims that he’s at risk because he fought against those gang leaders during his administration. Fico’s campaign played on a supposed plan to assassinate the candidate, revealed by the media, which led Quintero and Upegui to claim that the ‘plan’ had been leaked by Fico’s own campaign and that he was plotting a false attack to victimize himself. Upegui has claimed that gangs of the Oficina de Envigado were ordering people to vote for Fico.
Debates between candidates have been pathetic and embarrassing. Corredor and Felipe Vélez almost came to blows prior to a debate. Fico has refused to attend debates organized by Telemedellín, claiming that the public TV channel is controlled by quinterismo and politically biased (forgetting that the TV station was hardly neutral when he was mayor). Upegui has called El Colombiano a “sewer of misinformation”, which the FLIP called an attempt to promote digital violence against journalists.
If everything goes according to expectations, Fico will win by a large margin on October 29—perhaps with over 60% of the vote—and quinterismo will finish a very distant second, but with the silver lining that it will be the opposition to the resurgent right (with Upegui guaranteed a seat on the city council as runner-up).